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cover story together, camera savvy, hell, a cinematographer in his own right. Together they are a one- two punch on action." Hurlbut adds they had the idea where the camera shooting style is like a videogame "first- person shooter and we wanted to use this gamer POV just enough so that it really put you in the firefight of what a SEAL would see through his eyes." They devised a 5D helmet-cam with wireless video and wireless follow focus "everything to get that first person perspective." For Act of Valor, Hurlbut shot 70-75 percent of the time with The small body of the 5D allowed the filmmakers (Waugh, is pictured) to insert themselves into the SEALs' "op" environments. shot in 12 states, on four continents and five countries. "We had to come up with a visual language that would best assist the story," recalls Hurlbut. "When the SEALs were hang- ing out with each other and their families, it was film. When the bad guys were talking to each other, it was film. When they were blow- ing stuff up and creating havoc and kidnapping CIA agents and all, film. When the Navy SEALs went into 'op mode,' it was 5D, whether it was a wide shot or a close-up. THE SHOOT & THE POST "We started out Day 1," he continues, "on Canon L series primes and Nikon glass. Day 2 was the same. We were getting our hat handed to us with the still glass and its short focus throw. My focus pullers were not used to this format. We had to change, quickly. Day 3, I went to Panavision and they made mounts for all the Canon 5Ds so I could sling Panavision Primo Primes. That's when the image quality started to increase and focus was incredibly successful. I was able to get 12.5 stops out of the 5D with Panavision Primo Primes on it." For all the "op mode" sequences, they Jacob Rosenberg: making low-end look high-end. would shoot as many as 10 Canons simul- taneously. "The Navy said we're going to bring this H860 helicopter in, land it, and take off, and we're going to do that four times. You have to start thinking, where do I need to put the cameras to tell the story as well as heighten the action, but we only have four chances. "Scotty and Mouse are two amazing stunt guys who really understand action and where to put the camera," says Hurlbut, describing the working relationship. "Scotty works with the actors, operates camera and is story focused. Mouse is the conceptual guy putting the building blocks of the back story 18 Post • February 2012 Canon 5D, 20-25 percent with the Panavision and Arri cameras, and five percent with the Sony F950 for all the aerial work. That translated into roughly 125 hours of raw 5D footage (2.5TB of data) and 20-30 hours of film footage. Added together, that converts into a total equivalent of 1.4 -1.9 million feet of footage. In the field, McCarthy had a trailer set up with HP EliteBook mobiles workstations backing up the 5D footage to hard drives as soon as it came off the camera. Film footage was sent to Technicolor Los Angeles, where one-light HDCAM and SR "dailies" were struck. All media eventually arrived at Bandito Brothers' headquar- ters in Culver City, which, at the time, was in a giant warehouse with military tents as offices. They transcoded the Canon 5D H.264 camera masters into Avid DNxHD 36 media. Rosen- berg says, "We'd come back from a shoot, start five Avids going over the weekend, and we'd be editing Monday." Waugh started immediately watched the movie and discussed it at length. "I was just amazed as what I was seeing as far as its freshness and innovation. It was a first cut, [but] not every scene had been edited. My first approach was to look at the movie structurally. Very rarely did I go back to dai- lies; although I did for performance now and then. My goal was just for story — what best tells the story?" Rosenberg had established a post work- flow that created an offline edit in Avid and a parallel conform timeline built concurrently using Adobe's Premiere Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder and various third-party appli- cations. So every offline change rippled through the conforming system. Edit decision lists (EDLs) were exported from the Avid and imported into Adobe Premiere. In the Pre- miere timeline the The film was colored in Resolve. The final grade was done at Laser Pacific on Lustre. DP Shane Hurlbut is inset (top). working on the first cut of the movie. Rosen- berg recalls, "We shot our first scene and within a month we had to edit that scene to put it out there to investors to raise more money for the movie." Around February of 2010 they decided to call in veteran editor Michael Tronick ACE, (The Green Hornet, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, S.W.A.T.) to bring a fresh pair of eyes on the project. Tronick said initially he and Waugh just www.postmagazine.com offline clips were relinked to their original camera masters. In a separate project file, film clips that had been converted to one- light HDCAM "dailies" (1920x1080) for the offline were scanned as 2K (2048x1152) 10-bit DPX files. McCarthy then hand pasted the 5D clips into After Effects to do a frame rate conver- continued on page 46