Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6359
44 Post • January 2010 www.postmagazine.com ther Final Cut or Avid. Technology should help make the story better and make telling the story easier. The Mar tin Agency specializes in comedy and character-driven campaigns, but they are no strangers to VFX and work with some of the biggest providers around. Framestore has worked with Martin for years on the Geico campaign's gecko character, including re- designing the little CG critter. "They've done a fantas- tic job of evolving him and really giving him so many human-like [attributes] — how his face works and his hands — it's really great." Humble and company will often tape the voice actor's movements while record- ing the gecko's dialogue. "All the little subtleties — as he lifts his shoulder, tilts his head — you can take those cues and it really adds an amazing amount of human emotion." Humble agrees with other agency executives Post spoke with regarding the growing popularity of shoot- ing digital. He sees the paradigm "totally flipping" from "film first" to an environment where shooting digital is standard operating procedure."The quality of digital is amazing. It's gotten so much better to the point where the average person can't tell the difference." Typically the director often has the final say as to ac- quisition format, but with some clients it's become un- derstood that their shoots will be digital. The Martin Agency has its own in-house post facil- ity — Running with Scissors — with five stations run- ning both Avid and Final Cut. They also have a Flame and a Smoke suite.The agency only posts a fraction of their work, but in-house post also helps keep agency staff from being constantly on the road. The agency's color work is often done by Company 3 — they are connected via fiber to Co3 in New York and LA, and they have a matching calibrated monitor in the Rich- mond facility. "The great thing," Humble says about working with Co3 is, "we're watching the monitor in realtime as he's doing it." For Wal-Mart, Humble and company created A Mag- ical Christmas Wish that involves a special effect — snow in a dusty Iraqi desert where US Troops, including the father of a young boy, are on patrol. Shot in Southern California, the spot uses practical snow on set and digital snow added to the background in post. LOCAL HERO P O S T Especially in this economic climate, when do you see new business come and find you and spur you to expand? Under rarified conditions it can happen and Leandro Marini, head of Local Hero Post in Santa Monica, experienced such a phenomenon. He cites a convergence of good talent and clients join- ing with the right technology at the right time. The result is a newly opened 10,000-square-foot facility boasting expanded DI ser vices for feature film and — something new and growing — leveraging that DI exper tise for commercial work in a broadcast- mastering (TV spots) room. About five years ago Marini, the company's senior colorist, hitched his wagon to Assimilate's Scratch sys- tem. He built Local Hero (www.localheropost.com) around a growing need for DI services for lower-bud- get films and his own skill as a colorist. With the ad- vent of Red cameras Marini developed his own work- flow — which he dubbed "post 2.0" — that also ben- efits commercial producers. "We are an all-Assimilate facility," he says, and his three Scratch systems are identical. One Scratch ser ves in conforming while the other two are used for color grading. Local Hero's broadcast suite uses a calibrate-able Panasonic industrial 50-inch plasma screen with 10-bit 4:4:4 for display.The feature-film DI theater projects via a Christie 2K which is set up to emulate digital projec- tion as found in theaters today. Local Hero is a "DCI- centric" shop and Marini believes we will see most theaters turn to digital projection very soon. "We had to develop the tools and pipelines for ver y rigorous DCI standards and very demanding clients — every- thing's got to be realtime 4K," he says. Local Hero developed a reputation for deriving a natural, photochemical look from Red images. "We felt, since 90 percent of our clients had chosen the Red format, we had to spend a lot of R&D time to make the Red camera look its best. If you can make Red look good on a 50-foot screen it's going to look good on a 30-inch television." The difference between the work done on the commercials and the features "just comes down to color space and the kind of monitor you're viewing the material on." Marini tells of a high-end client working on a Panasonic promo bringing in funky, consumer-look- ing footage from a Canon EOS 5D SLR camera. When Marini balked, the executive producer said, "Leo, get on board! Everything is going cheaper and digital — whatever tool does the job. If you're going to moan about the kind of footage people are com- ing in with, you're going to get left behind. You need to have a solution for any format that's digital," not just film, Genesis or Red. An extraordinary advertising job Local Hero re- cently completed was a multi-purpose broadcast/ promo for Panasonic's new 103-inch, 3D-capable, plasma television. The production company, Paydirt Pictures, set out to make a three-minute, stereo- scopic, 60fps promo in 3K and shot on two Red cameras. A shorter, non-stereo version is ready for TV broadcast as well.To Marini this represents "the complete opposite" of the traditional film work- flow. This proved to be one of Local Hero's most difficult projects but, Marini points out, Scratch is adept at stereo imaging. The piece was finished in the shop's broadcast suite and the three-minute stereo version currently serves as a marketing de- vice for the 103-inch TV. Referring to his "post 2.0" initiative, Marini says, "We believe filmmaking is going to be quite differ- ent in two years. Ever y commercial [nearly] and every $50-million-and-under feature is going to be shot digitally on a variety of cameras with a variety of workflows. In commercials and broadcast, it's going to be even more varied. Digital cameras are the opposite of [film] log." Despite the massive in- vestments companies have made in traditional DI, post 2.0 is about "losing the attachment" to the world of film log and digital-in/film-out. [ cont. from 35 ] A G E N C I E S shots, and the robotic exo-suit was done here by The Embassy Visual Effects." Blomkamp acted as his own VFX supervisor. 2012, Roland Emmerich's latest blockbuster disaster spectacle, which is based on doomsday interpretations of the Mayan calendar and its apparent prediction that a cataclysm of epic propor tions awaits the Ear th in 2012, looks likely to get a nom. The film has enough VFX — supervised by Volker Engel, Marc Weigert and Mike Vezina — to employ thousands more. "The bud- get was around $200 million, which is huge, but it was- n't a problem as people know there's a big global mar- ket for films like this," says the director."I'm not sure ex- actly how many effects shots we did in the end, but there were so many that we had houses all over the world doing them — including Digital Domain, Double Negative, Scanline, Hydraulx and Uncharted Territory. We also had an in-house unit at Sony Pictures creating two major sequences, so we had well over a thousand people just doing visual effects." When director John Hillcoat was looking for dev- astated landscapes to use in his $20 million post- apocalyptic drama The Road, he found the perfect bleak images in Pennsylvania coal country, and around Mount St. Helens, "which showed the raw power of nature, because nothing had changed in the two decades since the mountain exploded," he says, "and I wanted to use real landscapes and scenery wherever possible." Hillcoat then worked with VFX supervisor Mark Forker and several houses — Dive, Crazy Horse Effects, Space Monkey, Brainstorm Digital, Eden FX and Invisible Pictures — to create the powerful images. The DI was done at Efilm by colorist Michael Hatzer. Nine showcases VFX by The Bluff Hampton Company. London's Peerless Camera Company did all the work for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Up In The Air features work by Lola Visual Effects. Sher- lock Holmes has a wide array of shots created by Framestore and Double Negative, including CG ex- plosions and greenscreen work. S O U N D D E S I G N & M I X I N G Jim Cameron has always pushed the filmmaking envelope, and Avatar looks like a strong contender. Like Avatar, Nine, looks likely to nab several tech- nical awards noms, including sound. Nine was mixed by veteran Jim Greenhorn (Shine) with post sound facilities provided by Todd-AO/Soundelux.Todd-AO also did audio for Inglourious Basterds, which is a strong contender. For District 9's Blomkamp, "Sound design and music are massively impor tant to the type of film I want to make. I believe that with action films you've got to use them to hype the audience and punch them in the gut, and with a sci-fi film like District 9, you're simply not going to make a com- pelling film without really exploitive sound design to its maximum degree." Blomkamp did the sound de- sign at Park Road Post. The Road features an eerie aural backdrop, with post sound by Wildfire Post and sound design by Leslie Shatz. The Hurt Locker showcases sound de- sign by Oscar-nominee Paul N.J. Ottosson (Spider- Man 2 & 3), who may also be nominated for his work on 2012. [ cont. from 27 ] O S C A R S