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February 2016

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BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 5 POST FEBRUARY 2016 BLACKMAGIC TOOLS USED TO COMPLETE 35+ SUNDANCE FILMS FREMONT, CA — Blackmagic Design (www. blackmagicdesign.com) Cinema Cameras and/or DaVinci Resolve Studio were used on more than 35 films at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Some of these films from around the world include Andre Hyland's comedy The 4th, shot using Blackmagic Cinema Cameras and Pocket Cinema Cameras and graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio; and highly anticipated films such as Other People, The Lobster and Spike Lee's Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall, were graded using DaVinci Resolve Studio. Director Matthew Johnson's film Operation Avalanche was shot (by DPs Jared Raab and Andrew Appelle), in part, on Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Cameras, and employed a unique film conversion workflow to capture the look and feel of an underground 1960s documentary. Operation Avalanche is a found footage film where four undercover CIA agents are sent to NASA posing as a documentary film crew. What they discov- ered leads to one of the biggest conspiracies in American history. Johnson, the writer and director of the film, was the creator of the sleeper hit film Dirties, which won the Slamdance Film Festival in 2013 and was later released by Kevin Smith. To capture both Johnson's and the DP's vision, the film had to be shot with the look of 1960s film stock and had to look like most of the footage was shot covertly. Shooting in raw, footage was converted into a 2K scan from the Pocket Cinema Camera's Super 16mm image. Footage was then graded after the final 16mm conversion. "Basically, we wanted a final print that looks like it was shot in the 1960s and buried in the ground and found in 2015," Johnson says. "We developed a one-of-a-kind conversion process to pull this off. We shot all our guerrilla footage with the Pocket Cinema Cameras and then did a 1:1 Super 16mm conversion that we invented ourselves. The Pocket Cinema Cameras were perfect because we get great image quality and the Super 16mm gate is the same as a Super 16mm film gate, which made conversion much easier." Another benefit of using the Pocket Cinema Camera was the camera's small size and ability to shoot discreetly. "In order to convincingly pull off the concept that Operation Avalanche is a real documentary filmed in the 1960s, it was important for us to use as much of the real world as possible," says Raab. "Shooting discreetly in public is something we learned how to do on our last film, The Dirties, and we were determined to keep using our formula in this film. We needed a camera that wasn't going to get us noticed too quickly, but could get us footage that was going to stand up to our compli- cated post process of making it look like archival 16mm film. The Pocket Cinema Camera, with its impressive dynamic range and tiny form factor, became indispensable to our process. In the final film, footage obtained from the Pocket Cinema Camera seamlessly cuts with beautiful archival film from the '60s, and I challenge anyone to be able to spot the difference." Other Sundance films that relied on Blackmagic Design cameras include All These Sleepless Nights, shot by director and DP Michal Marczak with Pocket Cinema Camera, and Manoman, shot by DP Steven Cameron Ferguson with Pocket Cinema Camera. Sundance films that used DaVinci Resolve Studio include Ali & Nino, by colorist Paul Ensby of Deluxe's Company 3; As You Are, by producer and colorist Joseph Mastantuono of Good Post NY; Carnage Park, by colorist Jason Knutzen; Christine, by col- orist Sam Daley of Technicolor PostWorks; Equity, by colorist Roman Hankewycz of Harbor Picture Company; Goat, by colorist Nat Jencks of Outlier Post; and The Lobster, by colorist Tony Ford. As You Are Christine Operation Avalanche

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