extreme-location film making and film-hd convergence

8/6/2019 Extreme-Location Film Making and Film-HD Convergence

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Extreme-location filmmaking and film/HD convergence

The challenge: produce a dramatic feature film, set entirely in the Amazon

rainforest, using indigenous actors, on a tight budget. Oh yeah, and we insisted that we needed to shoot on film.

The Enemy God tells the true story of a Yanomamöshaman in the Amazon rainforest, immersingviewers in the supernatural battle for the survival of his people. We spent almost five years inpreparation and false starts before principalphotography began in January 2007. Our processof shooting on film in a very remote location andour subsequent post-production workflow is a case

study in the convergence of film and HD.

Step One: Pre-production planning. As webegan to plan for production, our intention was todo everything in the Venezuelan jungle village andsurrounding areas where the events of the movieactually took place. The location is only accessibleby boat (several days’ journey past the guerilla-infested Columbian border) or by small airplaneserved by a grass airstrip. We would have a very small professional crew:Producer, Director, DP, 1st AC, Sound, and Make-Up. The rest of the crew and allof the actors would be indigenous Yanomamö and a few white people who grewup in the area and still live the village. And our goal was to shoot a feature-lengthfilm whose story covers forty years of Yanomamö history. You can call us crazyfor any number of reasons.

We were committed to shooting on film. We felt that film alone would give us thenaturalistic look we wanted, with rich jungle colors and range of light andshadow. The dynamic range of light in the jungle is extreme, with shafts of brighthighlights beneath the dense canopy where it almost feels like night. With a smallcrew and equipment package we would have limited control of the existing light.Also, we were not sure that high-end HD cameras would be able to handle theextreme conditions: heat, humidity, rain, mud, and generally rough conditions far

from the nearest town. We would be well out of reach of technical support thatwould likely be available only in North America. Therefore, we made the decisionto shoot most of the film on Super16mm, using two Aaton LTR-54 cameras witha complete set of lenses including Zeiss super-speed primes and a Canon 8-64zoom. Some key scenes that called for more resolution such as wide jungleshots and some of our blue screen shots would be shot on 35mm using a wildArri IIC camera. Our jungle film stock tests, done nearly two years before weactually began production, showed us that the Kodak Vision2 stocks would be



ideal for what we were doing. We would shoot as much as possible on theamazing 50D stock with scenes shot in the deep dark of the jungle or at nightdepending on the faster companion stocks. Most of the film is shot in natural lightwith very little additional lighting.

While prepping in Venezuela,we found a lab and transfer facility in Caracas, Bolivar Films, that we felt could do the

job well. Still, we had to plansome unusual steps to ensurethe safety of our negative,including the excavation of pitsin the cool jungle soil for filmstorage, as we would not havedependable electricity andstorage facilities. We

anticipated only being able toship film sporadically, perhapsonly a few times during

production. And there was no communication with the outside world except for radio and a very clever VHF radio e-mail system. No internet, of course.

Ultimately, the political situation in Venezuela deteriorated to the point that wewere forced to relocate production to a more predictable spot, ultimately landingin the Central American country of Belize. With the help of the FilmCommissioner, the late Emory King, we devised a new plan for locations, sets,actors, production facilities (all brought in or built by us), and for processing our

negative in Toronto. John Petrella, our Director of Photography, worked closelywith the Director, Christopher Bessette and our colorist, Colin Moore, atTechnicolor in Toronto.

Step Two: Production. Our meetings at Technicolor laid out a plan to shipexposed negative from Belize to Toronto where Colin would do a best-lighttransfer of all of the negative directly to D5 tape. This workflow would give us thebest look and dependability we were after from shooting on film, but would giveus more flexibility via digital post.We would receive down-convertedfootage on DV-CAM tape in our

office in Denver, CO. I was travelingback and forth between the US andBelize but I was also editing thefilm, which was not ideal, butworkable. John and Christopher were able to view clips and selectstills that I posted on a web page Iset up for the film. No dailies (or



even weeklies) were part of the deal. In the end, our trust in Colin to keep an eyeopen for problems, combined with occasional phone calls between John andColin, kept things on track.

Colin’s reports were consistentlyenthusiastic and encouraging tothe crew on the field. Our two-person camera department (withAssistant Cameraman, PaulCuthbert) did an amazing job andwe had only a couple of shots thatneeded a little extra attention in thefinal color sessions. If you canimagine shooting an entire featureon location in the jungle with aminimal crew of mostly first-timers,

with indigenous actors, far from the resources found in North America, you can

appreciate the amazing job John and Paul pulled off. The cameras workedflawlessly. That is, they always delivered a consistent, beautiful image evenwhen electrical problems caused inconveniences like blown video assist units. Asmuch as I love HD video cameras, a short-circuit would likely take you downentirely. Our twenty-year-old Aatons were unfazed by such things. As long as thelens was clean and the film was pulling they produced solid, amazing, state-of-the-art high-def images. We had planned a 46-day shooting schedule and wecame in at 47-days!

In the end, some 150 reels of negative was shot and transferred from principalphotography. We shipped negative weekly in small ice chests via the FedEx

agent in Belize. We ran tests in advance to be sure the packages would not be x-rayed in their circuitous route to Toronto. (There is no such thing as overnightto/from Belize. Sometimes ‘overnight’ was 7 days, but usually the film arrived atTechnicolor in 2-3 days, in fine shape.)

Step Three: Post. Technicolor’s process was great for us, even though we weresort of making things up as we went along. One part of our workflow included thetransfer of selected visual FX shots for compositing by Keyframe DigitalProductions in southern Ontario. As I edited scenes needing visual effects, Iroughed them together in FinalCut using the DV-CAM dubs. Once I had thetiming together I sent cut lists of all of the footage layers back to Technicolor and

they re-transferred the original negative to uncompressed digital files (Targasequences) and sent them on hard drives to Keyframe. I sent QuickTime moviesof my effects rough-ins to Keyframe for their reference and they matched theTarga sequences and did their additional magic to the scenes. We had severalscenes that made use of blue screens and some scenes that neededrotoscoping. In the end, the effect scenes were flawless, whether they wereintended to be very naturalistic or they were more impressionistic scenes of theYanomamö spirit world.



As I said, I edited the film in FinalCutusing the downcoverted footage. Thefootage came with telecine logs that Iused to generate batch lists viaCinemaTools. All of our sequences

were 24fps to match the D5 tapesand we had no problem withtranslating the FCP EDLs betweensystems. That is, it worked great for much of the film that was simple cuts.The complications came whenChristopher and I began to fine-tunethe cut of the film and began todevelop a much more stylized cut that included significant use of off-speed shotsand layers. Once you get into that stuff, the translation from FinalCut to any other system becomes much more complicated.

Principal photography had wrapped in March 2007. By July 1, I had a completecut of the film. Christopher and I sat together in several edit sessions over thenext few months to come up with our “Director’s Cut” in early September. Oncewe had that together, I began to worry about the workflow we had outlinedseveral years earlier with Technicolor. We had been aiming to keep things in aform that would easily end in a film-out to 35mm for theatrical exhibition.However, we are a very small independent company with a film that would havea long road to a theatrical release even in the best of circumstances.

As we began to look at distribution realities combined with the complexity of our cut, we met again with Technicolor’s post-production gurus to talk over the best

path for us. Having a finished cut of the film was helpful of course, because nowwe had reality staring us in the face, rather than the dream of several yearsbefore. My main question now was whether or not there was a workflow thatwould tie in to FinalCut Pro. More than one other filmmaker had told me thenightmares of converting to AVID or trying to translate the FinalCut project intoanything else without technical gymnastics that were sure to break our budgetand our creative enthusiasm. Fortunately, by that time, in the fall of 2007,Technicolor had just installed a FinalCut system with the intention of makingmore cost-effective post-production paths for filmmakers like us. This optionmeant that we gave up our smooth path to a 35mm film-out, but it gave us amuch smoother path to a standard HD finish. In our case, we decided an HD-

CAM master would do, even if we had some limited theatrical opportunities. Thisshift meant that Technicolor could take my FCP project files and ingest the D5transferred footage easily and create an HD-CAM master tape, ready for a finalcolor-correct with Colin. He assured us that he could do almost anything in thatcolor space, especially because we were correcting for television and DVD, nottheatrical projection via a film print.



Mark Betteridge, the FCP editor at Technicolor, did a fantastic job to conform our FCP sequences. Apparently our housekeeping was pretty good as we only hadone shot that was out of place when we got to the final color sessions. I hadfeared the worst but was very pleased with Mark’s attention to detail, especiallywhen he did have to match re-positioning by eye at times. (I had honestly

expected to have a lot of corrections to make, based on experiences at other post-houses; sorry to doubt you, Mark!)

Mark created an HD-CAM master tape using my sequence reels, and then Colinworked his magic. The fact that Colin did the original best-light negative transfersproved very valuable since he alreadyknew the footage and what we werelooking for. The color-correctsessions went flawlessly even with alot of experimentation to get the rightlook for our spirit-world scenes. As italways should, the final color

sessions added one more layer of creative impact to the film and thefinal result exceeded our expectations. Beginning with John’sincredible footage, Colin made magic.

Happily, audiences have also responded enthusiastically. The Enemy God hasscreened in numerous festivals and has been awarded for its achievement incinematography, among other awards. The film is now moving through thechallenging world of indie film through our distributor, Entertainment 7. You cansee trailers for the film and a limited-edition DVD release can be found on our

web site: www.TheEnemyGod.com

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Tom Khazoyan is one of the Producers and Editor of Yai Wanonabälewä: TheEnemy God . The multi-award-winning film tells the true story of a former Yanomamö shaman and the spiritual battle for the survival of his people in theAmazon rainforest. More information about the film can be found at:www.TheEnemyGod.com

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extreme-location film making and film-hd convergence

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