American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 39) set in Cartagena, Colombia. There was some infrastructure for film production in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, but the city did not have a film lab or a telecine-transfer facility, so we needed to decide where to process our negative and transfer our dailies. Because some of our financing was British and our postproduction was to be done in London, we chose three London facilities: Deluxe would be our wet lab, Midnight Transfer would do our digital dailies, and FramestoreCFC would do our DI. All this seemed fine, but we were told it would take three days for us to receive our negativeintegrity report and the telecine colorist’s comments, and it would take five days to get dailies. Even though my dailies were digital, I asked Deluxe to send me the RGB numbers (printer lights) of every scene — not take — as though I were printing them to ensure the accuracy of my exposures. Paul Dray emailed me those numbers after every batch was processed. I exposed to try to reach RGB numbers in the 30s, producing a denser negative that contained more information in the shadows; I knew this would allow for better blacks on the print and/or more information when scanning for the DI. These printer lights were then posted in a spreadsheet that contained the scene numbers in chronological order and helped me to observe any shifts when metering each scene. To get back dailies that would reflect my creative intent, the proper color balance and good light intensities, I decided to use Kodak’s Look Manager System. I’d had some training with the software while shooting Dark Water in Toronto in 2004 (AC Aug. ’05); at that time, the system was still in its beta version, and Kodak offered me an opportunity to test it. Kodak provided not only the software, but also a Canon 20 EOS camera that was compatible Photos courtesy of Affonso Beato, New Line Cinema (Love in the Time of Cholera), Touchstone Pictures (Dark Water) and Warner Bros. (Nights in Rodanthe). Beato photo on this page by Daniel Daza. with the system and a Sony CRT monitor calibrated by Kodak’s Display Manager. At the time, labs weren’t using Look Manager, so they didn’t have the required calibrated monitor to receive my images via the Internet, but because I was close to the lab, Deluxe Toronto, I was able to bring them paper prints produced by a Kodak P600, the very portable and extremely efficient printer that came with the package. Although I had tried to design the textured look for Dark Water using Adobe Photoshop, I could only achieve it with Look Manager because the sys- tem produces a very accurate film look from RAW digital stills. When the time came to shoot Love in the Time of Cholera, Look Manager was in Version 2.0; it not only was compatible with many Canon and Nikon cameras, but also permitted the calibration and characterization of LCD monitors, including displays on laptops having 1920x1080 resolution. While grading The Queen (2006) at Framestore-CFC, I had been impressed with a Dell UltraSharp 2004FPW flat-panel display, which Framestore was While filming Love in the Time of Cholera on location in Colombia, director of photography Affonso Beato, ASC, ABC used Kodak Look Manager Version 2.0 and stills taken on set by a camera intern to communicate his creative intentions to post houses in London. The photo on the opposite page is one of Beato’s graded stills. Above: Filming a character’s exile. Left: Beato (left) talks over a shot with Love in the Time of Cholera director Mike Newell. American Cinematographer 39
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