American Cinematographer - February 2009 - (Page 46)

Building Central City Pope (seated on dolly) captures a sprawling walkand-talk sequence onstage in Albuquerque Studios. Look Effects later constructed the actors’ surroundings under the guidance of visual-effects supervisor Stu Maschwitz. he Spirit’s Central City has always been a thinly disguised substitute for Manhattan, so it’s no wonder director Frank Miller describes the setting of his film as “a combination of my and Will Eisner’s versions of New York City.” Because principal photography happened entirely onstage, bringing the city to life required the efforts of 10 visualeffects vendors across North America and Australia: The Orphanage, Riot, Digital Dimension, Fuel VFX, Furious FX, Ollin Studio, Entity FX, Rising Sun Pictures, Cinesoup and Look Effects. All vendors were kept on the same page at The Orphanage, where visual-effects supervisor Stu Maschwitz and his collaborators “did EDL-based ingest of SR tape [recorded from the Panavision Genesis] and got 10-bit DPX out the other end,” he says. “That’s how the entire movie made its way from tape to our Nucoda Film Master system. Everything we shot became a DPX sequence.” A somewhat more circuitous workflow had to be devised for the Vision Research Phantom HD camera, which records a bayer-pattern image in a .cin file. In a document Maschwitz drafted for the vendors about the workflow, he explained, T “These .cin files were converted to .dng sequences at The Orphanage and then converted to 10-bit DPX using Adobe After Effects. This was done to take advantage of the Photoshop/Lightroom raw conversion algorithms, which were tested to perform better than Vision Research’s own de-bayering software.” The 10-page workflow document provided the visual-effects houses with step-by-step instructions for creating their own 10-bit DPX deliverables in the Cineon log format and replicating the LUT the filmmakers viewed on set. Maschwitz wrote, “All principal photography was monitored in Rec709 HD video through a highcontrast, low-saturation LUT known as ‘Mash4.’ The Mash4 LUT contains subjective color correction, a film-print preview and a conversion to video space.” “I determined that The Spirit was a neighborhood’s hero,” says Miller. “If you have a working knowledge of Manhattan, you’ll find that from Jane Street to Houston Street is Central City.” Building that neighborhood for a daytime walkand-talk that follows The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), Commissioner Dolan (Dan Lauria) and Officer Morgenstern (Stana Katic) down streets, sidewalks and alleyways fell to the crew at Look Effects, led by visual-effects supervisor Max Ivins and visual-effects producer Melinka Thompson-Godoy. Look’s workflow is usually based around Apple’s Shake software, but the team opted to work primarily in Adobe After Effects for The Spirit to more easily integrate with Maschwitz’s After Effects-centric operation at The Orphanage. “Maya was the primary software we used for all of the 3-D tracking rendering,” notes Ivins. “Tracking was done in several packages, including Boujou and PFTrack, and Maya for hand tracking. “Because [the walk-and-talk] covers so much ground, you lose a lot of the tracking markers,” he continues. “So we pre-processed almost every background with a method of extracting the contrast from the greenscreen; we were tracking the corners, the edges and sometimes the surface and the seams of the greenscreen. We put that through our 3-D tracking software and pretty much tracked without tracking markers. Figuring that out saved us hours. There were only a couple of shots we had to hand-track.” Simultaneous to the tracking, Look’s artists expanded the conceptual environments created in-house by Peter Lloyd or provided by The Orphanage, and then projected rough geometry onto the scene to test the accuracy of the tracks. Throughout the process, the Look team confabbed regularly with Maschwitz via CineSync, a remote review and approval program enabling live, real-time interaction with the footage (Post Focus, AC July ’08). As Central City took definite shape, the lighting captured onstage was tweaked to fit the actors’ new surroundings. “There are a lot of subtle color corrections and shifting of levels to get everything right for 46 February 2009

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - February 2009

American Cinematographer - February 2009 Contents Editor's Note Short Takes: Circus Production Slate: The International Reverte 2 Worlds in 3 Dimensions Dead Reckoning Embracing Anamorphic Citizen of the World Post Focus: Restoring Manhatta New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Peter Suschitzky

American Cinematographer - February 2009

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