American Cinematographer - June 2010 - 72

Post Focus
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Adding Chills to Frozen By Michael Goldman The recent release Frozen typifies how the independent film world is evolving, with traditional and digital techniques coming together to make complicated productions affordable. On the production side, the filmmakers adopted a traditional approach, shooting 3-perf Super 35mm for a final aspect ratio of 2.40:1. On the post side, they adopted a digital workflow that enabled much of their visual-effects work to be done during the digital-intermediate process. Directed by Adam Green and shot by Will Barratt, Frozen tells the tale of three skiers trapped on a chairlift on an isolated mountain. Principal photography, which took place at a ski resort near Ogden, Utah, over five weeks, was “the hardest shoot I will ever have,” says Barratt. Working largely at night in sub-zero temperatures, the crew battled to maneuver a 50' Super Technocrane, various lighting rigs and other equipment up the mountain and into position to film actors suspended 48' in the air for hours at a time. “The decision to shoot practically was easy,” says Barratt. “We’ve all seen big-budget films where the greenscreen effects look fake, and for another thing, Adam and I felt we could get better performances from our actors if we actually stuck them on a chairlift. And they really were stuck — they came down for lunch and for a bathroom break. Plus, budget-wise, shooting on the mountain was more affordable than getting a large greenscreen.” For night scenes, which dominate the film, “we wanted a moon-glow feeling, soft lighting, so we had to have moonlight bouncing off the snow back up to the actors,” says the cinematographer. “To do that, we put Nine-light Maxi-Brutes under the actors and basically pounded the light into the mountain. That gave us a soft bounce that resembled moonlight reflecting off snow.” Visual-effects supervisor/colorist Tyler Hawes and his team at Lit Post in Los Angeles devised an affordable method for digitally transforming the snow flurries captured in camera into a blizzard that pervades the film and becomes, in essence, a character in the drama. They accomplished this entirely within a DI pipeline built on the foundation of Digital Vision’s Nucoda Film Master system. There are 260 visual-effects shots in the film, and Hawes created half of them, almost all snow effects, while color-timing the picture. He explains that although the production captured lots of snowy footage on location, the look of those scenes varied widely, and a consistent, dramatic blizzard was required to fulfill the story’s needs. “Ironically, after they went to great lengths for realism by filming on a remote mountain, the footage looked like it had been shot onstage because you [couldn’t] see the weather and environment around the actors — there was just blackness,” says Hawes. “Naturally, they couldn’t sit around waiting for the clouds and moonlight to be just right so that the background would show up. Also, the script calls at certain points for certain weather hits, making weather a supporting character. So we had to finesse the snow and light to bring more realism and authenticity to the scenes.” The filmmakers decided not to attempt to do any of the snow effects with CGI; Green wanted to avoid artificially generated elements for the sake of realism, and the production didn’t have the time or money for 3-D effects work. Hawes’ team had successfully added rain and fog to Green and Barratt’s previous collaborations, the features Hatchet and Spiral, and Hawes believed a similar approach would work for snow in Frozen. His team used both real snow and snow machines to shoot additional snow plates using both 35mm and digital (Red One) cameras, and then brought them into the DI session to stitch it all together. “Originally, we talked about me just doing the color correction, and making effects separate,” Hawes explains. “Then, we

Nearly half of the 260 visual-effects shots in the indie thriller Frozen are snow effects created during the digital-intermediate process at Lit Post.

June 2010

American Cinematographer

Images courtesy of Lit Post.

American Cinematographer - June 2010

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