American Cinematographer - October 2007 - 82

Frame grabs highlight the video’s whimsical look. static because the footage was going to become the cutouts.” In Los Angeles, the P2 media was handed over to post supervisor Michael Cioni at Plaster City Digital Post in Hollywood. Dickerson shot the narrative portion of the video, then assembled a rough cut at Plaster City with editor Jeff Stone. Placeholders were inserted where the band’s photomation performance would go. The band had to sign off on their performance in the cut before the photomation still photography could begin. When the go-ahead was given, Cioni and Dickerson created high-resolution QuickTimes of the Toronto performances and transcoded them into PICT sequences at 24 fps. The result was about 1,200 separate JPEG images. Although laser printing would have been more efficient time-wise, the glossy quality of the printed image wouldn’t lend itself well to the flash photography used in the photo-mation process, so the 1,200 frames were printed out on five inkjet printers that ran for almost 72 hours. Next, a team of 10 people handcut the band members from every frame. The time code for each frame was taped to the envelope, and the corresponding band member cutout was placed inside. “We had envelopes everywhere, and they had to take each frame and rip out every band member by hand because I wanted it to look organic,” says Dickerson. “The more handmade it looked, the better.” The animation was accomplished in three 10-hour days. Images were captured at a resolution of 2048x1280 using Dickerson’s personal Canon Rebel XT. When it came time to decide which frame rate to use for the photomation, the team agreed it would shoot 24 frames for 24 frames. After finishing the first few performance sequences, they decided to double their shots. “That enabled us to move things every frame but only change band members every other frame,” says Dickerson. “We found it looked choppier and far more hand-crafted.” On the first passes, he adds, “I was doing intricate rack focuses using a really shallow depth of field, but it looked too sexy. It was too nice.” Cioni notes that setting up a data-centric workflow was the key to bringing the video in on schedule. Like the Toronto footage, all of the narrative elements of the video were filmed with an HVX200 and imported directly into Final Cut Pro. The digital photo-mation images were shot in an empty studio at Plaster City, so when Dickerson finished shooting a sequence, the camera’s flash memory card was handed off to Stone, who was able to rebuild the 24p sequence almost immediately. By the last day of photo-mation photography, both Dickerson and Cioni had figured out what would work. Three days of printing, 1,600 man-hours of cutting, and 36 hours of photography later, Dickerson found himself with 50 seconds of photomation footage. “My respect for animators, particularly the old school, is through the roof,” he says. “I can’t imagine the amount of patience involved.” However, Dickerson’s biggest headache had nothing to do with the photo-mation process. Instead, it was the tapeless P2 workflow. “The P2 cards didn’t bother me, but erasing them and 82 October 2007

American Cinematographer - October 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - October 2007