American Cinematographer - October 2007 - 86

Post Focus Private investigators Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) listen to a prospective client in a scene from Gone Baby Gone, which was shot by John Toll, ASC and finished with an all-HD editorial workflow. Beantown Noir by Iain Stasukevich With a budget of $19 million, the Miramax Films production Gone Baby Gone, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, cost less to produce than the average blockbuster costs to market. Shot by John Toll, ASC and directed by Ben Affleck, the film follows two young private investigators (played by Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) as they hunt for a missing 4-year-old girl on the seamiest side of Boston’s underworld. In the months preceding principal photography, which took place in and around Boston, executive producer David Crockett called Marcie Jastrow, senior vice president of sales at Modern VideoFilm, to request a budget for hi-def dailies. “I put the bid together, and we did the HD dailies,” recalls Jastrow. “Then, a few weeks into the shoot, I get a call from Ben Affleck, who starts asking a lot of Avid-related questions. He wanted to start cutting scenes, but every time he looked at the standard-definition Avid files, it depressed him.” Says Affleck, 86 October 2007 “I’ve been interested in nonlinear editing for a long time and have tracked the technology as it’s gone along. I knew everyone was renting the Avid Nitris for onlining, and I thought we should cut our whole movie that way.” After the shoot wrapped, Miramax approached Runway Editorial to handle the Avid editing systems for the film. Dan McGilvray, the senior engineer and technical-department supervisor at Runway Editorial, was tasked with the challenge of an all-HD editorial workflow. McGilvray recalls, “Ben wanted to know why he was cutting in standard-def instead of hi-def, and when we pointed out that hi-def would cost more, Ben was committed to a hi-def workflow even though he knew it was brand new, that it would be more expensive, and that there would be significant technical obstacles faced in the cutting room. His position was, ‘Well, don’t you want to be as close as possible to the final result instead of dealing with a poor proxy?’” The first challenge met by McGilvray and assistant editors Brett Reed and Kevin Hickman was that all of the footage had already been digitized in a standard-def resolution. When Modern VideoFilm initially received the camera negatives to transfer dailies, three outputs were made: one 1080p HDCam SR master, one standard-def direct-to-disk Avid file, and one standard-def DigiBeta tape backup. Upgrading the picture quality for editorial would mean redigitizing all 125 HD masters and transferring master-clip information into the new HD Avid project. In the meantime, there would be a two-week wait between the production wrap and the arrival of editor Billy Goldenberg, and Affleck had already begun a standarddef cut of the movie using Avid Xpress Pro on his own laptop in 24-frame progressive NTSC. “The workflow was a little bit hinky at first,” says the director. “I was cutting scenes, and I thought I could just convert these NTSC EDLs to HD, but that didn’t really work out.” Transitioning formats from a 24frame NTSC project to a 24-frame HD project posed a more difficult challenge than expected, requiring assistant editors Bret Reed and Kevin Hickman to Photos courtesy of Miramax Films.
American Cinematographer - October 2007

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