American Cinematographer - December 2007 - (Page 71)

visual-effects houses for them to start working on. Then we made a color bible to work out how the various stages of the movie were going to look. It’s a process that happens in so many layers, but the key to it is to have a really robust negative that’s very flexible, both for the DI grade and for the visual-effects artists. Most of them will say you’re better off working with a flatter image to begin with and then adding contrast later. If you put contrast in too early, the visual effects never bed in properly.” In order to achieve consistency between visual effects produced by the different contributing facilities, and to safeguard against these effects being damaged by changes made during the final grade, Doyle created a “neutral” grade that was distributed to each visual-effects house. “The vendors worked in what we called neutral space, which is really going back to what the original term ‘digital intermediate’ meant about 10 years ago,” he says. “It was almost like a negative, in that it was a little bright and the colors were very neutral. We then presented the primary grade, which were actually printer lights, so anybody could record out their visual effects, download these printerlight numbers from our Web site and see how it would all look in the final film. When we got finished visual effects back into the cut, because it looked like a digital camera negative, it kind of reacted to the final grade in the same way as Henry’s original camera negative.” “I very rarely use filters these days,” Braham notes. “I built that into the printing technique we chose and did a lot of work on it with Peter while we were shooting, particularly the interior-for-exterior scenes. I had to make sure they were working; it’s hard to tell when you’re surrounded by 360 degrees of greenscreen, because your eye can get tricked. What’s great about Peter is that you can talk to him about an idea and he’ll go away and write the program to achieve it. It’s not about the technology, it’s about understanding the ideas behind it.” I TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Super 35mm Panaflex Millennium, Millennium XL Primo lenses Fuji Eterna 500T 8573 Digital Intermediate Printed on Fuji Eterna-CP 3513DI 20 07 A C A D E M Y AWA R D S 20 07 G R A M M Y S 20 07 E M M Y S plus many of the highest ranked TV shows T H E N E X T S T E P I N T H E E V O L U T I O N OF THE CAMERA JIB TELESCOPIC LLC www.telescopicjib.com . 818.917.5677 . 661.510.7150 71 http://www.telescopicjib.com http://www.telescopicjib.com

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American Cinematgrapher - December 2007 Contents Editor's Note DVD Playback Production Slate Irretrievable Deeds Blood on the Streets Fantastic Voyage Promise Fulfilled Short Takes Post Focus Tomorrow's Technology New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index 2007 AC Index ASC Membership Roster Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up

American Cinematographer - December 2007

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