Digital Video - October 2007 - (Page 36)

Eastern Europe EXPLOIT the time, Louthan was able to acquire only four cards, along with an AJ-PCS060G 60GB P2 storage drive. The first problem the crew encountered was that the P2 cards did not download to the P2 Store as quickly as they needed them to. “It was inconsistent and frustrating,” Louthan recalls. “At times, it could take 30 to 40 minutes to download one card with six minutes of footage. We had Panasonic techs out with us who could not explain why it would take so long. On a film like this, we were doing a lot of long takes—we could fill up those cards very quickly, and then we would be waiting for them to download to the P2 Store so we could wipe them and shoot more. We scrounged Europe for more P2 cards and eventually found two more 4-gig cards—but they would hold only three minutes of footage, which really wasn’t worth much, so we only used them for emergency backup. Romania’s ambitious hero, Sebastian (Joe Shaw), buckles in the company of the country’s Mafiosos. THE AIRPORT WAS AT A HEIGHTENED LEVEL OF SECURITY AND THEY WEREN’T GOING TO ALLOW US TO SHOOT. WE SHOWED THEM THE HVX200, AND THEY SAID, ‘OH, THAT SMALL THING? OKAY, THAT’S FINE.’ thing I’d never do again, but space on these cards was precious.” Fortunately, for such troubles with the HVX200, Louthan “got fantastic footage from it. The camera performed extraordinarily well. In fact, in one situation, it saved us completely. “We had a sequence in a Bucharest airport. We had full permission ahead of time, but when we got to the airport, they were at a heightened level of security and weren’t going to allow us to shoot. We showed them the camera, saying, ‘We’ll be shooting with this,’ and they said, ‘Oh, that small thing? Okay, that’s fine.’ There are an awful lot of advantages to the HVX200 because of its size. You can get into situations on the street where the lookie-loos are cut down to a minimum because the camera you’re using has a profile no bigger than a home video camera.” Further complicating the production, Romania joined the European Union before Louthan wrapped, and the director suddenly found himself with an unexpected $80,000 VAT tax tab that ate up much of his post budget. Castel Film Studio— charged with collecting the money—was sympathetic to his plight and offered to do Romania’s post at a greatly reduced rate so long as the work was done entirely at its facility. As luck would have it, Louthan’s wife was about to deliver their first child back in California. “We had to do post in Romania, but I really had be in Los Angeles, so I was trying to find a way to oversee everything long-distance,” he explains. Amazingly enough, Louthan resourcefully turned to a highly unlikely solution: the Internet communication software Skype. “I bought the editor in Romania an Apple iSight camera and connected her to Skype. She focused the Web cam on her Avid monitor and I could watch what she was doing live from my home. It took a little getting used to, because there was a bit of a delay, but it wasn’t that bad.” Due to the 11-hour time difference between the countries, Louthan and editor Mirela Muresan split up the schedule, alternating days and nights so that one week she was working nights and he was on days, switching the following week. Once a sequence was rough cut, Muresan would e-mail a QuickTime file to Louthan for review. “It sounds clunky and idiotic,” Louthan says, “but the system became very efficient and was a remarkably effective method of working. I would actually do it again!” Although the road to completion has been a long and challenging one for Made in Romania, Louthan and his team managed to overcome obstacles with ingenuity, creativity and perseverance—not unlike the characters he lovingly lampoons. DV www.dv.com “It’s a little terrifying that this little piece of plastic [the P2 Store] becomes your entire movie,” says Louthan, who is accustomed to working on 35mm productions. Early on, Louthan and team had tried out several third-party hard drive recorders, such as Focus Enhancements’ Firestore, and found them to be unsatisfactory for their needs. “They all have these incredibly noisy on-board fans,” he attests. “You end up trying to cable this drive as far away from the camera as possible to avoid the noise. They’re also very hard to configure to the camera. We abandoned the Firestores very quickly.” At one point in production, Louthan found himself in the pouring rain in a remote Romanian field, huddled with his crew under umbrellas, with the P2 Store jury-rigged to a 12-volt car battery. “In a situation like that,” the director says, “it’s all a leap of faith. With no way to review the footage, in a remote location and knowing that we were going to cycle through these P2 cards as many as six times that day, we were totally shooting blind— which was very disturbing.” Because the show was constantly in “download downtime,” Louthan started deleting non-circle takes in camera. “It’s some36 dv october 2007 http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - October 2007

Cover Contents Letters DV Update R&D Fest Circuit Light Brigade Follow Focus Shootout Image Conscious Instant Expert Close-Ups Eastern Europe Exploit Call of the Wild Four Principles of Storage Storage Media Production Diary

Digital Video - October 2007

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