American Cinematographer - February 2016 - 18

Pratt (right) confers
with his collaborators
before filming
Maddox's drowning,
which marked the final
shot of the production.
As the crew drove
away, Christian says,
"it was thick with
snow, pouring down
out of the sky. If that
had come during the
shoot, I'd have been
screwed completely!
The crew all said to
me, 'You are one
jammy bastard. We
don't know how you
did this!'"

said, 'That's going out with Empire.'"
Lucas and Kershner even adopted
the film's step-printing technique in The
Empire Strikes Back, for the scene in which
Luke Skywalker confronts a vision of Darth
Vader on the swamp planet Dagobah.
Director John Boorman was also impressed,
and he screened the film for his crew in
advance of principal photography on Excalibur. Nevertheless, Black Angel seemed
destined to become just the stuff of cinema
legend after Christian's personal print, as
well as a print that had been archived at
Lucasfilm, went missing.
But then, in 2012, Christian received
a phone call from Bob O'Neill, who at the
time was an archivist at NBCUniversal and
had found Black Angel's negative and interpositive while clearing the shelves. Shortly
after O'Neill's phone call, Wired ran a story
about the discovery, and, Christian says,
"about two months later, another phone
call out of the blue comes in." This time, it
was from postproduction and visual-effects
veterans Brice Parker and David Tanaka,
who had read the article and wanted to
pool their resources to restore the film.
Parker, currently a producer at Weta
Digital in New Zealand, was then working as
a technical manager at Pixar Animation
Studios in Emeryville, Calif., where Tanaka
was employed as a creative editor; the two
were also fellow board members of the
Visual Effects Society's Bay Area Section. In
an email interview, Parker relates that he
and Tanaka had "both previously worked
for Industrial Light & Magic, [so] we had a
deep interest in and familiarity with the
history of the Star Wars cinematic universe."
In fact, Tanaka had worked as a
visual-effects editor on the Star Wars Special
18

February 2016

Editions (AC Feb. '97). In a phone interview
from the San Francisco Bay Area - where
he had just wrapped his work as creative
editor for the touring musical event Star
Trek: The Ultimate Voyage - he emphasizes, "One of our commitments to this
project was to stay true to what Roger did
30 years ago."
As a first step in the restoration,
Parker flew to Los Angeles, where EFilm
scanned the film elements full aperture at
6K on a pin-registered Arriscan, downrezzing to 4K (4096x3112) and recording
10-bit DPX files in log color space. Josh
Haynie, EFilm's scanning supervisor and vice
president of operations, also oversaw the
creation of 2K (2048x1556) elements
down-rezzed from the 4K files, as well as
the creation of HD QuickTime files. The 2K
files became the working element for
further color and cleanup work, while the
4K scan was archived to LTO 5 as an additional backup for future use.
Next, Deluxe and Chace Audio
performed a telecine from the sound negative to digitize the audio. It was then back
to the Bay Area, where Parker and Tanaka
enlisted the help of Jon Peters, the CEO of
Athena Studios. For nearly all of this work,
Tanaka notes, "there was no money
involved. Given the pro-bono nature of the
project, we all thought that this would be a
wonderful opportunity to offer a summer
internship position in postproduction digital
restoration. My son, Mitchell, was available
and interested. Under the supervision of
[Athena technical artist] Jorge Martinez,
Mitchell worked on the project for approximately 13 weeks."
In his work, Mitchell Tanaka utilized
Pixel Farm's PFClean 2013 image-restoraAmerican Cinematographer

tion system. He explains, "There were certain
[elements] I encountered in the cleanup
process that were extremely difficult to differentiate from dust or other artifacts. In order
to eliminate only the dirt and scratch artifacts, we manually rectified the shots frame
by frame. It was tedious, but it certainly paid
off in regards to the level of quality."
For grading of the restored elements,
Parker and Tanaka reached out to colorist
Kent Pritchett and DI producer Kim Salyer at
the now-defunct facility Colorflow. Pritchett
is another ILM alum, and since wrapping
Black Angel, he and Salyer have gone on to
co-found post company Color A Go-Go.
Pritchett used Autodesk's Lustre for
the two-day grade. "It was a rush job 30
years ago, and it was a rush job again!" he
says with a laugh. "My goal was to honor the
original color timing [while] using the DI tools
we have today. I helped balance the inconsistencies without changing the feel and the
look of the film."
The final steps of the restoration
included end-credit services by Illumina
Studios, the creation of a digital sound mix at
Skywalker Sound, the DCP creation at EFilm,
and the negative filmout and creation of a
print master at Deluxe.
The restored Black Angel premiered at
the Mill Valley Film Festival in October 2013
- just 11 months after Parker and Tanaka
had first reached out to Christian. The screening marked the first time the director saw the
restoration's results. "I'm so grateful to
them," he says of Parker, Tanaka and all of
their collaborators. "It's exactly as we shot it."
The enthusiasm that met Black
Angel's return has spurred Christian to adapt
the story into a feature. "It's the film I've most
wanted to make all my life," he says.
Likewise, the short "was a mad
passion project," he reflects. "My training, as
it were, was to just go out and do it. Star
Wars was just a ragged band of people trying
to make this huge epic from bits and pieces,
and Life of Brian was the same - it's a lowbudget film with an epic intention. It was
ridiculous to do what we were doing, but
blind faith gets you through. You have to just
do what you want to do, and put visions up
there on the screen."
Black Angel is available through
iTunes and WeAreColony.com.
●

http://www.WeAreColony.com

American Cinematographer - February 2016

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