American Cinematographer - April 2015 - 18

Top: The second
short film,
Instruments of
Darkness, is a
retelling of
William
Shakespeare's
Macbeth with
Sean Bean in the
title role.
Bottom: Friend
captures a
medium shot
of Bean.

At the time of our shoot, the F65's
workflow was still relatively new to the
industry. We would not have been able to
wrangle all the data and maintain our
shooting ratio without the expert team at
Mission Digital, who provided us with an
on-set grading system that included two
SR-PC4 readers, each with 10GB Ethernet
PCI cards; a 10TB mini-SAS array (where we
kept our working copy); and two external
G-Speed RAID drives as secondary and
tertiary backups. (Mission Digital also
provided LTO-5 archiving.)
The on-set grading system proved
invaluable. In between setups or during our
lunch break, I would work with Pablo to
grade what we'd already shot. Pablo
rendered our grades in ProRes 4:2:2 HQ and
performed a thorough QC before sending
cards back to camera. Pablo notes, "Thanks
to Laura Castelli and Ezequiel Sarser from
18

April 2015

Assimilate, we created a very consistent
color pipeline. I was running the full version
of Scratch, and I had an FSI monitor nicely
calibrated by Mission Digital."
It was a luxury to view polished
dailies, and it gave everyone on set - the
director, actors, producers and crew - a
real buzz. This system was also beneficial
because I was unable to attend the majority
of the final grade due to filming commitments in Bulgaria; thanks to the on-set
grade, I knew the look was already well
established. As Pablo relates, "The reconform process was one of the smoothest
I've ever had. Mission Digital cloned the onset lab's operating system into the grading
suite, so I was using the exact same project
as [I was] for the dailies, and all of the dailies
grades could be automatically applied to
the timeline provided by editor Nigel Galt."
With both production and post
American Cinematographer

wrapped, I'm relieved to hear this from
Patrick: "I could not have asked for a better
partner in the process. James' willingness to
guide me where needed - and, in turn, to
follow - made our collaboration something I am eager to repeat as soon as possible."
The second short, Instruments of
Darkness, was directed by Vincent Regan,
who conceived the project as a way to raise
funding for his upcoming feature, Enemy of
Man. The feature is to be a retelling of
William Shakespeare's Macbeth, with Sean
Bean in the title role.
As Vincent relates, "We decided the
most effective way to gather material for a
promo was to shoot selected scenes, and
then edit selected shots over Macbeth's
famous 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow' speech. I knew James' work on
Ghosted, and I was very keen to use him on
this promo."
When you start out with a story as
widely known as Macbeth, it's critical that
you enrapture the audience from the getgo. You need them to be surprised by every
twist and turn to ensure their investment in
Macbeth's journey. Accordingly, Vincent
and I agreed that the project demanded a
dramatic period look.
As it is a period piece, I was keen to
shoot on film, but the constraints of our
budget wouldn't allow it. Instead, we shot
with a single Red Epic MX, recording to
64GB RedMag SSD cards with 8:1
compression, and framing for 2.40:1 with
American Cinematographer - April 2015

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