American Cinematographer - November 2013 - 90

◗

Hard-Rock Apocalypse

The show's 3-D imagery was monitored from a mission-control room designed by Cameron Pace Group
3-D engineer Bruno Brunelle.

ish-blue and orange in our streetlights.
In a couple of places we had to match
the direction and quality of the lighting,
like when we cut from an interior tracking shot at the concert, moving through
the audience and up to the stage, to an
exterior tracking shot of the Death
Dealer on his horse."
"Metallica plays a lot of fast and
powerful songs, so I knew we were
going to have a fast and powerful
soundtrack that would dictate the
montage," Antal adds. "But this led to a
concern about fatiguing the viewer."
The filmmakers addressed this by
applying subtle color ramps during
grading sessions at FotoKem with
colorist John Daro, whose credits
include 3-D concert films for Miley
Cyrus, The Jonas Brothers and Katy
Perry. "After a lot of experimentation in
the edit, all of our concerns were alleviated," Antal says.
A 16-bit SGO Mistika Post
allowed Daro to work in real-time 3-D
with the different types of media in
their native resolutions and file formats.
(The film was rendered out in 2K
'Scope for wide theatrical release, and
Imax used its DMR blow-up process to
create 4K deliverables for the largeformat presentation.)
Because he was grading the entire
90

November 2013

film in 3-D, Daro's first task was a technical pass at the stereo balance, "just to
make it easy on the eyeballs," he says.
Adjustments were made to correct for
warping along the edge of the image
due to lens distortion, or misaligned
cameras due to convergence problems.
"There's a level of trust between Vince
and me, and he's okay with whatever
I'm going to do to his footage," says
Daro, who takes a "do no harm"
approach to working with stereoscopic
imagery. "As we get more visual effects
and the film starts to fill out, you can
make depth passes to push certain
moments and let the audience rest at
others."
Daro notes that his approach to
coloring a concert film differs from his
work on a narrative feature. "With a
normal theatrical film you take it reelby-reel, whereas with a concert film it's
song-by-song. At the very end, you take
it in as a whole feature."
Small differences in color -
usually green and magenta - between
two cameras in a stereo rig were
resolved in the Mistika using an optical
flow technique that gives a pixel in a
given frame a certain value and creates a
vector between it and the corresponding pixel in another frame (or stereo
camera eye). The result is a vector map
American Cinematographer

that can be used to map colors, interpolate new frames or even generate a new
stereo eye. (This last technique was used
to dimensionalize the NavCam stereo
footage.) According to Daro, the optical
flow technique was also used for creative
reasons, "to adjust interaxial disparity in
the post process."
Pados and Antal made their color
decisions with the strategy of preserving
the concert's dramatic lighting while
enhancing its overall effect. As an
example, Daro points to the performance of "Cyanide," which has "this
green-yellow kind of lighting, so we
enhanced the greens to make it feel
really poisonous. The general approach
we took was based on the question,
'What is Metallica?' They're dark and
heavy, so we tried to keep the blacks
thick and everything else punched up
and strong, with good contrast."
Rather than staying out of the
band's way, Pados and Antal got up in
Metallica's faces and captured the
essence of what makes their performances worthy of the 3-D concert
experience. "Their passion and strength
is performing, and to see the energy and
showmanship they bring to each
concert is a mystical thing," marvels
Antal. "I'm grateful we were able to
capture it."
"It was definitely a challenge,"
Pados adds, "but I loved every moment
of it."
●

TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa, Sony HDC-F950,
Cameron Pace Group BlakeCam
Angenieux Optimo



American Cinematographer - November 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - November 2013

Contents
American Cinematographer - November 2013 - Cover1
American Cinematographer - November 2013 - Cover2
American Cinematographer - November 2013 - 1
American Cinematographer - November 2013 - 2
American Cinematographer - November 2013 - 3
American Cinematographer - November 2013 - 4
American Cinematographer - November 2013 - Contents
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