Riding the Digital Range

Costner and Muro on Digital Intermediate

Kevin Costner wasn't exactly itching to do a digital intermediate onhis new film — Touchstone Pictures' Open Range —when the project got underway last year. He didn't even know, or care,what exactly a digital intermediate was. However, as the film'sproducer/director and star working with a modest budget for a studiofilm (just over $20 million), Costner did care about how to best usevisual elements to tell the story about a pair of aging cowpokes andtheir search for frontier justice. His goal: “To use angles,colors, wide open spaces, and interesting framing to show the totalexperience of being on the open range, and showing the reality of amajor gunfight.”

Costner picked a first-time DP to shoot the piece — industrySteadicam veteran Jimmy Muro (see the May 2003 issue ofMillimeter for more on Muro) who, like him, had never beeninvolved with a digital intermediate. Costner says he deferred thedecision about whether to use the process to Muro. That decision causedCostner occasional consternation during the year-plus it took to makeOpen Range, and he remains, by no means, a digital intermediatezealot. He will admit, however, now that the experience is over, thatthe movie benefited from the decision.

“First of all, it obviously helped my DP in lots of ways, andif Jimmy says it helped him make the film look the way it does, assomeone who is not highly technical, I have to respect that, and thatis why I went with the process to begin with,” Costner toldMillimeter. “Second, I was seriously interested inshooting this film in HD originally — I've been thinking about itsince The Postman. The reason for that is, on both films, I hadthis desire to make skies different colors, play with other things. Forboth films, I chickened out when it comes to shooting HD, but Jimmyfelt we could achieve most of those goals using this process. It alsoallowed us to work faster. We had very short nights up in Canada and acouple of key scenes at dawn. We were looking at five-hour workdays inthe evening. If I didn't get the ultimate dawn when shooting, then theability to do final manipulation on those shots obviously made a bigdifference because we didn't have the luxury of staying up there untilwe had the perfect sky.”

Costner and Muro did not arrive at the decision to perform a digitalintermediate lightly. In fact, since Open Range was meant to bean organic and realistic period piece designed to evoke classicWesterns of the past, and with only minor special effects, thereappeared to be no overwhelming need to perform a digital intermediateor to deviate in any significant way from the traditional photochemicalcolor-timing processes that both men were intimately familiar with.

Director Kevin Costner wanted Open Range's pivital rainsequences to have a dark, gritty, realistic look, and they thereforereceived close attention during the digital intermediate phase.

On the other hand, the film was shot on a tight schedule withlimited money on the prairies of Alberta, where nights were extremelyshort and weather and skies were constantly changing. The story alsorequired extensive practical effects work to create massive rainstormsand flooding in an old-time Western town constructed specially for theproject. These requirements could benefit from a digitalintermediate.

At the end of the day, Costner says he left the decision to Muro fora reason rarely discussed in filmmaking circles — namely, thatdirectors need to satisfy the needs of their key creativecollaborators, as well as having their own needs met.

“We had only so much money on this film, and I definitely didnot want to get bogged down in technical stuff myself,” saysCostner. “I wanted to focus on angles and my story as thedirector, and with my producer's hat on, I had to watch the money. Isat down with Jimmy, and he said he wanted to do the digitalintermediate. I have a lot of faith in him, and he promised we'd havethe beautiful scenes I wanted. He felt the process would help him getthe job done, so I agreed.”

In particular, colorist Marc Wielage faced challenges maintaining"blues at just the right shade."

Muro believes he and Costner probably could have achieved the samecombination of raw, gritty, dark rain sequences, wind-swept prairieshots, and painterly skies without resorting to a digital intermediate,but he insists the grueling shoot in Canada made the process a morepractical choice and gave him more flexibility during production.

“I felt I could make the sky better, get away with modestlight in some places, and work faster overall on set, which wasimportant because our nights were short, we had scenes at dawn, and wedid not have unlimited time or money to light the piece,” saysMuro. “But probably the biggest value we got with the digitalintermediate was the ability to selectively frame the film here andthere, and shoot Super 35 with confidence that a digital extractionwould turn out better than an optical blowup, letting us recomposeshots during color-timing if necessary. I really feel the digitalintermediate process has eliminated the reason many filmmakers have forstaying away from Super 35 — the complexities of the opticalblowup. More people are shooting Super 35 now than ever before becausethis process renders that problem moot.”

Muro opted to shoot Kodak 5279 for night sequences, often pushing acouple of stops in processing, and Kodak 5274 for all daytime scenes.He planned to generally underexpose exteriors in order to retain theoption to tweak them during the digital intermediate phase. Murobrought the film to Cinesite, Hollywood, where colorist Marc Wielageworked with Costner and Muro to digitally color-time the movie.

Cinesite scanned the film's original Super 35mm negative to an arrayof hard drives with a combination of Philips' Spirit and Lightning IIscanners. Wielage says the entire negative was scanned full-aperture at2048×1556, using Cinesite's proprietary one-light settings toretain highlight and lowlight details. The digital files were thenpushed through a Philips Virtual Datacine (VDC), where each scene wasconfirmed and matched frame-by-frame to offline HD cassettes undersupervision of assistant editor Tracey Wadmore-Smith and data operatorsEd Thompson and Pete Moc, who made sure the VDC produced the equivalentof a timeline conformed to the Avid offline cassettes.

Wielage then color-timed Open Range on a Pandora PoglePlatinum MegaDef system, using proprietary Kodak look-up tables (LUTs).Filmmakers viewed the images using a JVC DLA-QX1 digital projector,modified by Cinesite engineers with their proprietary LUTs toapproximate the look of a film print. The QX1 boasts JVC's proprietaryD-ILA technology, featuring 10-bit digital color processing and 12-bitgamma correction.

Muro says the nature of the location shoot and the project's budgetrequired filmmakers to use HD dailies. The movie was shot mainly at theStoney Nakoda First Nations Reserve near Calgary, Alberta, making itcost-prohibitive to produce and transport film dailies on a timelybasis. Instead, film was sent to Toybox, Vancouver, which transferredthe Super 35mm film images to HD, relying on digital still photos shotby Muro and manipulated in Photoshop as a primary color guide. Toyboxsent the HD dailies on Sony HDCAM tape back to Muro and Costner onlocation the next day, where the production team viewed them on a 20in.Sony HD monitor.

Those same HD daily tapes, however, were also used during the postphase to serve as the foundation for a rough and beautiful HD master ofthe entire film, according to Muro. That HD version — essentiallya conformed, online version of the movie in HD — was built bycolorist Greg Hamlin at LaserPacific, Hollywood, after production andoffline editing and before the digital intermediate phase began atCinesite. The primary purpose of the HD version was to permitfilmmakers to screen the film cost-effectively for test audiences and,later, for an early digital screening at the Cannes Film Festival.

Costner directed with a goal to visualize the "total experience" ofthe open range — a plan which was aided by the digitalintermediate process in terms of color and sky enhancements.

While the creation of HD test versions of movies shot on film isgrowing increasingly popular, it's still relatively new to do it forfeature films that will be going through the digital intermediateprocess. (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearlis another recent example. An HD version was built at Complete Post,Hollywood, and then a digital intermediate was done at Technique,Burbank.) Since video and film color space are quite different, the HDversion cannot be directly used as a guide for performing colorcorrection on the film version of a movie. “We essentially haveto start from scratch when color correcting the film in its finalform,” says Cinesite's Marc Wielage.

But Muro says he found the workflow from the on-set viewing of HDdailies to the creation of an HD test version to the final digitalintermediate phase useful in understanding how the film would lookoverall. He adds that LaserPacific's expertise with HD mastering andtheir HD theater made it “the perfect place” to build an HDtemplate of the movie. He adds that this template was occasionallyreferred to during the digital intermediate process, but moreimportantly, “the HD version was a beautiful example of our movieall by itself.”

Costner agrees that the HD version of the film came out nicely, buthe also admits he had some trepidation about whether the theatricalversion of the movie would resemble the HD version or not. Plus, headds, he had trouble during production getting used to HD dailies tobegin with.

“Our first dailies were horrible to look at — one of theworst nights of my life was the first night viewing dailies,”Costner admits. “We didn't have the sound synched, a few of ourcrew even walked out. What concerned me the most was seeing materialthat I did not have confidence would look the way I wanted it to whenwe got the whole picture together. It didn't look like what I wasplanning on. But Jim and I sat down and just worked all that out. Heworked hard to fix the problems we were having and to reassure me heunderstood the process and explained how he knew things would match up.As it turned out, his work paid off, and our most beautiful scenes andour budget benefited from doing it this way.”

Muro agrees that the process had some kinks in the beginning.“There was a lot of confusion early on with our HD dailiessystem, but that is not much different than printing dailies on film,where you initially have to get used to your color timer. There isalways a learning curve, which is why research and tests are soimportant,” he says. “But someone like Kevin just wants toknow what his images will look like and not be bogged down with allthose details about look-up tables and things. So I have to give him alot of credit for trusting me on this.

“[After production wrapped], we projected [the HD version ofthe film] at LaserPacific in an anamorphic frame using rented ChristieHD projectors, and it looked great. The video color space, of course,is different than film, and at the time we were posting this movie,only a handful of movies had tried the digital intermediate process, soit wasn't like we had a standardized work method to follow. But it wasa useful tool overall as we went through this process.”

Cinesite's Wielage, meanwhile, thinks the HD test version probablyhelped Muro and Costner more than it did him during the digitalcolor-timing phase for the movie, though he did refer back to thatversion occasionally. In his opinion, the digital intermediate processwill mature when the colorist and facility involved in the digitalintermediate are also involved, either directly or indirectly, in thecreation of HD dailies at a production's outset — much as visualeffects supervisors have evolved out of the post category and into keyroles on set during production.

“My belief is that for future digital intermediate projects,it would be a good idea for our facility to be more closely involvedwith the digital dailies process from the get-go,” says Wielage.“There should be more cross-pollination, so that the companydoing the digital intermediate has a hand in color correction of thedailies, or at least consulting on it. That way, HD versions of moviesthat are going back to film would be more useful as guides or templatesfor colorists like myself.”

(Cinesite's parent, Kodak, acquired LaserPacific in July, after thisproject was finished. Wielage believes that putting the two facilitiesunder the same corporate umbrella will lead to better cross-pollinationon jobs in which both facilities are involved in differentcapacities.)

From a strictly creative point of view, Costner believes that thedigital intermediate process on this project worked primarily becausehe had faith in Muro to ensure that the images matched his creativevision. He remains cautious, however, about “whether I'm seeingexactly what it will look like on film” while the process isongoing. He also says he would decide case by case whether he would usethe process again on future films, largely depending on whether he hadthe same level of faith in another team that he had in Muro andCinesite.

Wielage points to a handful of key scenes that were effectivelyaltered at Cinesite to achieve the sometimes gritty, sometimespainterly look that Costner was searching for.

“There is a scene where Kevin's character [cowboy CharleyWaite] is digging a grave,” Wielage explains. “The originalphotography had a deep blue sky present. We changed this to anamber-orange morning sunrise, adding a subtle gradiated filter effectto enhance the morning effect. We had other scenes that were shotnight-for-day, like the scene where Boss Spearman [Robert Duvall'scharacter] buys supplies in the general store. There we helped smoothout the lighting to match the day shots to the point where I think thedifferences were imperceptible.”

Costner was particularly concerned during color-timing sessionsabout achieving the look of dawn for a scene in which his characterinteracts with Annette Bening's on the porch of her home — ascene that was digitally enhanced.

Because he was deeply involved in the creation of the HD version andin the final film-out process (also performed at Cinesite usingLightning II laser film recorders, with final release prints done atTechnicolor, Burbank), Costner largely left details of the digitalintermediate phase to Muro and Wielage. He was involved a few times,however, particularly for the scene in which his character bidsfarewell to Sue Barlow (Annette Bening) on her porch at dawn, justbefore departing for the film's climactic gunfight.

“Kevin was nervous about that scene because he really wantedit to look like dawn, and it wasn't shot right at dawn,” saysMuro. “He personally color-timed much of that sequence,actually.”

Wielage adds that the night rain sequences in the film alsobenefited from the digital color-timing approach. “Most of therain sequences, except for one early in the movie, take place atnight,” says Wielage. “Keeping the blues at just the rightshade was tough and required a day or two of testing to make sure theyweren't too intense — neither too magenta-purple nor toogreenish-cyan, yet still looking natural and believable.”

Even the gunfight, a 20-minute scene that Costner and Muro laboredover on location in order to illustrate the angles and closeness of thecombatants in such battles, benefited from the digital intermediateprocess.

“We spent a good three or four days just on that sequencealone,” says Wielage. “There were nearly 600 cuts in thisone 2,000ft. reel of film, along with slow-motion effects, cloudeffects, and rapid-fire violence that kept the movie at a fairlyintense level. From a color standpoint, the biggest difficulty was inkeeping everything consistent, both overall and shot-by-shot. Becausethis sequence cuts back and forth from exteriors to interiors, fromeffects shots to camera negative shots, all photographed over a periodof several weeks, we had to jump through a few hoops to make it alllook like everything happened within the same hour.”

In terms of lighting, knowledge of a pending digital intermediatewas a double-edged sword during the shoot, particularly given thatOpen Range has numerous nighttime exterior scenes that Costnerwanted to realistically replicate the darkness and quiet of being inthe woods at night or in the middle of a driving rainstorm at night. Insome cases, Muro “could get away with less light and make itright later,” but in others, he had no room for error.

“There is no question in my mind that if we had not done adigital intermediate, I would have had to spend more time lightingthroughout filming,” says Muro. “In some of the interiorscenes in the doctor's house where people are walking around withcandles, I wasn't too worried because I knew I could brighten thoseshots up a bit with the digital intermediate. And I loved the fact thatin [a scene showing a confrontation in a small café], I was ableto darken some of the frame around Robert Duvall's and Kevin'scharacters and let them be in a pool of light. I could control thingslike that, but that is not to say I felt the digital intermediateshould be used as a special effect. I had to be very careful lighting,recognizing on the one hand that I would have leeway to makeadjustments later, and at the same time, struggling to be careful thatI didn't go too dark since it would be tough to dial it brighter later.It was a very fine line.”

An ambush sequence around a campfire typifies that fine line.Costner demanded the scene look authentic — in other words,giving only the impression of firelight since it takes place in themiddle of nowhere. “The ambush scene in particular had peoplenervous because there just didn't seem to be enough light,” Murorecalls. “My gaffer said he could find no value, nothing, on hislight meter. I was a first-time DP, so a few people thought maybe I wasmessing up by not bringing much light out to the forest for that scene.But in reality I was obeying my boss, who wanted the characters to besneaking around in the black woods. The whole scene was shot withsmall, battery-strip firelights and my Steadicam.

“This particular scene, we couldn't mess with at all duringthe digital intermediate. Digital post won't fix it if there is nolight. So, this sequence was a good example of where we had to get agood negative to begin with, using our skills. It turned out to be oneof the better scenes in the movie, but we knew we had no room for errorwhen we shot it.”

Overall, however, Muro says he learned to err on the bright sidewhen supervising a digital intermediate.

The reason for that, he says, is an often-overlooked point.“The digital intermediate isn't really the final step,” hepoints out. “After that step, we still had to do the finalrelease-printing step at Technicolor, which presented yet anotheropportunity to make minor color changes. Therefore, it's better toleave things a bit too bright than bring it down too much since you canfix one photochemically, but not the other. That just comes down to acost and time issue, about whether you can afford to sit down againduring the printing stage with a color-timer, but at least you havethat option. Still, the digital intermediate kept me from having toworry about that too much. It gave me opportunities to fix mistakes Imade, and I really appreciated that. One shot where Charley steps outin a storm at night, I made a mistake, for instance — it was alittle too bright. We had a lamp too close to Kevin when we shot him. Iwas able to nicely and efficiently dial that down in the digital postprocess.”

At press time, the movie was getting generally good reviews, withnumerous notations about the quality of Muro's cinematography. Costneris gratified by that turn of events, and notes the bottom line:“The film turned out the way I envisioned it.” But thatdoesn't mean the filmmaker has yet become vested in the digitalintermediate process, despite his success with it and its rapidlygrowing acceptance by the filmmaking community.

Rather, Costner insists, any decision to try another digitalintermediate would be “something I would have to hash out with myDP again, just like I did with Jimmy. I do like collaboration though,and there is no doubt this process requires a major collaboration byall key players. We'll see how that goes. I'm aware there are moreskilled filmmakers out there than me, and people far more technicallyproficient, but at the end of the day, it's all about the story and theimages that tell that story. We got it right on this project, soobviously we made the right decisions.

“I still want to shoot HD, though. I'll try that sooner orlater, when I find a project that meets the economics of the wholething.”

Next issue: A look at how Robert Benton and his collaboratorsapplied the digital intermediate process to his new film, The HumanStain.