Featuring Stock

During production last year of Spy Kids, director RobertRodriguez insisted on “magical” time-lapse clouds for thefilm's “virtual room” sequence. Rodriguez, however, didn'tparticularly care whether his crew filmed the clouds or utilizedexisting footage for the Dimension Films release. In fact, he didn'treally know how to describe his clouds, but he certainly knew them whenhe saw them.

“Robert asked us to find something that would work for theanimatic I was building and to keep it cost-effective,” explainsvisual effects supervisor Chris Olivia of Austin-based Digital Anvil.“Rather than hiring a crew to shoot clouds or trying to create afantastic environment in 3D, I acquired some generic cloud footage andstuck that into the animatic, just to give Robert an idea what it wouldlook like. One of those shots, he absolutely loved, and said,‘That's it — those are the clouds.’ Of course, thatfootage was video, so we had to search to find similar stock with anoriginal negative.”

Spy Kids' experience typifies the issues facing filmmakerswho utilize stock footage. Stock remains a seldom-used tool forfeatures because it is sometimes difficult to acquire originalnegatives from stock-footage libraries and then match them with new,live-action film.

Still, several of this year's major releases took advantage of stockfootage, including Spy Kids, Thirteen Days, and Castle Rock'supcoming December feature, The Majestic. Principals involved inmaking those three movies recently discussed with Millimetersome of the issues involved in researching, locating, restoring, andutilizing stock.

While most of the stock footage in Spy Kids appears in just acouple scenes, finding it was nonetheless a major job. Visual effectscoordinator Elaine Thompson conducted the search, and her questresulted in the licensing of shots from both major Getty stocklibraries — Image Bank and Energy Film — as well asmaterial from Fish Films Footage World, Wish You Were Here, Film &Video Stock Shots, Prairie Pictures, and Cinenet.

“It was a matter of calling around, explaining our needs, andhaving the various houses do some tests and then send us over half-inchvideo reels of their footage,” Thompson says. “We pareddown what we needed, and eventually got better Digi-Beta tapes of theremaining footage. After doing more tests, we eventually selected whatwe liked, paid the licensing fees, and the stock houses producedinterpositives for us.”

Thompson says using stock spared the production substantial expense.Acquiring Eiffel Tower footage for one scene, for instance, saved theproject the cost of having to send a crew to Paris to film the famouslandmark.

Digital Anvil, Quebec's Hybride Technologies, and Santa Monica-basedDigiscope cleaned and placed the stock footage into approximately 45shots.

“At the time Robert shot the live action, we had no idea whatthe exact background would be, so he had no lighting reference,”says Olivia. “He just decided to light it to look cool, and thenit was up to us to match that lighting scheme and work with his cameramove. When we got his live-action plate for the virtual-room scenes, weoften had to negate the camera move slightly in post or extrapolate outof his shot more digital information to use with the stock plate. Acouple times, we did projection techniques, projecting the clouds ontothe ground, for the characters to walk over. That can look flat, so wethen had to spend time adding particle smoke and othereffects.”

Some shots, says Olivia, were more complicated than others.

“There is a cool piece of storm footage we used, but the filmwas dark and grainy,” he states. “The Digi-Beta versionlooked better when we tested it, but the IP had problems. In the end,we decided to leave the shot darker than originally planned, and wedarkened down parts of the foreground live-action plate. I spent a longtime using grain and de-grain filters in Maya to get itright.”

Olivia says that, despite these technical hurdles, everything workedout because filmmakers were diligent during the initial researchphase.

“The big thing I tell filmmakers who want to use stock is,spend a lot of time looking, and keep a log of everything you seebefore you decide what to license,” he notes. “Often, youfind a shot, only to find a better one months later. Also, check aheadof time about whether a negative exists because sometimes stuff comesto you looking great on video, but they have no negative.”

New Line's Thirteen Days is a period piece and, therefore,required generous amounts of historical imagery. Seventy stock shotshelp tell the story of the Kennedy White House's efforts during theCuban Missile Crisis.

“There was no way, on our budget, to manufacture adequateshots of mobilizations of military personnel and ordinary citizensglued to their TVs, practicing air raid drills, gathering in TimesSquare to see the latest updates, and so on,” says co-producerPeter Almond. “The stock footage in this film gives a propersense of scope to the unfolding events, since most of the drama that weshot takes place in a limited place: the White House.”

Almond, along with two full-time researchers and a stockcoordinator, spent six months searching for proper footage in threecountries — the U.S., Russia, and Cuba. After locating thousandsof hours of material, they sent still and video versions back todirector Roger Donaldson and the film's producers. As the director andproducers selected images, the researchers then launched a secondworldwide search to find those shots' original negatives.

“Our main sources were the National Archives and the UCLA filmlibrary, as well as the major networks — particularly NBC andCBS, which granted us the right to use actual Walter Cronkitebroadcasts from that era — but we approached at least three dozensources altogether,” says Almond. “The National Archives isa treasure trove for filmmakers doing historical stuff, but they don'thave funds to catalogue and access everything. Therefore, we oftenfound footage that had a missing negative, and in those cases, we hadto go searching for other sources that might provide them. It was areal detective hunt.”

Producers brought the stock materials to Cinesite, Los Angeles, forextensive digital restoration. Visual effects supervisor Jerry Poolerand his team scanned stock elements with a Spirit Datacine and then,using Cineon, restored about six minutes of stock clips for use in thefilm. Some material also underwent colorization at Dynacs,Hollywood.

“Most of the historical shots needed scratch and dirt removal,but several also needed to be digitally stabilized because they wereshot with hand-held cameras,” says Pooler. “Other sceneshad a fluctuation in density from frame-to-frame that would be seen asa flicker on the screen, so we had to fix those, as well. We also hadto reposition a few things, manipulate grain, and so on.”

Pooler points out that when working on such jobs, “fixingcertain problems can often create others,” which is why thecopious use of historical stock footage requires exhaustiverestoration.

“We had a Navy sequence, for instance, which had a few framesmissing, and that created stutters in shots showing those ships firingmissiles,” he explains. “Therefore, we had to average theframes together, thus creating new frames, and then insert those framesback in. In so doing, we then had to deal with the problem of the rushof water past the ship. We had to keep that part of the shot seamless,otherwise the water wouldn't look natural. So we had to compositevarious elements back together in order to address thatproblem.”

According to Pooler, Thirteen Days was an exceptionalassignment for Cinesite.

“We don't normally deal with lots of stock on feature films,and it is even rarer when the material cuts back-and-forth withlive-action footage,” he notes.

Frank Darabont only used stock footage in a single sequence ofThe Majestic, a Capra-esque tale of a blacklisted screenwriter(Jim Carrey) suffering from amnesia. That sequence, however, is crucialto the story as it features Carrey's character discovering, through1950's newsreel footage, his own participation in the anti-CommunistHUAC hearings.

Filmmakers projected existing black-and-white newsreel footage ofthe hearings onto a movie screen, while filming a theater audiencewatching the sequence. In addition, they created their own, additional“clips” of newsreel footage and cut back-and-forth betweenthe stock and fictional versions.

“We got some newsreel footage from the UCLA library andcombined that with other material from Image Bank, Producers LibraryService, the Sherman Grinberg Film Library, and the Fox Filmlibrary,” says Christy Dimmig, postproduction supervisor on thefilm, who at press time expected about 20 shots would includestock.

DP David Tattersall created the footage to intercut with the oldnewsreels. After painstakingly studying the light and composition ofthe historical HUAC shots, he shot the matching sequence with Kodak'sDouble X black-and-white film.

“If you study the original newsreel footage, there are a fewkey wide shots that give away how the room was lit — basically itwas crude floodlighting,” Tattersall explains. “On set, weused film lights, Sky Pans, that are open-faced units usually used forlighting scenic backdrops. Then we added a bit of smoke since justabout everyone in the newsreel footage is smoking, and I resisted thetemptation to get too cinematic when shooting it. The rest of the workwas done in post to match it to the original stock, adding projectionweave, grain, contrast, and even a little exaggeratedflicker.”

In addition to making the new footage look old, the post team had toclean up the original newsreel footage for projection onto the theaterscreen. Joe Gareri, now a visual effects producer at Pacific TitleMirage, helped restore The Majestic's newsreel clips while atR!OT, Santa Monica. Gareri says that ancient splices, in particular,presented challenges.

“There were lots of bad ripples caused by bad splices over theyears, and one, in particular, was a big problem,” notes Gareri.“We couldn't completely eliminate it, but we were able to smoothit enough that it looked like typical newsreel. Some of the projectedscenes, though, where the audience is watching in the dark, made theprojected footage appear overexposed, so we also had to bring up blacksand balance it using our Inferno.”

Tattersall admits that the decision to shoot the projected newsreelin realtime, rather than using green-screen techniques, complicatedthings technically.

“The size of the theater and the throw of the projector in aroom that size created the risk of the projected image looking quitedim,” he states. “We ended up making several alternativeprints of the newsreel, at half-stock increments brighter each time, togive us some options. We eventually settled on the brightest print, andthe post guys made it all work nicely.”