Digital Surgery

Seamus Walsh (left) and Mark Caballero (right) help Ray Harryhausenset up a shot during production of The Tortoise & theHare.

In order to finish Ray Harryhausen's incomplete 50-year-old short,The Tortoise & the Hare, before its exhibition at thisyear's Sundance, animators Mark Caballero and Seamus Walshpainstakingly matched Harry-hausen's classic stop-motion style. But theproject's post phase was also crucial to maintaining the vintage lookfor the finished piece, which contains about three minutes of originalanimation created by Harryhausen in 1952 combined with nine moreminutes created by Caballero and Walsh.

IO Film, North Hollywood, provided film scanning, digitalrestoration, and film recording services to blend the old and new 16mmfilm images.

In 1952, Harryhausen filmed his portion on now-defunct Kodachrome16mm stock, while the new portions were shot on Kodak 7274. Caballeroand Walsh took Harryhausen's original negative and their own toPhotokem, Burbank, which created a new, low-contrast internegative outof the two pieces. That IP was taken to IO, which used its HDCinemaprocess to restore, blend, edit, and color-correct the images.

According to Chip Potter, IO executive producer, the processessentially involved bringing the film into IO's Avid HD|DS Studioworkstation for some digital surgery and then applying a proprietarycolor-matching process to the images before shooting the piece back outto film.

“The idea is to take all the cut film negative material, aftercolor correction on the telecine, and then manipulate, edit, andrestore all the footage in high-definition, allowing us to maintain adigital path without any additional telecine or separate opticalprocesses,” says Potter. “We conform to a final editedmaster in HD, adding visual effects, titles, credits, dissolves, motioneffects, repositioning material, grain matching, and so on. Wefinalized all the cuts, did some fades, tightened some of theanimation, repainted backgrounds, and a few other things. After allthat, we ran the film through our proprietary color-transform software,which transforms the 8-bit color space to 10-bit before the finalfilm-out.”