Remaking History

Filmmakers used partial sets in combination with extensive bluescreen work (top) to film specific elements that would later join withCG set extensions to represent the Pentagon in Path to War(bottom).

Andrew Hardaway recalls John Frankenheimer's sharp warning at thefirst pre-production meeting for Frankenheimer's newest effort —the HBO historical drama, Path to War, about the Johnsonadministration's plummet into the Vietnam War.

“John told us, ‘this will be a very difficultpicture,’” says Hardaway, Frankenheimer's visual effectssupervisor on the film. “He was talking about the fact that itwas a period piece and that we'd be working with a large cast,extensive sets, archival footage, and visual effects. But his wordstook on a new meaning after September 11.”

The infamous events of that date brought plans to shoot portions ofthe film at the Pentagon and other Washington D.C. landmarks to ascreeching halt and forced Frankenheimer's team to rethink itsapproach.

“Because the film is critical of defense officials from thatera, the Pentagon wasn't too eager to cooperate anyway, but we werehaving meetings with them,” says Frankenheimer. “After thesecurity crackdown that followed September 11, we lost any hope ofshooting near the Pentagon and many other places, so we had to figure afew things out.”

Among the things Frankenheimer “figured out” was thatextensive digital pre-visualization could help him calculate detailedcamera information for key scenes and also plan ways to build invisibleeffects shots to stand in for the Pentagon and other locations. He andHardaway took the pre-viz project to Pixel Liberation Front, Venice,Calif.

Director John Frankenheimer says he took “a complete featurefilm approach” in making the ambitious Path to War movie.

“The entire pre-viz team — even the notion of doingpre-visualization to begin with — I got from David Fincher, whoproduced the short film I directed a couple years ago [for BMW's onlineadvertising campaign, see July 2001 Millimeter). [He] has doneextensive work in this area [for Panic Room, see April 2002Millimeter],” says Frankenheimer. “I've worked closely withFincher ever since, and I've learned an awful lot from him. Themajority of my movies were made before there was this kind of visualeffects progress, so who better to learn from than a modern filmmakerlike David Fincher?”

Hardaway explains that the pre-viz project helped him and keyartists at The Orphanage, San Francisco, calculate exactly whatportions of the Pentagon would need to be built practically for crucialscenes in front of the Pentagon building and where and how those setswould be digitally augmented by The Orphanage.

“We planned the sequences knowing where the set would end andwhere CG would take over,” says Hardaway. “It was a coolcollaboration, because the DP [Stephen Goldblatt] and the productiondesigner [Waldemar Kalinowski] got hard information about how the shotswould be framed and what they needed to do long before we beganshooting. I could go to the production designer and ask him to focusexclusively on very specific portions of the set.”

Pre-viz also helped filmmakers solve another problem: how toconstruct a crucial scene at Arlington National Cemetery during a visitfrom defense secretary Robert McNamara (Alec Baldwin). BecauseSeptember 11 “shifted our entire production schedule,” itwas impossible to capture correct background plates at the historiccemetery during the right season, Hardaway explains.

“We shot half the Arlington scene on stage in front of greenscreen and half at the Westwood National Cemetery in LosAngeles,” he says. “During the pre-viz phase, we designedshots we could tile together, combined with some plates taken later atArlington during the wrong time of year and then altered with CGflowers, grass, and so on. We tweaked it in Photoshop and performed adetailed compositing job.”

The film also required extensive use of archival footage from theVietnam era, both of the war and of historical events in and aroundWashington. That material was acquired by a research team put togetherby Frankenheimer months before production began. HBO's strict budget,however, precluded filmmakers from acquiring original or even dupenegatives of that footage.

“That was difficult, but I'm glad that it happened in thesense that it forced us to address the whole stock footage integrationissue from square one, at the beginning of the project,” Hardawaysays. “We knew we would be limited to tape-based sources, and weplanned accordingly. The first thing we did was an extensive test,digitizing a scene that we shot from our film and then also digitizingthe stock material onto Beta SP or DigiBeta. We did an online conformof that sequence, putting the two together, at television resolution inan online bay, and from there, we went to a da Vinci tape-to-tape colorbay [at Post Group, Hollywood]. From that DigiBeta master, we went intoInferno and up-rezzed to high-def resolution and then used Inferno'scolor warping tools and an array of plug-ins to help us smooth theimage processing. In other words, we smoothed the continuity of theintercuts between old and new footage. We also talked to John and theeditor [Richard Francis-Bruce] about keeping stock sequences continuousrather than quick cuts back-and-forth. That cut down on potentialvisual bumps. Therefore, by the time we got deep into the job, we had apipeline to incorporate older footage from tape sources.”

DP Stephen Goldblatt emphasizes that while the stock footagerepresented “the use” of documentary footage, there was astrong mandate from Frankenheimer to avoid making the film look like adocumentary. Still, having a consistent look was also crucial.Therefore, the digital intermediate process at Cinesite, Hollywood,used to build an HD master, per HBO's requirements, took on increasedimportance.

“There is a scene in a Vietnam-era hospital that we shot 35mm,but at Cinesite, we de-rezzed it, grained it up, desaturated it some,and so on, so that it would be indistinguishable from 16mm filmmaterial of that period,” says Goldblatt. “In that sense,it sort of resembles a documentary sequence, except that it was donefor dramatic effect, to put the viewer into that timeperiod.”

Goldblatt says this kind of image manipulation was extensive duringthe post phase.

“John and I did not want the film looking like a documentary,but we also did not want it to look like a modern film,either,” says Goldblatt. “That's why we applied a varietyof color characteristics to the negative, to make it appear similar tonegative film of that era. In other words, the color and contrastcharacteristics of the film were manipulated to create a periodlook.”

Throughout the job, Goldblatt was charged with maintainingFrankenheimer's characteristic shooting style — deep focus andwide angles with multiple characters in the foreground. That's a“different approach” from what Goldblatt was used to, buthe says, “It was particularly an effective style for this kind ofperiod piece — very intense, which is what this subject matterrequired.”

This approach is obvious in the film's Oval Office scenes.

“The Oval Office has been featured in so many films and TVshows, and John really wanted it to appear different — a uniquelook,” says Goldblatt. “Our guiding principle was to makesure it did not resemble The West Wing. No insult to thatfine show — I just mean that this was not meant to be aromanticized version of the Oval Office. We wanted a realistic andbusiness-like look to the office. Therefore, the lighting and many ofthe setups were directly inspired by the amazing White Housephotography taken during that era — extraordinary black-and-whitephotos from the archives that we researched.”