RED Digital Cinema
Killing Time
Time and memory are rendered with precision film emulation and pioneering VFX camera work by Rodrigo Prieto ASC, AMC for Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed saga of crime and punishment
Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic The Irishman is, at heart, a meditation on the passage of time and in particular the memory of events as recalled by Frank Sheeran, a mob hitman played by Robert De Niro.
Director of photography Rodrigo Prieto ASC, AMC, (Brokeback Mountain, Silence) faced two challenges in translating this idea to screen. He had to find a way of visually delineating the different decades of the story’s timespan and simultaneously grapple with the visual effects required to transform the appearance of the principal actors.
“We tried hard to tell the story from Sheeran’s perspective and to give the audience a feeling of their own memories and lives,” Prieto explains. “Having read the script and the book it felt to me that representing the passage of time would be more appropriate for the texture of motion picture film negative. Scorsese referenced the patina of home movies but he specifically didn’t want it to look like Super 8 or 16mm so that started the whole process of researching how to achieve a feeling of memory.”
At the same time, Prieto began discussions with the picture’s VFX Supervisor, Pablo Helman of ILM, about the process of digitally de-aging actors including De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.
The director’s brief was to find a way of photographing the actor’s performance without any of the conventional invasive motion capture techniques such as facial tracking markers, head-mounted cameras or repeat performances in a controlled environment.
“The actors’ performance had to be captured on the set while they were interacting with each other and under the on-set lighting,” Prieto says.
Helman showed the director and his DP a proof of concept of ILM’s proposed solution in which a scene from Scorese’s Goodfellas was re-enacted by 74-year old De Niro, de-aged to appear in his mid-40s.
“The concept worked extraordinarily well but required synchronising the shutters of the main camera with two witness cameras,” Prieto explained. “Synching the shutter is really difficult to achieve with film negative in addition to which the witness cams needed to move in unison with the main camera. They needed to function as essentially the same camera head. Both of these impediments precluded shooting on film.”
The straightforward route would have been to shoot entirely on digital and add grain to achieve the desired look but Prieto felt strongly that only negative would deliver the echoes of memory the story demanded.
“The whole last section of the story didn’t need any de-aging – the opposite in fact,” he says. “We were to use make-up and prosthetics to make the actors appear older. I knew I wanted to retain the characteristics of film and add extra grain to that section and I didn’t think that could be achieved in post.”
Concluding that they would shoot digital for the VFX scenes and 35mm for the other half of the film, it became extremely important to ensure a seamless transition between the two.
“It couldn’t fall short,” he stresses. “There had to be continuity of texture.”
Prieto’s research had led him to emulate classic still photography from the 1950s and 1960s, an idea which Scorsese liked and which Prieto further explored with color scientists Philippe Panzini at Codex and Matt Tomlinson at Harbor Picture Co. They also tracked down the Kodak chemists who had made the original emulsions for Kodachrome and Ektachrome.
“We went in deep to figure out how different colors were achieved and how they reacted and shifted once the image was projected or printed. Based on that we created a series of LUTs which Matt applied to the film negative. This was the first step to defining the look for the movie.”
The next step was finding a digital camera to match the LUTs. Prieto tested a couple of different systems by photographing the same set up on his film choices (Kodak 500T 5219 for night time and 250D 5207 for daytime sequences) and on digital.
“I asked the art department to provide panels painted with the production’s colours, some with wallpaper and others with cloth. I also shot stand-ins and then the actors in costume all in exactly the same way, from the same angles, and same lighting and applied the LUT. It was the RED Helium that best tracked the LUT and gave me the same color reproduction for film and digital capture that I needed.”
With LUTs emulating Kodachrome and Ektachrome for the 1950s and 1960s, Prieto deployed a bleach bypass process called ENR for the early 1970s. The result, doubled down for the later period of the story, offered less color saturation and more contrast.
“I wanted to create a look later in the movie which was the opposite of the colour saturated Kodachrome. In essence, as the narrative arc of the movie changes, we drain the color and this is emphasized even more once Jimmy Hoffa, Sheeran’s friend, is killed.”
All the LUTs were applied for dailies as well as the final DI for film negative shots and the RED Helium.
Meanwhile the VFX rig was being finessed in a series of trial and error. Witness cameras were mounted either side of the RED Helium director’s camera (fitted with Cooke Panchro and Zeiss high speed lenses) to provide stereo views of the actor’s face. Each witness cam was modified by having its Infrared (IR) filter removed so that the sensor only recorded IR light. A ring of LEDs around the lens also threw infrared light onto the actors’ faces to neutralize unintended shadows (while remaining invisible to the production camera and the actors).
Prieto explains, “The process provided a full set of data of every frame of each performance and all of the on-set lighting and camera positions that would be needed in post.”
After every take they photographed a mirrored sphere, a grey sphere and colour chart and then a Lidar scanner positioned where the actor’s face would have been. They captured the environment in 360-degrees with bracketed-exposure for High Dynamic Range and fed the data plus the IR information into ILM’s VFX pipeline.
“ILM were able to replicate the on-set illumination in their computers with incredible accuracy,” Prieto recalls. “In the DI we could toggle between the digital image and the final image and the lighting was exact. That was remarkable.”
The rig itself had to be sufficiently lightweight be able to be carried on any kind of rig, crane or head that Prieto or Scorsese wanted. There could be no restrictions. This included the ability to remove one of the witness cameras and fit it to the top of the RED if the shot dictated, for example, shooting up against a column. Even then, the three-camera rig proved too heavy for Steadicam so this necessitated a two-camera version with the second witness cam positioned independently to complete the triangulation of the actor in 3D space. They also ensured that the width of the rig could pass through standard size doorframes.
“Since Scorsese likes to shoot dialogue scenes with two and sometimes three cameras simultaneously this gave us the challenge of positioning six or sometimes nine camera bodies so that they wouldn’t be in shot.”
For all the film emulation techniques and VFX breakthroughs, The Irishman is a masterwork of controlled storytelling.
“Everything was designed to facilitate the artistic content and to shoot the movie with the freedom to allow for any artistic intention from Scorsese’s side or my side,” Prieto says. “The camera language was planned to put the audience into Frank Sheeran’s perspective.
“He’s a methodological man. For him, killing is a job. It’s about efficiency, so the camera behaves that way. We avoid any special camera moves, instead composing simple frontal frames and plain pans following, for instance, a car in perfect profile. Sometimes the camera is static. As Scorsese said, Sheeran’s character moves like clockwork. We even retrace the same angle and type of shot at different parts of the movie.
For Prieto, who is BAFTA, ASC and Academy Award nominated for his work on The Irishman, the achievement was immensely satisfying.
“I had to call on everything I’ve learned and all my experience. It was a like facing a final exam every day.”
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