copy written for Sohonet
Influential documentarian Ken Burns has made many
landmark films in his four-decade career including the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn
Bridge, The American Civil War and The Vietnam War.
His latest work is Hemingway, a three-part, six hour series made
for PBS with producer-director Lynn Novick, exploring the life and work of the
legendary writer.
Like all of Burns’ work it is produced by Florentine
Films, the production company he set up in Walpole, New Hampshire with fellow
filmmakers Elaine Mayes, Lawrence Hott and Roger Sherman. Each member works
independently, but releases content under the shared banner of Florentine
Films.
“We’ll never run out of stories,” says Daniel White,
post-production supervisor, Florentine Films. “We’ll have half a dozen in the
hopper at various stages of production. I’ll be leapfrogging from film to film
to film. There’s always something going on.”
In February 2020, White was working on a restoration of
Burns’ marathon 1994 documentary Baseball when Covid started
to shut things down.
“We had to very quickly figure out a solution to be able to
continue coloring remotely with Technicolor PostWorks, New York. Right away we
tested ClearView but it just wasn’t quite ready for what we needed. Within a
month Sohonet had ramped it up including with 5.1 audio and we tested it
again.”
White sent LG C9 55-inch monitors to PostWorks for it to
calibrate to professional standard. The facility shipped them to the homes of
Florentine’s post team who, in the meantime, had equipped themselves with the
latest version of Apple TV and upgraded to the fastest local internet speeds.
“With ClearView, everyone who works at Florentine Films was
working remotely on the project,” White says. “Suddenly, we were able to stream
directly from the post house to do color and titling sessions. We were pretty
impressed at being able to do it remotely. Usually, we’d send our editors and
producers in and out of the edit facility to sit with the online editor. The
travel would be expensive and disruptive to our families.”
We were streaming remotely and doing color grades,” says
White. “It looked terrific and worked smoothly – essentially like a Netflix
stream.”
While White was in his basement office in Keene, New
Hampshire, colorist Jack Lewars was at home in Brooklyn. “We were
streaming remotely and doing color grades,” says White. “It looked terrific and
worked smoothly – essentially like a Netflix stream.”
A similar workflow applied to the show’s sound mix.
Re-recording mixer Joshua Berger had a ClearView box at his stage at Harbor
Picture Company in Manhattan streamed to Hemingway’s sound editors who
were remote at home.
“We had one of our dialogue editors in Ithaca, New York
listening to streams played out of Harbor in Manhattan. When we did our mix
playbacks we had picture and sound coming through in sync and at cinematic
quality via ClearView Flex. We pay a lot of attention to detail on both the
picture and sound side and being able to accomplish all of this hundreds of
miles away from our mixer and colorist was remarkable.”
The pandemic made access to the archive of Hemingway’s
manuscripts, correspondence, scrapbooks and photographs housed at the John F.
Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston a little tricky. As a result, some of
this material requiring a 4K scan came in at the last minute but still the
project finished on time and on budget.
“ClearView Flex improved by leap and bounds during the
crisis. More facilities started using it. Without it, I’m not sure where we’d
be.”
“ClearView Flex improved by leap and bounds during the
crisis. More facilities started using it. Without it, I’m not sure where we’d
be.”
White has already moved onto other Burns’ projects on
subjects as diverse as Muhammad Ali, the American Buffalo and the holocaust.
Even as the pandemic eases the most immediate concerns of working in a
facility, remote solutions have opened up a flexible work environment that
won’t be reversed.
“Now that we have these tools in the future we won’t need to
travel as much,” says White. “If we’re setting looks it would be nice to sit in
the room with your colorist directly or to point to something on a screen to
your online editor. Many people will want to do their final review in the
facility too. But for two thirds of the process, including titles or graphics
sessions, you can do it from the comfort of your couch.
The regular workflow for White and the production team is to
have Zoom open on one screen to chat and while sound and picture is streamed
from the sound house or finishing facility.
“I can tell the online editor at PostWorks to ‘pause right
there’ or ‘can you back up 5 seconds’ or ‘let’s look at that graphic again’. I
can ask the colorist to darken this or that area or make that parchment paper a
little bit warmer.
“By contrast, for all of us to schedule something where we all
had to be in Manhattan at the same time and figure out hotels and travel and
food took a lot of time and expense.
“Just being able to text each other ‘let’s do a Zoom at 11am
tomorrow’ and set up a ClearView session very quickly has more than paid for itself
in just one person’s travel costs alone.”
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