Cutting edge: How Final Cut craft control over Covid

copywritten for Sohonet

Final Cut is a creative editorial company with offices in London, New York and Los Angeles. For over twenty-five years it has collaborated with top directors and agencies on the most prominent commercials, feature films and music videos. A global pandemic wasn’t going to stop that. 

https://www.sohonet.com/our-resources/blogs/cutting-edge-how-final-cut-craft-control-over-covid/

One of Final Cut’s roster of sought-after editors is Ed Cheesman. He explains that when Covid first hit, the facility still had a large number of jobs in production that would need to be finished to the same high standards as before.  

“Editing is a craft that relies heavily on close collaboration,” says Cheesman. “So often an offline edit suite is fit to bursting with the sheer number of people contributing physically in a room together. Covid looked like it might put an end to this. Unlike production, editing was not forced to stop work, but we did need to offer an immediate response. How could we offer the same edit suite experience without actually having anyone in the suite? 

“At first, we began experimenting with video conferencing apps such as Zoom and Facetime, but their flaws were immediately apparent. We also worked alone sending QuickTimes for review. This led to delays in the post workflow. Sometimes feedback didn’t come for hours and clients didn’t get the experience they were used to. We wanted our clients to see what we saw, at the same time.” 

It was Final Cut engineer Antony Fetigan who introduced them to ClearView Flex. “ClearView enabled us to recreate the same ‘over the shoulder’ experience as before,” Cheeseman says. “We could edit in real-time with directors and agencies seeing exactly what we saw in frame for frame accurate pictures. “

“We were able to have everyone together without actually physically being together. All we had to do was ask our clients to download Google Chrome if they didn’t already have it. The benefit of everyone being able to quickly check edits, review takes and problem solve all in real-time was huge. It sped up the edit process. We could give our clients the confidence and reassurances that jobs in the post-production stage would still be carried out to the same high standards as pre-Covid and that collaborations could be carried out to the fullest.” 

Fortunately, during the lockdowns Cheesman was able to continue working alongside respected clients Dom & Nic (Outsider) all via ClearView. He explains that, once rushes were loaded, Cheeseman was immediately able to review them and begin to sketch ideas out on the timeline just as before in real-time. 

“We would open ClearView in the morning and have it run for the duration of the day. People would join and leave as they wished without ever experiencing lag or glitches.” 

Dom & Nic pick up the story; “Aside from the terrible global health problems, the pandemic also looked like it was going to create a lot of disruption to our working practice during lockdowns. We were relieved to eventually get back to work, but unsure how the editing process would work out. Ed introduced us to ClearView and from the first day of offline it worked seamlessly in combination with video conferencing.  

“It’s as close to being in the room as possible with a reliable, live shared editors screen for us to follow. We also used ClearView in post-production for grading and VFX work. Of course, we miss the social side of being in the same room altogether but the creative and practical side of the process with ClearView has worked without fault.”  

 

Behind the Scenes: Promising Young Woman

IBC

When Emerald Fennell took over from Phoebe Waller-Bridge as lead writer for the second season of Killing Eve, she said, “What I’m most interested in is how women win in a world where the deck is stacked against them.

https://www.ibc.org/trends/behind-the-scenes-promising-young-woman/7363.article

“I think the feminist statement maybe in [Season] 2 is if you are a woman and you are vulnerable, how do you exact power?” she continued. “I think it’s about how women survive, and what you lose and gain, when you have to survive something.”

There is more than a hint of Killing Eve’s Villanelle to Cassie, the central character played by Carey Mulligan in Fennell’s feature directorial debut Promising Young Woman.

It’s a wickedly funny #metoo era revenge movie which takes on masculine complacency and feminine complicity with a subversive wit not seen in the cinema since Heathers back in 1989. That’s evident from the first scene which counterpoints the macho idiocy of men dancing in a nightclub (in slow-motion) to the pop hit Boys by Charli XCX.

There’s a sinister undercurrent to a tale which ultimately stems from sexual assault and maybe why Fennel, who wrote and exec producers, selected Frédéric Thoraval to edit. He is most closely associated with director Pierre Morel with whom he has made the action thrillers District 13, Taken, Peppermint and The Gunman.

“Normally with a revenge movie you have a trauma at the very beginning and the revenge is motivated from that,” he tells IBC365. “In this case, you discover gradually that there was a trauma in Cassie’s past at the same time as you see her try to make other people aware of what happened and the impact of what they’ve done. What I loved about the script was that Emerald keeps a lot of question marks so you don’t know what to expect next.

Thoraval explains that Fennell’s script contained a mood board and a playlist of songs and that both were crucial to his process.

“The mood board contained a lot of visual elements that informed every department from cinematography to hair and make-up and costume,” he says. “There were specific visual elements like the suffocating feeling of Cassie’s parent’s house. There were references to Clueless and Twin Peaks and ideas about using candy colours to create the world of the film. The script I saw was always set in America but the location is not-defined to keep that fairy-tale quality.

“The second element was the soundtrack. Emerald had baked specific songs into the script as well as other music cues which were all part of the DNA of the movie. She was insistent that they couldn’t be changed. The film wouldn’t work if you took one away.”

All the songs are recorded by female artists and have a strong female perspective. They include several unreleased existing songs, four covers (one of The Weather Girls’ classic It’s Raining Men given suitably ironic treatment), and four originals composed for the film.

“The songs are intimately connected to conveying Cassie’s emotion at different times”, explains Thoraval.

“For instance, after she vents her anger at being insulted by a male driver and smashes the body of his car, we hear Liebestod from Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’. The camera circles around Cassie. It is glorious and operatic.”

The film slips between charming rom-com, thriller and macabre horror in a way that might seem problematic for an editor to judge but Thoraval says it flowed naturally.

“Emerald is playing with the genre tropes but that is all contained in the script. The connection between Cassie and the music is actually a brilliant way of guiding the audience through the rollercoaster of her emotions.”

He adds, “In more conventional films you might use the soundtrack to create a continuity when there are drastic changes to story. Here, Emerald’s script is pulling the rug from the audience all the time and the shift of music is part of that tonal shift.”

A scene in which Cassie is shown at her happiest, having just made up with boyfriend Brian (Bo Burnham), is the closest the film comes to breaking into a musical. In any other film the showstopper of the couple dancing and singing in the middle of a drug store to Paris Hilton’s Stars Are Blind would give the audience a big romantic hug. By this time in Promising Young Woman the viewer is prepared for the cliche to be short lived.

“Carey and Bo played the scene out with karaoke of the track. There couldn’t have been another song; this was the one Emerald wanted. This is the narrative peak of the movie because it has that emotional connection of a new love that is what everyone wants in a rom-com. There’s a montage which is very poppy and designed to show the audience that Cassie is blissfully happy with life.”

Thoraval worked with assistant editor Emily Freund to cut this scene. “The challenge for us was to find best way to lead into it. We have to show she is sad and alone in order to give more weight to the moment when the two of them kiss. She goes from sad to ecstatic and gives us the opportunity to create a more traditionally comic scene where they are dancing oblivious to everyone else. In order for the rest of the story to work we had to nail this moment when they are in love.”

Later, in the film and posing as a stripper, Cassie prepares to enter the lion’s den of a stag party, to an instrumental version of Britney Spears’ Toxic.

Fennell had contemplated using the Dirty Dancing theme (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life or a cover of The Walker Brothers’ No Regrets, for the finale but used a new track written for the film by singer-songwriter Fletcher.

“My revenge is sweeter than honey,” she sings on Last Laugh.

The ending was necessary for the character and for Fennell, says Thoraval. “There’s no other way for this to end if you follow the logic of Cassie’s situation. It may not be a classic Hollywood ending but it’s still a happy ending - just not the one you were expecting.”

Oscars Nominations- Inside the VFX category

IBC

The visual effects category of the 2021 Oscars is wide open, with last summer’s blockbuster Tenet the frontrunner. But, with none on the shortlist up for Best Picture - which is usually a guide to success - it is a tough category to call.

https://www.ibc.org/trends/oscars-nominations-inside-the-vfx-category/7373.article

UK-based facilities Dneg, Framestore and last year’s winner MPC Film are involved in four of the five nominations and arguably the fifth too. Toronto’s MR.X is nominated for its work on Love and Monsters but it was Technicolor stablemate Mill Film that was awarded the contract in 2019. The facilities merged under the MR.X brand last June.

Tenet

Espionage thriller Tenet required 300 VFX shots but maestro Christopher Nolan’s desire was to film as much in-camera as possible. “He wanted everything to feel grounded in the real world and not appear magic,” explains Dneg VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson.

Wrapping their heads around a story that works forwards and backwards often in the same scene was the first problem. “After the fourth script reading, I’d got to point where I thought I understood but trying to explain it to someone else was another matter,” Jackson says. “After a couple of months, we developed a muscle that we’d never used before - this ability to think forwards and backwards at the same time. What would it look like when an inverted event interacted with the forwards world?”

For example, when a car pulls away and wheel spins what does the kicked-up dust look like in reverse? Showing an inverted bullet hole is one thing but how long has the hole been there before the inverted bullet is fired?

Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who previously guided Nolan’s time-warped Interstellar, was consulted. “He liked the idea of there being a little area of disorder in front of something and area of order behind as an object moves through as if the forwards world is pushing back on the inverted entropy of the object. The ratio was 70% - 30%.”

To put that another way, Dneg hit upon the idea that an inverted event was swimming against the tide. “Pushing against the normal flow of time would push back on the event,” Jackson says. “An explosion would explode out and at the same time the world would force it to go backwards. For a bullet hitting a wall you would see the hole in the wall and see a tiny bit of debris falling out as if the hole is still forming before the inverted bullet hits it.”

Still confused? Imagine having to translate these concepts to screen. To Nolan’s brief, Dneg came up with many practical ways of filming “with a twist” that would look real but unusual. For example, they dragged cars behind a truck going backwards while its wheels spun forwards so the kicked-up dust span ‘the wrong way’ and then reversed it so the dust appeared sucked into the wheels.

Much of this came into play during the main car chase sequence filmed on location in Tallin. The audience sees the action once in a linear point of view and later the same event in reverse. Both directions had to make sense and appear as a logical progression.

“Half the cars and characters are inverted on the same road with people driving forwards, transfers of characters to and from inverted vehicles. It’s a really complex interaction.”

Dneg built a pre-viz model of the sequence in Maya including the physical positions of all cars and actors to allow Noland and DP Hoyte van Hoytema to scrub back and forwards to make sure it worked both ways.

The climactic battle required a ten-storey building to be simultaneously imploded and exploded. Dneg built two thirds scale miniatures and filmed them blowing them from matching camera angles, reversed one half of the footage and composited them together.

More subtle touches helped the audience understand what they are watching. Snow is constantly falling during the battle scene except that half the time when the scene is inverted the snow is ‘falling’ upwards.

The One and Only Ivan

Photorealistic creatures that are required to act was the task set for 500 artists at MPC Film’s studios in London, Montreal and Bangalore. Disney’s family film centres on silverback gorilla Ivan (voiced by Sam Rockwell) who lives in captivity with other animals, including an elephant (Angelina Jolie).

The production began with a traditional set and location shoot of live action actors including Bryan Cranston with puppeteers used to represent the key animated characters. This allowed the actors to have an eyeline to play their scenes and for DP Florian Ballhaus to frame shots.

Ivan’s physical movement was recorded on a motion capture stage using playback from the voice actors to govern the pacing of scenes. Director Thea Sharrock used a virtual reality headset to plan out her shots and best angles. CG artists used in-house software to simulate hair, skin and feathers.

The next stage was Virtual Production within the Unity games engine. The film makers used VR tools for dollies, camera heads, cranes and Steadicam to shoot the master scenes on a stage and view the pre-recorded animation clips from any perspective.

A large part of MPC’s 1055 shots involved photorealistic CG environments and digital set extensions. “A lot of care was taken to match the full CG shots to the cinematic look and feel of the live action sections of the movie,” explains production VFX supervisor Nick Davis. “Each of the camera lens’s distinctive features was replicated and subtleties like lens-breathing during focus shifts were included on full CG shots to give added realism.”

Ivan got special treatment. MPC’s Character Lab team researched gorilla bone structure, muscles, the nuances of movement and, most importantly, their eyes.

Davis adds, “Ivan’s eyes had to speak figuratively to the audience and his thoughts and emotions needed to be expressed through subtlety of expression.”

The Midnight Sky

In the George Clooney-directed The Midnight Sky a lonely scientist in the Arctic races to stop a group of astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.

Clooney admitted that his role as a stranded astronaut in Gravity (for which Framestore shared the Oscar for Best Visual Effects) helped him to conceive some of the space sequences, telling Vanity Fair, “once you’re in the antigravity kind of world…up isn’t up, and down isn’t down.”

Framestore were tasked by overall VFX supervisor Matt Kasmir to deliver nearly 500 shots (One of Us provided additional work). Notably they used ILM’s performance capture ‘Anyma’ to record actress Felicity Jones’ face and then transferred the facial performance to a body double. That solved the challenge created by Jones’ pregnancy as she was not unable to travel to the shoot location or hook up to a rig to simulate zero gravity.

“The head motion and eyelines were adjusted to work with specific actions and the position of the camera,” explains animation supervisor Max Solomon. “Considerable sensitivity had to be used though as it was surprising how quickly small adjustments made shots feel broken.”

To simulate weightlessness, cast members were shot suspended on wires, prevized by Clooney and cinematographer Martin Ruhe using the Nviz virtual camera system. Animation was done in Autodesk Maya, rendering with Freak (Framestore’s proprietary renderer) and compositing in Foundry Nuke.

The ‘Aether’ spacecraft, was designed by Jim Bissell, production designer of E.T., with the support of Framestore art director, Jonathan Opgenhaffen. “The buzz word was ‘topological optimisation’,” explains Opgenhaffen. “The ship’s components had to work practically. It’s beauty stems from its functionality and availability of existing and emerging technologies.” 

Iceland doubled as the polar cap but the actual amount of snow posed some problems. “Unfortunately, when they went to shoot the plates, a lot of the snow had melted so we had to replace it,” explains VFX supervisor Shawn Hillier. “We’d worked on snowy landscapes for the first season of His Dark Materials, but we really had the opportunity to push our snow shaders further to hold up in all of the close-up shots of the snow moving across the surface of the ground, with the light scattered through it.” 

Mulan

The epic sweep of director Niki Caro’s and cinematographer Mandy Walker’s vision for Disney’s Chinese fable required multiple VFX shops under the command of supervisor Sean Andrew Faden.

Weta Digital took care of the Imperial City, using a LiDAR scan from a backlot in China’s Hubei province to measure distances and depth for use in CGI. The film’s rooftop chase sequences called for paint and roto work to remove stunt rigs and any glimpses of modern China in the background.

Framestore’s 300 shots included the Phoenix - Mulan’s ‘spiritual guide’ - and the design of the long sleeves of the Witch (played by Gong Li) that transform into weapons.

“The key was to ensure the sleeves moved in a realistic way, giving the sense that they are alive while keeping the look of cloth,” says VFX supervisor Hubert Maston. “A significant chunk of time was spent in achieving that balance.”

A sequence in which Mulan embarks on a journey to battle the Witch, was filmed against blue screen on a partial set, providing a worldbuilding challenge with VFX backgrounds of large mountains, blocks of rocks, and a CG sky.

“It was quite a challenge to rebuild that volcanic environment filled with fully-simulated CG effects including steam and smoke and volume rendering for a realistic physical lighting,” adds Maston.

Sony Pictures Imageworks enhanced the third act battle sequence. From plates shot in a valley on New Zealand’s South Island, artists had to add a mountain that would be the site of an avalanche. To achieve this, they built a new system inside Houdini called Katyusha, for simulating snow and ice.

Faden also encouraged Imageworks to create what he called the ‘Pepsi Challenge,’ running slow-motion footage of Mulan on her horse Blackwind, riding through a canyon, side-by-side with the CG Blackwind. The CG Blackwind is seen in battlefield shots too chaotic and dangerous to be shot with a real horse.

For example, in a sequence in which Mulan races to catch up with her friend Chen when he is swept up in an avalanche, actress Yifei Liu was shot on a green mechanical buck which was replaced by a CG horse. Imageworks created a hair solver called Fyber that was less data-heavy so artists could integrate it into scenes faster.

Image Engine and Crafty Apes also worked on shots for this show.

Love and Monsters

Paramount’s monsterpocalypse Love and Monsters gave Technicolor’s Toronto-headquartered facility MR. X lots of scope to create several outlandish creatures. The trick was to give them personality.

“The performance goal was to create creatures with a sense of character, identity and individuality, born from their environment and circumstance,” the film’s Animation Supervisor, Matt Everitt told AusFilm.

“For example, we have a creature that is 15 meters in length, blind and rises from its hiding place beneath the earth. It feels its way around the world through its 7-metre-long face tentacles, has hundreds of legs and moves like a snake.”

MR. X (then Mill Film) partnered with the production on set in Queensland in 2019 working with VFX Supervisor Matt Sloan, to deliver 463 shots. This included lots of blood, slime, goo, dust, and debris to interact with. Plus, environment work.

For a monstrous crustacean called Hellcrab, the team used heavy machinery on the beach set to destroy real world props before integrating CG crab, extra props and sand.

“One of the first conversations with [director Michael Matthews] was the moment when our hero Joel realises that the Hell Crab is actually a wounded soul, in need of its freedom. It’s a moment of subtle performance; a dilation of the pupils, micro darts and contractions in the eyes showing fear and a need for connection, not anger. Finally, a moment of connection between the monster and the man.”

Oscars nominations: Inside the editing category

 IBC

The Oscars editing category features and eclectic mix of shortlisted films. IBC365 finds out how there were cut with insight from those tasked with editing the features. 

https://www.ibc.org/trends/oscars-nominations-inside-the-editing-category/7372.article

Promising Young Woman

Weaving in specific music tracks and cues as well as blending the tone of a story that shifts from rom-com to horror was the task of French editor Frédéric Thoraval.

He worked with best director nominee Emerald Fennell on the table turning #metoo thriller that takes pleasure in subverting rom-com and revenge movie genres.

“Emerald had baked specific songs into her script as well as other music cues which were all part of the DNA of the movie,” he tells IBC365.

“She was insistent that they couldn’t be changed. In more conventional films you might use the soundtrack to create a continuity when there are drastic changes to story. Here, Emerald’s script is pulling the rug from the audience all the time and the shift of music is part of that tonal shift.” 

A scene in which Cassie is shown at her happiest, having just made up with boyfriend Brian (Bo Burnham), is the closest the film comes to breaking into a musical miming to Paris Hilton’s ‘Stars Are Blind’ in a pharmacy.

“The challenge was to find best way to lead into it. We have to show [Cassie, played by Carey Mulligan] is sad and alone in order to give more weight to the moment when the two of them kiss,” says Thoraval.

“She goes from sad to ecstatic and gives us the opportunity to create a more traditionally comic scene where they are dancing oblivious to everyone else. In order for the rest of the story to work we had to nail this moment when they are in love.” 

The Trial of the Chicago 7
“Aaron’s scripts are very specific, very detailed with many of the intercuts and flashbacks or hand-offs to a different character written in,” explains Alan Baumgarten ACE who edited Sorkin’s politically charged period drama.

Baumgarten, who cut Sorkin’s Molly’s Game and was Oscar nominated for American Hustle, built the edit in layers with the stock footage the last to be mixed in.

“Aaron had only spelled out the use of historical material in the prologue. In three other places it found its way in organically. This included the riot scenes where the archive gives us an authenticity but it’s almost like a reference, a footnote. We’re not trying to match shots and say look how well we recreated the riot but really to embellish our footage and add another texture to the story.”

“The first material they shot was the location work in Chicago including the park riots, exteriors and Chicago streets but the courtroom is the heart of the drama and we use the riots in an illustrative way to show what happened as the case unfolds. The courtroom scenes were filmed next, in a church in Paterson, New Jersey. Sasha Baron Cohen’s stand-up speech (as Abbie Hoffman) to college students came in late but was an essential part of the story.”

The script was written 14 years ago and originally developed by Sorkin for Steven Spielberg before being put on the back burner.

“Aaron always made a point not to overdo the sixties period itself. When Trump was elected president Aaron and the producers decided it was time to bring it back and that it would be relevant. They didn’t know to what extent.”

When production began in October 2019, Netflix’s goal was to release before the presidential election. “The idea of civic duty and responsibility to vote would be in people’s minds, and all the drama that comes in the US when people vote for new political power.

“The killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor then the Capitol riots all happened after the film but we were mixing the film during the Black Lives Matter protests and civil unrest which was chilling and strange to wrap our heads around. We were putting the finishing touches to a film that had tear gas, protestors in the streets, police violence and a lot of out-of-control situations. The events caught up to the film.”

Sound of Metal
The last acclaimed feature about drumming, Whiplash, landed editor Tom Cross an Oscar. Sound of Metal is about the drastic hearing loss suffered by a heavy metal drummer which director Darius Marder and editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen (Beasts of No Nation) convey by trapping the audience within the character’s disorienting auditory point of view.

“Darius wanted it to be closed-caption from the start,” Nielsen says. He wanted it to be an experience where a deaf person — for the first time — would be able see this film, and people with hearing, would be excluded and see it as deaf people would normally see a normal film.”

In a scene in which Ruben (Oscar nominated Riz Ahmed) enters a deaf community “we have to see the world just the way he sees it. We are just completely not sure what’s going on up to the midpoint of the film.”

To achieve this, the Danish-born editor worked with the Oscar nominated sound design team led by Nicolas Becker. “It was super interesting to be able to use the sound as a storytelling tool,” he explained.

“The ability to put the audience inside of Ruben’s head and to balance how much information we give.  We got all the ambience sounds recorded for the movie, so we didn’t have to use library SFX in the edit process. Nicolas also gave us an audio program so we could create the sounds for the cochlear implants. This gave the possibility to find the right balance, when to be in Ruben’s perspective.”

Nielsen played with filters to create the tinnitus sound. Muffled sounds, unintelligible conversations and silences dominate rather than using a manipulative score.

“I could completely understand losing my sense of hearing,” says Nielsen, who reveals that he is also a long-time drummer with a drum kit in his edit room.

Nomadland
Nomadland rediscovers a community of Americans who have been airbrushed off the map and almost off the grid. Neither drama nor documentary nor docu-drama, filmmaker Chloé Zhao has almost crafted a new genre with her Best Picture front runner. It’s not her first attempt, with previous indie films like The Rider similarly fusing reality with a degree of artifice to capture the truth of a subject.

“I am not a documentary maker,” Zhao says of her filmmaking philosophy. “I don’t know how to do that. But I think audiences want authenticity and I find that having authenticity in fictional filmmaking really helps to keep their attention.” 

She directs from her own script that evolved during the course of filming to incorporate the real personalities which she and [best actress nominee] Frances McDormand met on the road.

“Structurally and in terms of character arc the script didn’t alter from conception to execution,” she says. “A lot of things happened spontaneously or things I wanted to happen, didn’t, just because of the nature of making a film this way. I would watch dailies every night and I would write every night. I don’t stop writing the screenplay.”

Conventionally, directors will bounce feedback about the shoot’s progress with their editor. In her three features to date, Zhao has preferred to be her own editor.

“I’ve always edited the first cut of my films and after the first cut I bring on an editor and we work on two Avid stations exchanging ideas, refining the material. On from my first film [Songs My Brother Taught Me] I learned that when you have a large cast of characters you have to have a very structured script and follow it religiously. I learned from The Rider how to focus on one character arc in a situation where the world around that character might be unpredictable.”

“Sometimes things happen on set and I instinctively make decisions. I can’t articulate why but it’s actually because I am subconsciously editing in my head. If I don’t work that through myself in the first cut, then I feel that something gets lost. As we entered post on Nomadland the quarantine happened so I was like – let’s just do it!”

Growing up in Beijing, Zhao’s early influences were Japanese graphic novels. She named her own van in which she lived on the road while making Nomadland, ‘Akira’, after the Manga classic. 

“If you think about it, Manga is storytelling in edited storyboards,” she tells IBC365. “In Manga the storytelling is quite extreme at times in the way the story jumps from one image to the next. So, at a very young age that is how I see story.”  

Minari

Nominated six times including Best Film and Director, IBC365 also looks at the editing of Minari.

Named for a peppery Korean herb, Minari is a tale of immigrants making a go at their own American Dream in a candid and personal film drawing on director Lee Isaac Chung’s experiences. Editor Harry Yoon ACE arrived in the US aged five with his parents who ran a small business in Northern California.

“Being strangers in a strange land and being brought up together in a tight knit family as a result of having to navigate all those challenges were things I identified with,” he tells CinemaEditor.

Beginning at script stage through editorial, much of Yoon’s work was honing the vignettes of family life to find the best way of telling the story. Disconcertingly, and refreshingly, this included removing scenes depicting prejudice and racism, “because they started to feel unnecessary in terms of the truth of this story,” he says.

“It was trial and error of removing certain scenes or sequences. Sometimes the most important feedback isn’t what anyone says but about how they feel in the room. What was lovely, was the more we took away, the more that happy accidents happened.”

The heart of the film is the unlikely friendship that blossoms between an unruly seven-year-old and his equally defiant, Korea grandma.

“This is the kind of story I wanted to help tell since I became a filmmaker,” he says. “You can get a little cynical and wonder if this kind of story will ever be commercially viable or compelling to a broader audience. The screening that’s most important to me is when I can finally share it with parents. I feel like the film helps [Asian Americans] say to our parents that we recognise you on screen.”

The Father
Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Coleman are Oscar nominated for their roles in writer/director Florian Zellar’s adaptation of his own play about an elderly man succumbing to dementia. We experience the world through Hopkins’ character (also called Anthony) as a confusion of time and place, a frustration of memory loss, where nothing quite adds up.

“When I read the script, I had a horror movie in my head,” says editor Yorgos Lamprinos.

“That was my approach, and where we needed to put the audience.”

Lamprinos explains that for each scene he started out with where Anthony was, and then used footage to subtly shift the point of the view, or repeat a section of dialogue. Peter Francis’ production design also helped since the same items are shown but with discreet changes: a white bag instead of a blue one, different tiles in the kitchen.

“Also, it’s a question of pace—which scenes you need to drag a little bit, to get another emotion out of them, which scenes need to be faster, so the spectator stays in the same emotion. Mostly, it was about how we used the shots of the flat, and the evolution of the space. That was the real challenge in the edit room.

There are films that are structured in a non-linear fashion that you can put together, and they become linear. Pulp Fiction, for example. This film’s puzzle cannot be reconstructed.

“That’s the whole point of it, because Anthony’s head works that way. He can never reassemble things. So, even though the film’s structure goes in loops, it’s also a loop that will never work. That was Florian’s intention from the very beginning, and one that I also found a brilliant choice.”

 

Oscars nominations: Inside the cinematography category

IBC

There’s an eclectic mix of films nominated for cinematography with previously nominated DPs Dariusz Wolski and Phedon Papamichael mixing with established DP Sean Bobbitt, rising star Erik Messerschmidt and young British DP Joshua James Richards, making his third feature. Four of the five selected films were shot on Arri with one (Mank) shot on Red. None of these contenders has won Oscar before.

https://www.ibc.org/trends/oscars-nominations-inside-the-cinematography-category/7364.article

News of the World

The proxy relationship between Tom Hanks’ war veteran and an orphaned girl is the heart of Paul Greengrass’ western. It’s an engrossing horseback ride that asks for a delicate touch and one that you might not immediately associate with the cinematographer of blockbusters Crimson Tide, Alien: Covenant, or Pirates of the Caribbean.

The director’s debut collaboration with Dariusz Wolski ASC is inspired. “We needed to find the balance between being stylish and true to the [1870s] period yet contemporary,” says Wolski who shot handheld and occasional Steadicam using Alexa Mini LFs and Angénieux zooms.

To evoke the hardship of life lived in the saddle the film is shot using mostly natural light. Interiors and exteriors of homesteads and the dark and dirty but bustling outpost towns are often lit with hurricane gas lamps.

One startling shot silhouettes a church against a darkening and pink sunset. “We were all set for a night shoot and had a big artificial moon light,” Wolski recalls. “As we were getting ready, I thought the cloud looked so beautiful it would be foolish not to turn the camera on. My motto is first roll and then think how you are going to use it.”

He says he is proud of the film’s depiction of Native Americans. “The first time you can barely see them and the next is like this exodus in the background. Nobody is trying to speak for them with some accent or broken English. If there was a movie just about them it would be a different story.”

 

The Trial of the Chicago 7

With writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s focus on the minutia of dialogue it fell to DP Phedon Papamichael ASC to deliver much of the necessary coverage to editor Alan Baumgarten ACE.

“Aaron’s writing is very nonlinear,” Papamichael told IBC.

“Not just jumping forward or back in time but constantly criss-crossing these timelines.”

The actual trial of the Chicago 7 took place over six months in 1969 and involved 200 witnesses. In telling what is essentially a legal drama, the trick was to find ways of making the story cinematic.

“With Aaron it’s all about the word and the structure of this overlapping puzzle that he sees in his head,” says Papamichael who shot with an ARRI Alexa LF and Mini LF. “But I know we need reactions of the jury and of the prosecutor to build the scene. He doesn’t even look at the screen of the monitor on set. He literally closes his eyes and just listens to it. You have to find a way to shoot so it’s not just two hours of talking heads in a courtroom.”

The large ensemble cast assembled for Chicago 7 also proved a handful. “I ended up in charge of blocking the movie and assigning who gets what shots because Aaron didn’t really want to talk to them about that. So, it’s like ‘don’t I get a close up?’ and ‘isn’t this scene about me?’ – and I was very much caught in the middle. Which is fun… I love working with actors, but there’s lots of strong individual personalities on this one.”

Nomadland

Director Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards’ intimate story of self-discovery has won plaudits for its naturalistic and ego-free approach. Their film about a group of drifters on the margins of American society blends actors Frances McDormand and David Straitharn among real life nomads transiting between RV camps and low-paid jobs in the mid-west.

It’s an improvisational style honed over two previous feature collaborations Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider which were both filmed with a cast of non-actors and a limited budget.

“The nomads need to know me and they need to feel safe,” Richards told IBC.

“I’m not going to be up there on a hill with a telephoto lens. We’re trying to tell this story from the inside out, very much grounded in Fern’s [McDormand] point of view.”

He shot handheld on Alexa Mini using portrait photographers like William Eggleston as tonal reference, always in available light and typically at the end of the day to catch magic hour.

Little visual details inform us about the characters as much as anything they do or say. “Early on we show how Fern decorates her van,” says Zhao. “What she chooses to bring with her says so much about who she is because space is so limited. It’s the art of editing down.”

The film doesn’t overtly politicise the nomad’s situation. Rather, it shows them making a positive life choice to regain a sense of freedom and community.

Zhao says, “It’s a conscious decision to stay somewhat neutral because I rather would have one person who disagrees with my politics watch my film and maybe just change how they feel a little bit than a whole room full of people who already agree giving me a standing ovation,”

Richards grew up in Cornwall and met Zhao at NYC Film Academy. “She was the kind of person I hoped to meet … from a different part of the world, who was making a film in the heartlands of America. I was a long way from Penzance.”

It’s odd to think that Mank is Erik Messerschmidt’s first feature, so fastidious is the design for David Fincher’s homage to Hollywood’s heyday. He’d worked with Fincher before, gaining ASC recognition after filming series 2 of Mindhunter, a show from which he transferred to Mank a similar 8K HDR workflow.

The most obvious creative choice was to shoot black and white using the Red Helium camera. The greater light sensitivity of the monochrome sensor was helpful in meeting the intent to shoot large parts of the movie in keeping with the techniques cinematography legend Gregg Toland helped pioneer for Citizen Kane.

“My biggest fear was that I’d get drawn in by the desire to be dramatic and aggressive with light,” Messerschmidt reveals. “If a scene had some venetian blinds it was so tempting to put a light behind them. In Mank, we are emulating and paying respect to the cinema of the 1930s and ‘40s but we don’t want it to become a pastiche.”

Less obvious are the digital simulations of ‘gate weave’, a wobble caused when negative passed through the sprockets of a projector. This was a subtle nod to the dissolves and title cards of the period.

He also added flare enhancement and distortion around certain highlights which where a natural artefact of circular halation lenses.

“That was something David really wanted to bring out. So, we worked out a way of keying the blacks to a certain level and added a bit of blur. We’re kind of art directing each frame.”

Messerschmidt gave himself a further challenge by shooting day for night for a scene set at Heart’s mansion and featuring Mank and Hearst’s girlfriend Marion Davis and occasional backgrounds of Heart’s zoo.

“We spent a lot of time in prep figuring out where the actors would be in relation to the sun. I remember waking up those mornings praying there would be sun. The scene wouldn’t work if it were overcast, but we were really fortunate mother nature cooperated.”

 

Judas and the Black Messiah

The events leading up to Black ‘Messiah’ Fred Hampton’s assassination are harnessed to the story of William O’Neal, a petty criminal, FBI informant and ‘Judas’, in this powerful biopic lensed by Sean Bobbitt BSC.

He used the wide screen format of the Arri Alexa LF to frame strong group compositions and also to isolate characters at different times.

“With wide frame you can get fantastic compositions to comfortably fit seven or eight people in the frame,” he says. “The other advantage is that you get a great sense of scale and at the same time the ability to create remarkable intimacy.”

The most technically challenging sequence was the climactic police raid. “An overhead shot on a motion control arm goes from room to room to room,” he explains.

“To get something like that is expensive so a lot of time and effort went into designing the sequence so that we made the most of the time on set. Since this was also the culmination of the film it needed to have more power to it and horror as well.”

The Texan has a strong British heritage (he went to school here and was based in London for a decade in the eighties as freelance war cameraman. He lives in a house boat near Bristol when in the country). Remarkably this is his first Oscar nomination despite acclaimed work for Steve McQueen notably on 12 Years A Slave.

 

Reinventing Live Sports Production — Capture, Cloud, Everything

NAB Amplify

Latency is the big bugbear of live production and is certainly hampering migration to the cloud but perhaps the industry is looking at the problem from the wrong end of the lens. What if latency were embraced and you could perform realtime control in the cloud?

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/reinventing-live-sports-production/

The result would transform live sport into the genuine immersive interactive experience that producers believe it can be. What’s more, the bare bones of the technology to achieve it are already here.

First it requires the industry to shed its allegiance to working with uncompressed media and its fetish for no latency.

“Once we stop looking at moving current production technologies and workflows to the cloud and instead ask how we reinvent live production it totally transforms how we cover live events,” argues Peter Wharton, Director, Corporate Strategy, TAG Video Systems. “If we continue to bring the excess baggage of latency to cloud we bring with us the same workflows which does not leverage what the cloud can do.”

NAB Amplify lays out the case for reinvent linear media workflows in the cloud.

 

Start from scratch

 

Efforts to migrate traditional production workflows to the cloud rely on fundamentally the same technology, familiar features sets and control surfaces unchanged for half a century.

 

Mindsets have been replicated too. Where there were segregated functions (between camera shading and switching, for example) in an OB so the same processes are being repeated in the move to IP. This approach is coming up short in the next step to cloud.

 

“We’ve had to adapt from ST 2110 to something it wasn’t designed for,” says Wharton. “2110 is not for the cloud. 2110 exists because we want to maintain the latency of the SDI world at the expense of cost and bandwidth.”

Solutions which don’t work with uncompressed but retain ST 2110’s precision timing are being advocated. Top of the pile is JPEG XS which exhibits subframe latency on the production side while reducing bandwidth to make live over IP more economical over long haul transport.

Another solution with potential is Cloud Digital Interface, developed by AWS and being proposed to standards bodies. CDI allows uncompressed video to flow through the AWS Cloud to help guarantee delivery at the other end without introducing latency (as low as 8 milliseconds).

The issue, as far as Wharton sees it, is that these solutions continue to translate traditional SDI workflows.

“Live production in the cloud doesn’t work unless you build it end to end,” he says. “That’s important because as OTT becomes the dominant force for distribution the whole media ecosystem needs to be in the cloud. You need to co-locate production and distribution systems.”

“The problem is that we’re always battling latency.  For that reason, we can’t move the cameras and the camera-ops to the cloud.”

Volumetric camera, Virtualized game

But what if you could? Could the playing field be virtualized just like every other part of the live production machine?

Wharton’s answer is volumetric camera arrays. In this model, stadia are ringed by dozens of cameras on the mezzanine level with all feeds being home run to the cloud. The feeds would be processed to create a point cloud array from which the director can create slice any angle and single view they wanted.

The volumetric camera ops would be sitting in a central production control room not at the venue. Far fewer camera ops are needed – maybe 4-5 as opposed to 32 for a standard English Premier League match; while an infinite number of camera positions are possible.

The multi-camera arrays could be 4K UHD, perhaps linked with Lidar, a time-of-flight sensing technology that determines the distance between camera and object or player on the field.

The shots themselves are synthesized in production similar to the eSports observer camera model. The operators would be controlling a virtual camera to shoot the game.

What’s more, production can use the 4-5 seconds of raw processing time to see the event slightly ahead of time and anticipate shots. Virtual jib cams, sky cams and POV cams could all be driven by AI to pre-program camera moves.

Zero latency

Most importantly, camera control is now at ‘zero latency’ compared to the virtual representation of the game in the cloud.

“The camera shot is directed at the switcher time not the event time,” says Wharton. “Event to cloud latency is now irrelevant because it is the virtual point cloud we are shooting against. With cameras in the cloud the only latency you’d have to manage – the only latency a director will worry about – is between cloud and operators [the virtual camera].

Pressed on this, Wharton says no distribution model – cable, satellite or OTT – is going to beat someone in a stadium using a cellphone to place bets on the game in front of them.

“You’re looking at 5-10 seconds of latency minimum in almost every distribution model compared to the half second on your phone. The delay we’re talking about [with volumetric production] is two seconds on distribution. If it is any more than that you throw more compute power at it.”

Moves you can only imagine

The volumetric model trades the concept of latency in order to create a far more immersive coverage of a game.

 

“By recreating the entire playing field using volumetric cameras as a point cloud with an eSport observe camera I could position, pan, control and move any way I want. If you think about the millennial audience who are used to the kind of engaging involvement in an eSports game then the traditional linear sports presentation feels two dimensional compared to the far more immersive perspective of that game that could be created.

 

“From the volumetric camera array operators can interpolate any camera position you want. I can start with the camera behind a player as they kick the ball and follow the ball’s trajectory before getting right behind the goalkeeper as they save it. You can do camera moves you’d never attempt now.”

For instance, the camera could move from one side of the stadium to the other without making a jump cut which would otherwise confuse viewers.

What’s the cost?

It all sounds far-fetched since it would still need massive amounts of computer power. Wharton admits to being no cloud computing expert but says he’s done the math.

He estimates that approximately 8000 cores are needed to run 32 UHD cameras, to create the point cloud with sufficient resolution to allow you to zoom in without losing detail.

That’s tens of millions of dollars of servers – if you were to buy them. Renting is another matter.

An entire server of 96 cores can be rented in Amazon for $7.8 an hour (or $0.0815 per core per hour). Plus, it’s all OPEX, not CAPEX.

“Based on the most expensive compute with the most expensive memory and GPUs instances I can rent 8000 cores for $640 an hour. That’s throw away money in live production. It’s less than the travel and entertainment costs for a single camera person.

“While we don’t care about compression latency as long as the images can be synchronized, compression artifacts could stress the computation of the point cloud rendering the same way noise impacts compression. So fairly low compression ratios with very high image fidelity is probably needed. I think this means JPEG-XS with somewhere between 4-8x compression ratios today.”

All this requires stadia to be installed with 100 Gbps ethernet/fibre. Taking Wharton’s model again: 32 UHD cameras x 12Gbps native data rate = 384 Gbps raw data rate. 5:1 compression reduces that to 77 Gbps data rate. Hence the need for 100 Gbps links.

 “Most professional stadiums in the US today already have 100 Gbps Internet and dark fibre connections to the outside world,” he says. “There’s no cost for ingest into the cloud, so this is not a factor in the economic analysis.”

He also points out that $640 is list price. “We’ve had this idea for years and wondered how it could be done. Now the question for the industry is who is going to develop the point cloud compute engine and software?”

 

Intel and Canon

The scenario goes further to giving fans at home the ability to run a personal observer camera on their gaming consoles “for pennies an hour because the compute costs are so low for each camera output [estimated at 1-2 cores per stream].”

Wharton adds, “You could have a 360-game in your own headset and be walking around the field of play – live.”

Clues to how all this will look are already being demonstrated by Intel and Canon. Their respective True View and Free Viewpoint multi-cam arrays are installed at several NFL and EPL stadia including Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta and Anfield, home of Liverpool FC.

The key difference is that these applications are not realtime.

“Intel use a fairly modest amount of compute power in racks on-prem. The recordings are used for replay not realtime because they have limited computer power. They’re basically throwing 300 cores not 8000 cores at it.”

The volumetric camera model might work for stadium sports but it’s harder (though not impossible) to see how the larger and topographically challenging connectivity of a F1 circuit or golf course would follow suit.

“Two years ago, live was the last remaining step in the holy grail for making cloud work for media ecosystems,” Wharton says. “Today we’re at the early stages of making that work and in two years it will be more than normal.

“US TV groups are already looking at how to migrate their live production control rooms to the cloud whereas until recently they’d be kicked out for even contemplating the idea.”

 

ends

 

 

 

Cloud Native Production: The Next Level of Carbon Reduction

Streaming Media

Are broadcasters and major content producers going far enough, fast enough, to reduce their impact on climate change? A new report "Video Shouldn’t Cost The Earth" suggests not.

https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/Cloud-Native-Production-The-Next-Level-of-Carbon-Reduction--145693.aspx

While many media organizations are starting to use the cloud for editing and post-production workflows—in part because of its merits to sustainability—they can go further by using fully cloud-native solutions.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from browser-based editing system developer Blackbird. In particular, the report highlights the limitations of hybrid solutions which are not designed to work natively in the cloud. Hybrid is the reports terms for technology which remains on-prem even if the applications are accessed remotely.

"While they require less physical infrastructure, most standard cloud-based solutions need extra hardware to connect to the system and output from it," the report states. "They also use hidden virtual infrastructure within the cloud, which consumes significant amounts of energy."

To support this, Blackbird commissioned environmental consultancy Green Element to compare the carbon emissions of on-premise and cloud hybrid workflows versus a cloud native one.

As expected, the on-prem model, which includes travel to a venue and on-site production rigs, produces much higher emissions than either of the cloud workflows—ten times more than a cloud-native solution in one scenario.

The report also suggests a significant gap between the two remote production models. Emissions from the cloud native solution are less than half that of the cloud hybrid model in a one-day live event scenario. This gap increases dramatically over time so that during production of a 14-day live event, the hybrid solution produces six times more carbon than one able to work using low power (or lower bandwidth).

Though the report doesn't name them, the findings of this report seem to condemn Avid and Adobe (combined with PCoIP solutions like Teradici) remote editing systems, while giving a big tick to Blackbird.

The company believes its solution can offer "significant energy and emission savings" when compared to most rival cloud-based video production platforms.

Green credentials are rising up the agenda when it comes to selecting one partner or product solution over another and Blackbird is clearly confident in sticking its colors to the mast.

The carbon cost calculations for video production are stark. Albert, the sustainability arm of BAFTA, estimates that every hour of TV produced results in the equivalent of 9.2 tonnes of CO2. And each tonne of carbon dioxide results in the loss of 3m2 of sea ice.

Watching online video alone generates 300m tonnes of CO2 a year, equivalent to 1% of total global emissions, according to the BBC.

The report says the biggest share of carbon emissions come from the energy needed to power streaming and the devices used to view content, as well as the delivery networks and data centres that support streaming.

Awareness of the problem is rising and the industry is beginning to act. Google has committed to go entirely carbon-free by 2030, ensuring that its data centres are powered by renewable energy. Sky aims to achieve net carbon neutrality in all of its TV production activity by 2030. Content providers such as global sports giant IMG have made similar statements of intent.

Among VOD platforms, Amazon has committed to be net carbon zero by 2040 and Netflix is matching its energy consumption with renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets.