Editing Frank Miller's Sin City - Part 1
FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY represents a new kind of film in digital filmmaking. This article describes in practical terms what the 4:4:4 HD filmmaking revolution is about and the workflow that filmmakers use to create digital films of striking image quality.
by Robin.Rowe@MovieEditor.com
Contents
- The New Digital Pipeline
- Understanding DI Technology
Images Courtesy of Warner Bros.
4:4:4 RGB camera shot
Color key, B&W, and color shift
Original Frank Miller graphic
The New Digital Pipeline
For many years the state-of-the-art in filmmaking has been to shoot 35mm film, scan the film into digital intermediate format (typically DPX), composite special effects using Apple Shake, create an offline low-res copy to edit with Avid Composer or Apple Final Cut Pro, print the DI effects sequences back to film, then conform to match the offline edit by physically splicing film. To cut costs the B-movie industry has used television gear instead end-to-end, but the image resolution and color was noticeably less compared to productions originated on film and pipelined in digital intermediate. Upgrading to HDTV cameras brought substantial improvement, but achieving the image quality of film has been elusive.
A new breed of 4:4:4 HD cameras such as the Sony F950 and Thompson Viper offer better picture fidelity than previous 4:2:2 HD cameras. HD can be handled like scanned 35mm film by converting it into DPX digital intermediate format.
Robert Rodriguez left the DGA so he could co-direct SIN CITY with author Frank Miller. SIN CITY, a story of no-holds-barred city noir based on three of Miller's books, was shot with Sony F950 cameras on HDCAM SR format. SIN CITY was edited at Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas, by Editors Guild member Rodriguez. Stylistically, SIN CITY is mostly in B&W, with occasional color in elements such as lips or eyes.
"When I read the books, I felt that they were fantastic exactly as they were", says Rodriguez. "I loved that the dialogue didn't sound like movie dialogue, that the visuals didn't look like anything you usually see in movies. It was so much more unpredictable than any screenplay. So I wanted to bring Frank's vision on the screen as it was. I didn't want to make Robert Rodriguez's SIN CITY. I wanted to make Frank Miller's SIN CITY. I knew that with the technology I already knew how to use - lighting, photography, visual effects - we could make it look and feel exactly like the books."
Rodriguez approached Miller saying, "Why don't we shoot the opening scene on a Saturday with my crew and some actor friends, [Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton], my effects company [Troublemaker] will add the effects, and I'll score it and complete it up through the opening titles." That footage, shot in just ten hours time, convinced actor Bruce Willis to play Hartigan. "It was just riveting", says Willis. "I'd been a fan of Frank Miller's Sin City for a long time - I've always been a fan of dark, poetic, hard-bitten stories - but I didn't think anyone could come up with a way to actually shoot them until Robert invented this new digital filmmaking style."
"The trick was to capture what's visually startling about the books", says Rodriguez. "It had to be shot entirely on green screen because the visuals and lighting in Frank's books are physically impossible."
Troublemaker used 4:2:2 HDCAM on past shows such as SPY KIDS 3D. HDCAM SR, a new Sony 4:4:4 RGB format, was used to shoot SIN CITY and to exchange footage with the effects houses -- where it was converted it digital intermediate DPX. However, Troublemaker didn't use a DPX pipeline. Onlining of the film started on a Quantel eQ at 501 Post in Austin where Rodriguez could approve the online and video space color correction -- to get the look in the ballpark. Reels were transferred from 501 to Post Logic as archived data, something 501 and Post Logic helped pioneer for this show. At Post Logic it was seamlessly picked up in their Quantel iQ. Shots finaled at Post Logic were assembled into finished reels then shipped on HDCAM SR tape to EFILM for the final color correction and film-out.
"Since I shot in color, we'd take the color out and make it a stark black and white, but at any time in post I could bring a color back in", says Rodriguez. "ou could then use color as a weapon; a really strong storytelling tool. So you have a character like Goldie who pops out with real flesh tones and blonde hair or The Yellow Bastard with his mustard-colored skin. And when I wanted to heighten a character's pain I turned the blood red, which really brings it into the foreground, almost like a color close-up. At the same time, we could temper some of the more gruesome images, by making the blood that very cartoonish white you see in the books, which keeps it from being overwhelming. It becomes very abstract." Rodriguez had the Yellow Bastard painted blue, so that in post they could get a better key off of him and do a hue shift that would turn him yellow.
Visual effects were created by The Orphanage in San Francisco, CafeFx in Santa Maria, California, and Hybride near Montreal. Each effects house independently developed its own creative look, honoring the style of Miller's black and white illustrations and Rodriguez's vision for the film. Rough edit was done at 501 Studios in Austin. Final edit was at Post Logic in Hollywood. Film-out was at EFILM in Hollywood.
The Orphanage received 4:4:4 RGB-formatted HDCAM SR clones of the camera masters shot with the Sony HDC-F950 camera. "We received plates shot on green screen from Troublemaker Studios, and created 3D environments and digital matte paintings", says head of editorial Carl Walters. "We also ran effects animation and composited each shot". Working on Windows 2000 workstations, digital matte paintings were created in Photoshop CS, 3D environment models in Discreet 3ds max, falling snow in Houdini, and car animation in Maya. SplutterFish Brazil was used for rendering the environments. Windows After Effects was used for compositing, plate manipulation, and time remapping.
The Orphanage workflow had a RaveHD DDR ingest the 4:4:4 HDCAM SR tapes and write them out as DPX file sequences onto a 2TB dual fibre disk array. An internal plate processing macro driven by Digital Fusion created 4:2:2 HD BlackMagic-encoded QuickTime proxies for quality control and dailies. "Robert would send us EDLs of his changes to the cut", says Walters. "He would approve shots as final by looking at Quicktime files that we would post to his FTP server." The Orphanage did a shot-by-shot color correction prior to Rodriguez calling a shot final. was then used to print the final DPX frame sequences back to 4:4:4 RGB HDCAM SR tapes to go back to Texas.
Hybride special effects director Daniel Leduc oversaw 735 shots to deliver book one of SIN CITY. The F950 was set to record 4:4:4 RGB at 10-bit (higher quality than the 4:2:2 YUV 8-bit typical for HDTV). "The project was shot mostly in the studio on green screen, like SPY KIDS 3D", says Leduc. "Then imported into Inferno at 12-bit through the Discreet Smoke on SGI Tezro built-in dual-link SDI board." SoftImage|XSI was used for most 3D, except for particle effects - such as the rain effect - created in Maya. SoftImage and Hybride are both based in Montreal.
Leduc found it unnecessary to render all the 3D layers in 16 bits, which would take too much time and space. "Some layers were done in 8 bits and mixed with others rendered at 16 bits, such as fog, lighting and depth of field", says Leduc. "Without any noticeable difference, we composited those layers together and created a final image at 12 bits."
On the Inferno shots were finaled in 12-bit then exported back to HDCAM SR in 10-bit through Smoke on Tezro. "Using 12-bit left room for final color correction", notes Leduc. "501 did research on color correction with Robert". Input and output on Smoke for offline conform of all different elements, and running Final Cut Pro on the side to check progress and continuity. During shooting two monitors were used. One with the full tonal range, the other adjusted for high contrast to preview the look of the final film for Rodriguez. "Three different studios created the style of each book of the film independently", says Leduc. "Normally when many houses work on a movie together they try to blend, but for SIN CITY the goal was to keep the look of each book different."
CafeFx produced the visual effects and virtual sets for "The Big Fat Kill", one of the three books in SIN CITY. "All of the actors were shot on green screen using the new Sony SR HD Camera and VTRs", says digital effects supervisor David Ebner. "We captured the footage into our Final Cut Pro HD edit system, preserving the dynamic range of the 4:4:4 signal." The 3D and compositing work was done in floating point to preserve the full bandwidth of the image for maximum flexibility. "We colored our 600+ shots with a SIN CITY high contrast black-and-white look and also did over 200 extra deliveries with color additions for director Robert Rodriguez", says Ebner. CafeFx effects included water, rain, explosions, car crashes and digital stunts.
Guest director Quentin Tarantino worked for one day on the scene from "Big Fat Kill" in which Dwight and Jackie Boy drive through the rain with Dwight convinced that the dead Jackie Boy is talking to him. "Robert couldn't have picked a scene that better illustrated the uses of digital filmmaking", says Tarantino. "You have this rain pouring down on the car, you have a ton of water hitting the car, and you want to have every water drop illuminated, just the way it's drawn. I realized if I was shooting this on film, it would take forever to get that going, and the sounds would have been ruined. But instead of being stuck with capturing everything perfectly, it became entirely about the delivery and the performance."