Making Stock Footage Work

"Documentary filmmakers get no respect," laments Billy Baldwin, president of New York’s PostWorks. Baldwin knows documentaries. He’s worked on lauded nonfiction film projects including Oscar -winners The Fog of War and Born Into Brothels as well as nominees My Architect, Capturing the Friedmans, and Tupac: Resurrection. Many of those films required crafty decisions in post to make stock footage cohere aesthetically, utilizing a skill set that feature-film producers don’t always understand or appreciate. "If we can get multiple formats out to film, you’d think we could handle a single format easily," says Baldwin. "But when we bid on a feature, they just want to know what other features we’ve done. Documentaries, even award-winning ones, have their own set of unique challenges."

As an example, Baldwin cites the company’s work on director/screenwriter Eugene Jarecki’s documentary Why We Fight, an inside look at the American war machine. PostWorks prepared the film for the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, where it earned the American Documentary Grand Jury Prize. "We had brand new interview footage, shot on HD and film, that was a stark contrast to the archival footage that you have no control over," he explains. "We also had to deal with multiple additional formats, including DVCPRO 50 and Digital BetaCam in PAL and NTSC, not to mention all of the graphic elements that have to be brought in and composited. And that’s usually the case. Very few documentaries are shot on a single format, so that’s the big challenge: how do you tie it all together?"

Color is the obvious starting point. "You might desaturate certain images to create a smooth transition when you’re cutting between B&W archival footage and recent HD interview footage," Baldwin says. "We also, on many documentaries that end up on film, often record them out to a camera negative stock such as Eastman Kodak 5245 on a CRT film recorder rather than using the Arri Laser film recorder, which is a little too precise. You end up with a more seamless image."

But it’s not just dealing with color, he stresses. Aspect ratios and framing issues pose problems. "Much like video frame rates, when it comes to aspect ratios, source formats vary widely from distribution formats," Baldwin notes. "HD is 16à—9 and SD is usually 4à—3. Archival footage ranges from 1.33:1 to 1.66:1 to 1.85:1 and is often in direct contrast with our multiple delivery formats. We had to simultaneously build the theatrical version, a 4à—3 pan-and-scan, and so on."

Colorist Eric Alvarado, who worked on Tupac: Resurrection, notes that when multiple sources are involved, he usually likes to see the edit before he starts to color correct. "This was especially useful for Tupac, as they had a lot of footage that was on 3 / 4 -inch and VHS," he says. "I used the da Vinci 2K and tried to keep the contrast between the formats as close as possible. Keeping the highlights from popping between scenes keeps the eye from having to adjust."

Award-winning writer-director Alex Gibney’s new film chronicles the notorious collapse of energy giant Enron. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room makes ample use of interviews, insider accounts and even Enron’s own corporate videos to draw a bleak picture of factors leading to the collapse. "As for all the archival footage we used, that took a long time to acquire. The best stuff comes from unofficial sources," Gibney says. "You can always go to the networks’ main archives, but to get the most interesting and powerful material you have to go to unofficial sources."

Gibney acquired material in a wide range of formats: Betacam, VHS, DigiBeta and compact disc, as well as from the Internet and TV broadcasts. "We then had to find a way of taking all those sources and almost indulging the bad look- finding a way to make it work for us instead of against us."

To this end, material was often framed by TV sets. "Sometimes we’d roll stock tickers on top of material, not so much to hide anything but because stock prices suffused everything they were doing," he explains.

Gibney decided to shoot in 24p HD using the Sony F900. "We went that way as we were pretty sure it’d go theatrical, and 24p transfers beautifully to film," he says. The team was also able to get "incredibly high quality" by scanning stills at very high resolutions. "We were able to move them in post rather than shooting them, and the detail is fantastic. We had a few limitations in manipulating color, so it took a bit longer this way."

The film was posted at Frame:Runner in New York. The colorist, Don Wyllie, who was also the online editor, DP Maryse Alberti and Gibney sat down in front of Sony’s XPRI. "That was our effects box and we used it to manipulate some of the images, both in terms of color and moods." The XPRI was especially useful in dealing with the high-res stills. "It let me blow up an image by 60 percent in real time with no loss of quality," says Wyllie, "and because I could show Alex immediately, it was very efficient."

Reports Alberti, "We only had a couple of days to do the color correction, so Don and I broke it down into two main areas. We gave the interview footage I shot with the F900 a very warm look with natural skin tones. We also had to incorporate stock footage from CNN and C-Span, and it was in a lot of different colors and contrasts, so we decided to desaturate, to go towards the green tones, and to take out almost all color. That way we could give all the footage a more standard look."

The blow-up from the HD master to 35mm was done at Technicolor. "As they didn’t have much time to do the digital color correction at Frame:Runner, we did some additional photochemical color correction here at Technicolor to balance it out," reports Christian Zak, executive producer, digital intermediates, Technicolor Creative Services, New York. "Then we did a transfer to Kodak’s 2242 Estar intermediate stock with the ARRI Laser, and release prints were then made to Fuji 3513 DI [stock] off the original negative."

"They did a great job," Gibney adds. "We were having technical problems importing all of the archival material. We only had two days to do the color correction, but we ran it all through the XPRI and that worked great. Like any film, there’s never enough time and money in the budget but because you’re dealing with so many different sources, pulling together a unified, coherent look for a documentary is always a huge challenge."