For a set of high-octane show openers for ESPN's NASCAR coverage, The Syndicate intercut animated races featuring colorful CG cars with super-glossy live-action footage from the Arri D-20. Watch the package, below, then read our interviews with The Syndicate's creative director, David Hwang, on the ideas behind the animation, and with FX supervisor Ben Grossman on the decision to use the D-20 and its implications for the pipelines for TV spots.

DAVID HWANG, CREATIVE DIRECTOR

FILM & VIDEO: How did The Syndicate get this job? Did you go out and pitch ideas to get the contract?

DAVID HWANG: Yes. We sold the concept for everything that has been airing. It was kind of cool because sometimes ‘ a lot of things change so much from the time you get the job until you finish, but this stayed pretty cool to what we sold them.

Was the decision from the start that there would be three independent openers?

There were going to be two tied together but the third was added out of necessity, once we realized we needed one that looked different from the other two as the show open for a studio show that’s on every day. The other two with the live action are used on the weekend, for the races, and the more colorful CG one [NASCAR Now] is shown every day.

When you were thinking about NASCAR, where did your ideas for the visual style come from?

NASCAR is currently the fastest growing spectator sport in this country, but the challenge was that it has some stigma attached to it that it’s southern and maybe “redneck-y.” We wanted to elevate it into a mainstream sport and stay away from anything that would say “trailer trash.” With ESPN doing a pretty good job of broadcasting HD technology, there was a nod to a slightly futuristic aspect to it. But at the same time we didn't go so far into sci fi that it lost what it’s supposed to say. So we came up with the idea of an HD camera at ESPN giving you the coverage the other networks don’t. Instead of making it literal, we added it more as a flavor. And we came up with the whole idea of a command center, which is a wink at ESPN’s technology-savvy crew, bringing out the best coverage possible. The challenge was to take the stuff that exists now and give it a stylized look, without either looking too much like a video game or making the cars photoreal to the point where it just looks like a race. We developed a style that bridged the gap between a cartoon and just running footage.

Are any of the cars actual cars or are they all CG?

They’re all CG.

Some of the shots look really good.

It actually ended up looking too photoreal, and we wanted to give it a filmic style through color-correction – more of a dangerous look. One of the telecine artists, a partner here, Beau Leon, headed up the color-correction. It was a really fun job. The subject matter was fun, because obviously a lot of the guys who do 3D are really into cars and video games. And the clients were great. It was very collaborative.

The backgrounds are very monochromatic, but the cars have these incredibly rich, saturated colors.

Have you ever been to a NASCAR race? We just exaggerated what it feels like to be at the race, in terms of the movement and the way the cars are shaking and interacting with each other. It’s like amplifying what actually happens with colors and sound and motion. We took a cue mostly from going out to the tracks. I was pretty floored by how visceral the experience is. You feel it at a gut level. Your mind, your body – it’s a sensory overload. And we wanted to give it a competitive story and all the things that good races have. The only thing we couldn’t show that we wanted to do was more crashes. [Laughs.] They didn’t want to push that. The color palette was pretty intentional to make the cars saturated using the bright candy colors and keep the background monochromatic as a backdrop.

You directed the live-action. Were those shots done using the D-20?

Yeah. It’s a great camera.

What drove the decision to use it?

Basically the fact that you could use interchangeable 35mm camera lenses. Also the data could be kept as a raw file, and our plan was to go from digital start to digital finish. We actually did our first tapeless delivery for ESPN. And it had all the nuances of a 35mm film camera. We were pretty impressed. I’ve been on the fence as much as anybody – I like the film look. But with the advances in digital cameras, especially in the last year or so, I think it would be kind of silly not to start investigating it.

Prior to the existence of the D-20, would you have shot a project like this on film or HDCAM?

We would have shot 35.

But the is a case where the optical characteristics of this camera –

We just wanted to give it as much of a film quality as possible before we start compositing, to take the edge off the videoness. You know, David Fincher and David Lynch are starting to shoot digital. It’s starting to develop its own look, too, and we’re starting to use it for what it can do rather than trying to mimic something. But in terms of the D-20, it was pretty close to a film camera.

I just wanted both of them to have a story. Things can be visually great, but without a story it loses its shelf life. We wanted to give it a storyline, so no matter how many times you see it, it just becomes part of getting ready for the race. The challenge initially was that they wanted 10-second opens. They ended up liking the idea so much that they told us we could run 30 seconds.

And did you deliver 720p?

I’m not sure whether we delivered 720 or 1080, but ESPN broadcasts it in 720p. Which I think actually looks better than 1080i on CBS. For sports it looks great. You know, I’m a little bit of a Luddite. I wait a little bit to buy the technology at home. I just barely got a flat screen at home. And it’s been a real pleasure to watch it in high-res. In the business, a lot of the time you sit in the edit bays and compositing and see it for what it could be, and then by the time you get home and see it in NTSC, the colors are dulled out and it never looks the way you intended it. It’s kind of fun to watch something at home that stays true to what you created.

BEN GROSSMAN, Effects Supervisor

FILM & VIDEO: Tell me about using the D-20, and why you were eager to do that.

We’ve started to evolve to be a little bit more of a production company. And, along with everyone else in the industry, we’re trying to test out an end-to-end all-digital pipeline. That’s not something you just decide to do on a project if you’ve never done all the individual components below. So shooting on the D-20 was one of those important aspects – we looked at this project and said, OK, we can shoot on film, we can shoot on a variety of HD cameras, we have that flexibility and latitude. What we were testing, with this NASCAR shoot in particular, was the idea of moving telecine to the end of the pipeline.

Traditionally in a commercial, you shoot film, and then you telecine. You do your dailies. And when you’ve got your editorial selects, you do a transfer that has a color-corrected and supervised section that’s your final color. But on projects that have a lot of visual effects, that makes next to no sense whatsoever. You may have a plate, and the only thing you’re using in it is some teenagers in the foreground, and the entire rest of the shot is going to be replaced digitally with visual effects. If you’re transferring that, you’re trying to base your color-correction on an entire plate that’s only going to make up 5 percent of the shot in the end.

At The Syndicate we’re setting up the mentality that you can shoot on either film or digital, and then you transfer the footage with the largest dynamic range possible. You work on those plates just like a feature film where you don’t make any color decisions – you match your [VFX] dinosaurs to the footage that was shot, you do all that stuff in expanded, floating-point high dynamic range – and then you send that down to the colorist who actually does the telecine at the end of the project. He’s working with VFX almost as though they were the original film.

With this new approach, what we’re looking for in cameras is the ability to preserve the technical latitude. How much information can we get in there? Don’t worry about what it looks like. Just worry about saving every little detail and every little pixel and make sure it’s not being clipped or chopped off. Make sure you haven’t lost anything. It follows all the way through the pipeline, and at the end, that’s when you start throwing things away if you need to just to get the look you’re looking for.

How does the D-20 help you do this?

The cool part about the D-20 is it has the ability to shoot with a dynamic range that is much closer to film, and send it directly to tape in a digital format. Even though it’s being recorded to tape, it’s being recorded as data rather than your traditional video signal, and there are several different ways to do that. We used that shoot as an opportunity to test out that camera for our pipeline and say, “OK, if we shoot in these different technical formats, how does that improve the quality of our final product and how easy is it to work with in our pipeline? And let’s see if we actually get results out the other end that look the way we think they should.

What format are you recording on set?

We’re recording a 4:4:4 video signal on HDCAM SR tape. The trick is, the color space that we’re writing into is exactly the same color space feature films do film scans on for DIs and stuff. You’re writing into a logarithmic color space. If you played straight off the tape and looked at it, it would look very weird – flat, low contrast. It would look a lot like a 10-bit log film scan for any major motion picture.

You’re not applying any kind of LUT to that picture before it goes to tape.

That’s it. And because this was a test shoot, and because Arri was still experimenting with their log curves on that camera, they gave us a second deck. The D-20 has the ability to record two simultaneous streams, so we did one stream that did have a LUT baked onto it recorded to HDCAM 4:4:4, but in Rec. 709 color space. This is what it would look like if we were shooting in normal HD. It’s a picture-perfect, calibrated and clear image that looks exactly how you would expect it to look. And you’re recording another stream that’s in log color space that has all the raw data on it. You can take the Rec. 709 signal, do all your offlines, and everyone talks about how beautiful the image is, and whenever you go to do your actual work you’re doing it on your raw plates. We did that as a safety, but at the end it was kind of unnecessary.

Overall, the D-20 handled really well. It’s so much more fun to shoot on HD when you know that you have all that film range. If you’re shooting 35mm, you’re almost always looking at a video tap signal. That’s how you judge all your stuff. As a director, I’m sitting here looking at this shitty, really badly compressed Web-quality image of what’s been shot. And I have to trust that, on film, it’s going to look beautiful. And that’s kind of a pain in the ass.

With the D-20, the DP is looking through the viewfinder just like he would on a 35mm film camera because it has an optical viewfinder. But everyone else is looking at a full-quality, uncompressed, full-color-range beautiful signal on a 22-inch HD monitor. You’re seeing things right away. Is the focus not exactly correct? Is the exposure a little too hot? For shooting green screens, it’s amazing. You’ve got this live uncompressed signal, and you’re looking at the waveform in the vectorscope. You spot-meter it and you say, “It doesn’t look that uneven.” But on a waveform monitor, you can tell exactly where the shadow spots are and how to adjust the highlights. We would have the gaffers adjusting lighting on a green screen, not looking at the green screen or even metering it – just looking at the waveform in the vectorscope. “On the right side in the top right-hand corner, it’s about 20 IREs darker than the rest.” They adjust the light, and we see it in real time. The clients are happy because they’re seeing a pristine image, not some crappy video tap. And you still have all the other advantages of film.