Modern Video Film Finds a Post Workflow for Gone Baby Gone

For Modern VideoFilm, it boiled down to a lucky break. Cinematographer John Toll was a regular customer of Modern’s for digital dailies, so when he started work on Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, he referred executive producer David Crockett to them. Modern’s VP of sales, Marcie Jastrow, wasn’t sure whether the studio would eventually pony up for a DI, but she knew she wanted to keep Modern close to the project. “I knew it when I had the dailies,” she tells Film & Video. “I knew there was something special about this film.”

For more information, read about Runway's HD editorial pipeline for Gone Baby Gone.

Modern’s confidence eventually blossomed into a fruitful working relationship on a full 2K DI with Toll and Affleck, who was remarkably tech-savvy – and demanding, when it came to image quality – for a tyro director. "He was smart enough to understand that he could always have more," says Jastrow. "And he pushed for it."

Dailies were a fairly basic proposition. The film was shooting in Boston and developing negative at Deluxe in L.A. Modern would pick up the film cans and transfer the footage to HDCAM SR 4:4:4 tapes. The footage was transferred from the tapes to FireWire drives in Avid media-bin and file formats, then shipped back to the production. “The thought was that, if there wasn’t enough money in the budget to do a full DI, they could at least take the footage from the HDCAM SR dailies, assemble and color-correct that, and film that out,” notes Jastrow.

But Affleck started to get impatient with compromises as soon as production wrapped. He was eager to start cutting scenes together, but was frustrated by the quality of Avid files compressed at 14:1. “In his words, it depressed him to look at his film,” Jastrow recalls. She explained to him that HD editorial workflows were still fairly exotic beasts, even on big Hollywood projects. “Well, Ben didn’t care. He decided he wanted to re-digitize everything in high-definition using the DNxHD codec from Avid. So we redigitized all of the SD material in HD. I think he purchased an Avid Adrenaline system and was able to cut what he wanted to cut.”

Modern contributed some VFX work as well. Look Effects is credited with much of the work on the film – including adding water to a quarry that’s one of the film’s key locations – but Quantel iQ artist Roger Berger composited burn-ins of TV programming that’s playing during the film at Modern. “The Resolution Co-existence feature of the iQ lets us take images of any resolution into the iQ in its native form – SD, PAL, HD, 2K, 4K – and throw them all up on the same desktop together, cut them in together, and composite anything we throw at it,” Berger explains. “Then we produce the result in any resolution we want to finish in.

“It’s a story of stolen and missing children, and part of the story is told through news reports as characters are watching. So there were quite a few pieces of story that play burned into monitors on screen. They shot a lot of news-style video footage in SD, and some film elements, along with graphic elements to give it a newsroom look. We were able to pull those elements together and composite them efficiently in the iQ.”

A few shots were so time-consuming, or required such intricate tracking work, that Berger would shoot them over to Modern’s Inferno artists, working in another building, via the facility’s fiber-optic network. The finished shots were pulled back into the iQ.

“And we went though many revisions with the VFX company – right up until the very end we were replacing a lot of shots,” Berger recalls. “But that’s par for the course.”

Affleck started taking a personal interest in the DI process early on, Jastrow says. During post, Affleck visited Modern’s Burbank facility to compare DNxHD footage at 115 and 175 Mbps. “During that time, he saw the color-correction room and wanted to play,” she says. “He physically got behind the color-corrector and tried to color-correct his film. He’s the kind of guy who is very hands-on.” Affleck quickly decided he wanted to scan film at 2K to get the most out of a DI. “Through Miramax, we discussed what kind of budget I could come up with to actually make it happen for him,” Jastrow says. “Knowing that John Toll had never done a full DI, and also that Ben had never done one, there was no way I wasn’t going to grab this show.”

Jastrow wrangled the budget, and colorist Skip Kimball ended up at the helm of Gone Baby Gone‘s DI. Film was scanned at 2K on the Spirit 4K in CPD 10-bit log format, and the da Vinci Resolve was used for real-time, full resolution color-correction work. “That’s the main reason why I chose the Resolve,” Kimball says. “If you can run at real-time in 2K, it’s just a nicer look. You can’t show a client a 1K proxy on a 24-foot screen. It’s just too soft and too jaggedy.”

Before he started work, Kimball sat down to read a copy of the Dennis Lehane novel on which the movie is based, then sat down with Affleck to discuss the director’s ideas. “I came up with some looks for him that he was really happy with,” Kimball says. “You’ve done the previews from the HD dailies, so you’ve been sitting with the DP and the director months before you start the DI. By the time you get to the DI you’re halfway there.”

Kimball says he went for a dark, gritty look. “It’s hard to describe,” he admits. “It’s just a feel. The flashbacks he wanted very gritty, very grainy and very high-contrast – kind of monochromatic, and only accentuating certain colors.

“It was Ben’s first DI, but being in here you wouldn’t know that, other than his excitement about all the toys. You had to be careful. If you got up to go to the restroom, he was turning the knobs. But he was fun to work with. He knew what he was after, and he knows the limitations of film and the DI process.”

And working with John Toll was a breeze, Kimball says. “We hit it off in respect to the workflow – how things should be done, and how things should look. After about an hour with John Toll, it was like second nature. He didn’t have to ask for anything. I could tell by his body language. You get a feel for what people are after, and it just flows really good with John.”

Kimball did a 4K DI last year, for Ridley Scott and A Good Year, but he’s cautious when asked about the immediate prospects for 4K DIs. “It’s a subtle improvement over 2K,” he explains. “But at this point I would rather have the client save their money on the 4K and get more DI negative. Most DIs only output one negative, and they have to go IP-IN [adding more photochemical generations to the release prints in order to avoid wear on a single DI negative]. If you take a 4K DI negative and go IP-IN, you’re gaining contrast and losing dynamic range on the [release] print. You lose more definition in the highlights and the low end. And that’s two more elements that go through a chemical bath that is not exact. The soup of the day at the lab is the soup of the day at the lab. It’s never quite the same.”

For more information, read about Runway's HD editorial pipeline for Gone Baby Gone.