Nobody Someday gets 2K treatment at Red - English Beat - Brief Article

Post, Feb, 2002 by Bob Pank

LONDON -- Talk of infrastructure for post may provoke a yawn and incites the question How's it going to make money?" The independent Sohobased post house Red (www.red.co.uk), which has thrived on a combination of technical innovation and creative skill over its 10 years, knows the answer. Their posting of the Robbie Williams fly-on-the-wall feature Nobody Someday for Century Films (released January 2002) hinged on the ability to manage the full 99-minute feature at 2K resolution. Here, new infrastructure was key for the efficient handling of 2K: a non-TV format producing huge volumes of data, And if it works well for 2K, it really flies at standard definition.

Red's high-speed backbone ensured that the near 3 TB of data for the film, were available "at the touch of a button." Technical director Simon Leppington comments, "We have invested a lot of time and money to ensure that Red is highly efficient. Our fast HIPPI network was particularly useful for the Nobody Someday project. It connects our Spirit DataCine with the editing and effects systems, enabling us to move data around the building at the highest speeds so the time spent on the creative treatment is never compromised."

A VARIETY OF SOURCE MATERIAL

The feature required both SD television and 35mm film finishing from its varied mix of source material shot on-site during Robbie Williams's European tour of February 2001. It comprised 55,000 feet of Super 16 as well as some B&W and DV footage. Going the E-lab route rather than through the traditional film path made more sense, even though the documentary style meant there was no great requirement for effects.

Many shots were taken in less-than-ideal lighting conditions resulting in increased grain. Leppington points out that, "It's not always easy to get good results from a 16 to 35 blowup in a film lab, And with some shots being a bit marginal at Super I 6, we needed all the help we could get. Going the E-lab route gave us access to far more tools, including the DataCine's VS4 with powerful grain and noise reduction, as well as further reduction and other techniques [used in editing]."

Red was supplied with an over-length neg assembly from neighboring Soho in ages. This was scanned and graded at 2K by Red's head of telecine, Gary Szabo, on the Spirit with MegaDef 2K color corrector.

Optimal workflow was vital and involved an initial film scan at SD so that all the edit decisions, including grading, noise reduction and cuffing, were rendered and checked fast and in a cost-effective environment. The resulting edit data was then applied directly to the 2K material and conformed on Discreet Fire -- also adding some subtle effects. The finished piece was delivered on removable drives and shot back out to intermediate film via a Celco film recorder at Soho's Capital FX.

Managing director Steve Luther describes Red as offering "full-service post facilities extending to distribution and broad-band, Our creative skills have produced many TV channel brandings including for BBC, Channel 4, cable and satellite channels as well as sponsorship packages.

KYLIE MINOGUE

The pop theme is equally strong with recent work including Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out of My Head (USA release, February 2002) promo featuring the pop princess strutting her stuff in a futuristic city Production company Black Dog tasked Red with a real three-loaves-and-five-fishes assignment, turning bluescreen shots of Kylie, a handful of dancers and a static car into the finished result, creating the rest from scratch from designs developed by director Dawn Shadforth.

Red used the full gamut of its Discreet arsenal -- 3DS Max, Fire, Flame and Inferno -- as well as Softimage JXSI to create animated backgrounds from rough sketches of building and landscapes produced on Macs. Perspective changes and environments had to be developed to show Kylie driving the car while approaching and entering the city for the promo's opening sequences. XSI was used to model the city's roads, bridges and buildings for the two opening wide shots. Fire layered live action sea, sky and landscape backgrounds to match.

Just three weeks for post demanded innovative solutions to give the director flexibility in building the moving backgrounds while retaining the required look. This was very important in the close-up of Kylie driving and the nighttime rooftop sequences. Here 3DS Max built and textured simple CGI models that were then imported into Fire and Inferno with the textures already associated. The CGI buildings were then matched in perspective to camera moves or to build up tracking shots.

Detail included reflections of the city created by surface models of the car com-posited onto its body and windows. The shape and size of the buildings were altered to match the rhythm of the song. One shot shows the dancing ensemble in a bright, crisp white room -- again completely generated in XSI and com-posited in Flame. There was also the task of matching the 3D models to camera movements and overlaying specially shot light effects to join the sequences together. Miracle completed!