The revolution for independents: okay. not everything about indie filmmaking is cheaper, faster and better. yet but the walls have come tumbling down

Post, June, 2008 by Ken Mcgorry

IS the explosion of inexpensive new digital production gear empowering the independent filmmaking world? Did the advent of "desktop publishing" spark an increase in newsletter production? And did the Beatles' success cause more electric guitars (including cheap ones) to be sold to garage bands?

So who, in the 21st Century, might represent a sort of Beatles of independent filmmaking? You know, some unknown guys working with simple tools on a great concept that ultimately captivated a generation of young people worldwide and emboldened a burgeoning community of like-minded artists?

Dan Myrick helped make indie history nine years ago with a no-budget thriller; shot on video; marketed virally (and exceptionally) on the Internet; and believed to be made from true documentary footage. That last part was a little easier to pull off since the film's three actors were unknowns. Many indie filmmakers would love to achieve a small fraction of the success and notoriety Myrick's BlairWitch Project garnered; but few if any can ever expect to touch the box-office numbers Myrick and his co-director/writer/editor Eduardo Sanchez achieved: a block-busting $240 million.

Myrick has gone on to produce and/or direct thrillers such as the recent direct-to-DVD Believers and Solstice. His next release is The Objective, an eerie tale of US special-ops reservists in Afghanistan who stumble upon a cave harboring a deadly, otherworldly threat. It screened at the recent TriBeCa Film Festival before heading to Cannes.

In recent years, Myrick started a boutique post production company to facilitate his own projects: Gear Pants, founded with partner Jackson Douglas, and a sister company to Myrick's Gearhead Pictures (www.gear-headpictures.com). "We've embraced a lot of off-the-shelf technology to help us kind of do what much larger post houses do, but on a much more modest budget," Myrick says. "We've got a Final Cut Pro HD bay and use Infortrend and [Apple] Xserve RAIDs to do our own in-house DI. Infortrend is a really fast RAID array that can handle up to 2K throughput. The Objective, which we shot in Morocco, was the first feature in which we did a full HDCAM SR, 4:4:4 digital intermediate all on the Apple desktop. It saved us tens of thousands of dollars being able to do our own online color correction and export to DPX files for film blow-up all on the desktop--it was really quite liberating for us." Robert Florio performed the film's first cut and then Myrick took over editing, with Michael Duthie providing the final finishing.

The Objective shot on Super 16mm and was transferred to HDCAM SR to maintain 4:4:4 color space for eventual 35mm film-out. Myrick and company rented an SR deck and digitized all the SR dailies directly into the FCP. (On location, they also digitized A-camera video-tap output directly into an FCP laptop, in order to skip the traditional dailies film chain.) They "did the down converts on the fly so we didn't have to pay for HDCAM stock or offline." The footage appeared in FCP as DVCPRO HD, allowing Myrick to work the offline in HD, "which was really helpful--I could rough-in my color correction. I had a lot of different plug-ins that we use--we had an infrared camera-look on some of the shots as well as night-vision goggles--we created all of that in Final Cut Pro. Working in an offline HD environment helped us previsualize a lot of that early on. There are so many plug-in packages for Final Cut Pro that allow you to do all kinds of fixes and dust and scratch removal; it's really liberating for the creative process." Myrick did all the color correction himself--five reels--in-house using Apple's Color and was gratified to be able to do creative experimentation while not "on the clock."

For film-out tests Efilm projected in 2K directly from Myrick's DPX files recorded to a hard drive, thereby bypassing a costly third-party color session. Tests projected at the Dl theater proved that the color balance achieved in Myrick's suite matched Efilm's LUTs: "Then they'd send it off to the lab and that was it!" Myrick says one of the most exciting things about the indie/technology revolution is this ability to work more on your own, and he likens it to the digital audio revolution of yesteryear.

Getting The Objective cast, crew and gear over to Morocco--to simulate Afghanistan--represented a serious chunk of budget, but reliance on Myrick's new post workflow helped ease the financial strain.

Myrick's Gear Pants post operation (accessible through his Website) has provided his post service to three other indie filmmakers. "Our process is an alternative Dl to a full 2K, which is enormously expensive, and 2K is roughly only 18 percent more pixels than our 1920x1080 process." Gear Pants uses a JVC HD monitor for color correction and will sometimes rent a 4:4:4 Cinetal for a client or provide a CRT.

The Objective got its final audio mix at Absolute Sound (www.absolutepost.tv) in Burbank. Intense VFX sequences, such as two actors being vaporized by the film's evil entity, were done at Encore Video (www.encore-hollywood.com) while Myrick is increasingly keeping simpler fixes and effects in-house. He stresses, "Now, tracking software is like $99!"