Stuart Little 2 makes the digital grade: Imageworks used its experience on Stuart Little 1 and Spider-Man to streamline the effects process via digital intermediates - Special Report: Technology - Sony Imageworks - Brief Article

Post, August, 2002 by Daniel Restuccio

CULVER CITY, CA -- During a pre-production meeting two years ago for Stuart Little 2, Sony Imageworks visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen remembers thinking that he was going to have to push to make a digital intermediate. "Then cinematographer Steven Poster walked in and right off the bat said, 'We have to do a digital finish here."

"I knew that probably 70 percent of the movie was going to be digitized anyway," says Poster, who is also president of the American Society of Cinematographers. On the original Stuart Little, he says they had a problem in the printing stage -- getting the color in the CG footage to match the production dailies.

For Stuart Little 2, "I figured if we went all digitized, we wouldn't have that problem, and we would have a tremendous amount of control that we couldn't afford on the first one."

To grade 72 minutes of Stuart Little 2, Imageworks (www.sonypictures.com/imageworks) expanded and refined an interim pipeline they created while working on specialized color correction for the recent Spider-Man feature film. In-house programmers created proprietary code to handle 2K files -- in Cineon color space -- and produce a digital conform that was frame accurate to the edit decision list.

"On Stuart Little 2 about 75 percent of the film was effects shots that had already been digitized," says John Nicolard, Sony Imageworks VP of technical film services, who served as the digital intermediate supervisor on the project. "It seemed appropriate to scan the other 25 percent of the non-effects material at 4K with the Imagica scanner and then do a specialized color correction, using digital color tools, on the entire picture. The output is what we call a digital original negative."

A COLOSSUS TOOL

The centerpiece to Imageworks' digital intermediate process was the 5D's Colossus, a software-based 16-bit/channel linear or log color correction system that was used extensively on the first two Lord of the Rings films.

With the Colossus toolset, Imageworks was able to add digital saturation to the entire film to give it a brighter, snappier kind of look. "The art direction and costume design in the film had some really interesting colors," notes Nicolard. "So we were able to take the film and actually make it even more vibrant looking. It gave a very interesting, idiosyncratic look to it."

There was one scene, Nicolard explains, a night interior and Stuart is standing on a wood floor. "The comment from the director Rob Minkoff, was, 'It appears he is sort of blending into the floor. How can we make him stand out a little bit more?"'

They used one tool, within Colossus, to knock down a highlight section, make it smaller and enhanced a shadow that was in the frame. Then they "windowed" Stuart and lifted him approximately half a stop. "By the time we were done, Stuart stood out much more in the shot and we gave the director exactly what he wanted," says Nicolard proudly.

There were some growing pains, however Poster realized he needed to build in a mental offset in terms of saturation and contrast in order get good film outs based on what he saw on the monitor. "We were sort of inventing the wheel as we went, and it was a painful process in the invention stage."

Were the results worth it? "In the end it did meet my expectations," says Poster. "I was able to mold the frame, direct the eye the way I wanted it to go, as though I was working with Photoshop or as if I were painting a canvas."

"I couldn't be more pleased with the results," says Chen. The amount of control they had, he says, working entirely in the digital domain allowed them to finesse the entire picture into a very seamless looking movie. Poster comments that it was very much a group effort. "I had an amazing team with me: my colorist Mike Eaves, who I had been working with for 10 years, and John Nicolard, and all of the Imageworks brain power behind this project."

"I would not go back to doing grading the old way," echoes Chen. "Particularly on movies like Stuart Little 2, which is a hybrid, CG and live-action movie, where 80 percent of the film is already digitally enhanced. But it definitely applies to all movies, because it gives the director and the cinematographer the ability to really control the look of their movie."

Nicolard also has an answer to the question, how does the digital negative compare with the quality of the original negative?

"I think that if you digitize and handle the data properly, and then film out and make sure that all aspects of your pipeline are perfectly honed -- which they are here at Imageworks -- then you will put out an image that is extremely competitive with the original negative. By digitally manipulating the data, you can create a negative that contains information that is otherwise unobtainable photo-chemically. One might argue that it is in fact better!"