Seeing in the dark for Collateral: director Michael Mann re-invents digital filmmaking

Post, August, 2004 by Daniel Restuccio

LOS ANGELES -- Director Michael Mann's new movie, Collateral, is about revealing the unseen, and he uses digital cinematography to grab it out of the night and show it. In this character-driven thriller, Tom Cruise plays a mysterious hit man named Vincent who comes to Los Angeles, hijacks a cab driven by Max (Jamie Foxx), and sets off on his grisly business of dispatching people under cover of the LA night. Known for his innovative visual styling, Mann has reinvented digital filmmaking by combining footage--captured from the Thomson Viper FilmStream, the Sony CineAlta HDW F900 and Panavision 35mm Millennium cameras--and devised an HD screening and preview system to maintain exacting creative and technical control.

"Film doesn't record what our eyes can see at night," says Mann. "That's why I moved into shooting digital video in high definition--to see into the night, to see everything the naked eye can see and more. You see this moody landscape with hills and trees and strange light patterns. I wanted that to be the world that Vincent and Max are moving through."

To help him find just the right images to illustrate the wild Los Angeles night, Mann brought on board cinematographers Paul Cameron (Man on Fire, Gone in Sixty Seconds) and Oscar-nominated Dion Beebe (Chicago, In the Cut).

Cameron did most of the camera testing in the five-week prep period and shot about four weeks of principal photography. "Michael is a dramatic filmmaker," says Cameron. "He wants the visuals to be a character."

The difference between film and HD, says Cameron, is that film's sensitivity falls off sharply at the bottom of the curve, transforming subtle shadows into deep rich blacks. But what if, he asks, you went into those shadows? "How do I record what the eye sees at the toe of the curve?" Where everyone is trying to make black, Mann decided he would go into those shadows and pull out information to create intense emotions.

THE TOOLS

Burbank's Plus 8 Digital supplied an HD package that included two Thomson Vipers and a Sony SRW-5000 deck. Panavision provided the two Sony CineAlta HDW 900s and the 35mm gear. "We hot rodded the Vipers in that lower end of the curve," Cameron recalls, effectively doubling the Viper's 320ASA rating to 640ASA and adjusted the F900s to match the Vipers.

Yet even with the enhanced sensitivity, Cameron and Beebe frequently shot +6db with the Vipers and +12db with the F900s.

Thomson's Viper FilmStream camera boasts three 9.2 megapixel frame transfer CCDs and delivers an RGB 4:4:4, 10-bit log, 1.5Gb/s output without compression or image processing and a native 2.37:1 mode without anamorphic lenses maintaining full vertical resolution. The Viper is just a camera head and has to be tethered to a recording device.

By contrast, the Sony CineAlta HDW F900 has three 2.2 megapixel FIT CCDs and outputs a YUV 4:2:2, 8-bit, 185Mb/s, 4.4:1 compressed image in 1.77:1 on to its built-in camcorder.

Cameron, in collaboration with Collateral associate producer Byran Carroll and Hollywood's LaserPacific, did extensive testing with the Viper and concluded at the time that recording to hard drive technology was impractical for field production.

Fortuitously, the Sony SWR-5000 recorder was available and has the capacity to record from the Viper in 4:4:4 RGB mode at 440Mb/ps, in MPEG-4 SP with a 4.2:1 compression. While this resolution is less than 40 percent of the data rate of log mode, the image was perceptually lossless and made location shooting practical.

Beebe says the HD look "serves the feeling of the film," drawing out that sense of alienation from the stark urban landscape. "You're getting more nuances and details," he describes. Beebe was particularly excited about how at night the camera reveals this immersive glowing, haloed, surreal environment, caused by the thick LA marine layer, trapping and diffusing the light coming from the sodium vapor street lights.

THE POST

Post production started during pre-production with coordinated discussions between LaserPacific (www.laserpacific.com) and Santa Monica's Company 3 (www.ascentmedia.com). LaserPacific has been an early leader in the implementation of high definition technology. Their first project with Michael Mann was on the HD imagery in the film Ali and then on Mann's HD TV series, Robbery Homicide Division.

Collateral associate producer Bryan Carroll was very keen on "creating a film lab environment" for digital acquisition, says LaserPacific executive VP Leon Silverman. "So we were working on the notion of what would be the technology of a film lab, even when you don't shoot on film."

Cameron, Beebe, Silverman, Carroll and Company 3 founder/colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld spent many weeks creating multiple integrated systems for generating dailies, screening footage, previewing the movie and doing final color correction.

"Bryan Carroll is the most organized person in the post room," says Silverman, "and we're very pleased that he and Michael Mann trust us to create a seamless solution to a complex editing process."