Developed by Deluxe's vice president of technical services, Beverly Wood, and executive vice president of engineering, Colin Mossman, CCE is one of three silver-retention processes offered by the lab. According to Wood, "CCE is a proprietary process that produces a much higher contrast and adds more grain. When you have more silver [in the print,] you get a grainier look and blacker blacks. However, your black [values] can also plug up more. The matter of getting the color, the balance and the contrast right comes from the standpoint of density. CCE is different than the ACE process, which is adjustable; with CCE, the distinguishing factor in the answer-print process is that you can't really adjust the blacks or the amount of desaturation. Our job at Deluxe is to get the look that Tim and Chivo want at the answer-print stage, and then maintain that same look when we make the dupe."
Lubezki notes that "from the beginning, Tim said, 'If the studio would let me, I'd shoot this movie in black-and-white.' But then we talked about it and he said, 'You know, maybe not maybe it's better just to do it in color and keep everything very monochromatic, but still keep all of these shades of grey, dark blue, very dark brown and green." He asked me if there was anything I could do in the photography to get that look, so we began talking with Beverly about different processes that would enhance the film's contrast and desaturate the colors. We did a bunch of tests, like flashing and not flashing the film, and we decided to go with CCE, which was the process that would add the most contrast and desaturate the colors the most. Tim was always there when we did the process tests. It was a lot of fun to have him there, and we liked the same things, so we went with the CCE process.
"Once we decided on the look, we had a meeting with all of the departments, because CCE really affects the contrast and blacks in the images," he continues. "Ian Robinson was our contact at Deluxe London, and we consulted very closely with him. The costume designer, Colleen Atwood, was doing a lot of stuff in black, but after the tests she began adding bits of silver and other enhancements to the texture of the clothes so we wouldn't lose the details completely. With Rick Heinrichs, we would paint 8' by 4's with the colors he was planning to use for each set, and then shoot them, project the footage, discuss it and revise the colors. The color red was particularly affected by the process it became really dark, sometimes so dark that it was almost black. We had to be really careful in the way we lit things. If you went into one of our sets while we were shooting, you'd have thought we were doing a soap opera, because everything looked really overlit. When we saw the dailies, though, everyone would say, 'Wow, this is really dark and moody.' You always have to factor in the effect that the process will have on the images. The first week of the show was miserable for me, and many many times I wanted to kill myself for deciding to work with the CCE process, but when you see the movie from start to finish, it looks really good."
Asked to outline some of the problems he encountered with CCE, Lubezki offers, "The thing that's really difficult about the process, which almost made me chicken out, is what it does to the actors' skin tones. Because there's so much contrast and the gamma curve is so steep, the skin tones can look blemished if you're not careful. I don't like to use much diffusion, and I usually don't mind when you can see some imperfections in the actors' faces as long as those imperfections don't take you out of the movie. On this picture, though, I wish I had used just a little more diffusion."
Lubezki was also careful to monitor his use of smoke, which added some Hammer-like ambience and helped to reduce the dramatic contrast produced by the CCE. "There are some elements in the film that might be viewed as 'cheap,' such as the heavy use of smoke, but in a weird way, those elements help to make the images more beautiful and interesting," he submits. "Using smoke also allowed us to get a consistent look for the movie. When all of the sets are smoked, you can't tell what was done on a stage and what wasn't. I didn't want the light to be too baroque, with all kinds of backlights, kickers and little lights. Most of the lighting was created with very big sources, so you can't really tell where the light is coming from.
"In the Western Woods set and at some of the other locations, you can definitely see the smoke it looks like the fog they used in the old Frankenstein and Mummy movies!" he exclaims with a laugh. "Balancing the smoke therefore wasn't much of a problem on the exterior sets, but it became really complicated when we used it in a smaller set like Ichabod's room, where I didn't want the audience to feel the smoke. It's difficult, but after a week of using smoke you get a better feel for the proper level and how much is too much. Our use of smoke was also dependent on the CCE process. In our case, we could use more smoke, because we knew that the process would 'see through' it. The smoke affected the blacks, but the process also affected the blacks in the opposite way, so everything balanced out.
"Of course, if you're going to use smoke, you have to live with the limitations," he points out with a grimace. "One problem with using smoke was that sometimes, when we were working outside with our big cranes, the smoke would reveal where the light was coming from. That drove me insane, and I lost the battle a couple of times; in two or three shots, I had to beg the visual effects team at ILM to erase the light that was closer to the cranes, or to take the edge off."
Another atmospheric touch was the use of "lightning flashes" whenever the Headless Horseman appeared in a scene. "Usually I hate lightning as an effect, because it has the potential to take the viewer out of the movie a bit," Lubezki says. "If it's supposed to be raining, it's fine, but otherwise it can be a bit much. When we did tests with the Headless Horseman, though, we found that the lightning really added a lot of energy to the character it made him more impressive, scary and Burtonian. Every time the Horseman is going to kill someone, the lightning appears as dramatic punctuation. The problem with lightning is that it really affects the editing of the movie. If it's really fast-paced in one cut, and you go to a shot where the lightning doesn't match, you start to feel this lack of freedom. It took us a while to learn how to keep it constant without obliterating the images with lightning. It looks really interesting when you're shooting it, but you have to control yourself!"
Lubezki notes with a chuckle that the use of lightning gave Burton the chance to play God on the set. "I gave the Lightning Strikes control box to John Higgins, but Tim always told him when to cue the flashes he would sit there and signal John by twitching his index finger. Since Tim would be so heavily involved in the editing, we felt that it would be best if he was responsible for the rate and speed of the lightning. I guess that's one of the perks of being a big-time movie director!"
