One of the scenes was a Ku Klux Klan rally involving some 350 dancing extras. "That sequence posed quite a set of problems," the cameraman notes. "We had a large number of setups to do, and the choreography of the Klan members was going to be time-consuming. We chose a field backed by a tall, wide tree. The scene would be lit as if by the light from a 30-foot burning cross, and I knew I had enough room behind the tree to hide the large construction crane I would need to augment the firelight."
To bring off the effect, Deakins used 10 Dino lights in a purpose-built box truss that he suspended over the tree, in line with the fiery cross. "My gaffer, Bill O'Leary, had each bar of each lamp on its own flicker generator, and the whole unit was running at about 30 percent capacity on the dimmer. There was also 1/2 CTO in front of the lamps, which helped create the illusion of warm firelight." The tree itself was frontlit using 2K blondes that were also on flicker generators to give the effect of firelight coming from the cross. "Quite often I will use multiple sources to create the illusion of a big soft light," Deakins notes. "I think during the shooting of the Klan rally I hardly used another lamp. Certainly very little changed from setup to setup maybe some fill from a gold reflector or two.
"We just could not have made our schedule if the lighting had been complicated," he concludes. "It was a case of an expensive rig saving time and money in the end."
The cinematographer had a similar problem in Mississippi while shooting in an old theater. "This theater in Vicksburg was a historical landmark, so it was a hard rig," he recalls. "Also, the ceiling was very low, so any light I used would fall into the wide shots if [the units were] bigger than a Tweenie. Again, we did not have the luxury of lighting each shot separately. I used an array of 65 Tweenies, which created the effect of a soft light on the theater audience and created a glow on the stage as well. If you look closely, you can probably count 65 shadows, but the audience will never see them!"
One of the film's most intriguing effects shots occurs very early in the story. When the three cons break away from the chain gang, they attempt to board a rolling freight train. McGill jumps through an open boxcar door; a second con is halfway in and halfway out of the car, hanging on for life; and the third con is running alongside the car, trying to catch up. He finally stumbles and falls, dragging the other two out of the car. The sequence was clearly too dangerous to shoot with a real, moving train. Instead of using stunt doubles, the actors were filmed pantomiming the shot in front of a bluescreen. The moving train was filmed as a background plate, and the two elements were composited by Digital Domain.
Deakins spent about 10 weeks in a digital suite at Cinesite fine-tuning the film's look after the negative was locked down and converted to digital format. The cinematographer reports that it was a learning process for both him and Friede. "We found that the more we tried to manipulate the image, the more noise and electronic artifacts appeared, and then we would have to rescan and retime the image," he says. "In the end, we kept the manipulation to a minimum in order to maintain quality overall. We affected the greens and played with the overall saturation but little else. We only used windows, for instance, on a couple of shots."
Sarah Priestnall, director of digital mastering for Cinesite, notes, "It was experimental in the sense that it was a learning process for all of us. Green is the most difficult color to deal with when you're converting film to digital format."
She adds, "Most people are going to focus on the use of this technology because it is new, but I think the most important thing is that everyone learned that the process can be very creative and intuitive, [enabling] cinematographers to create looks that may not be possible or practical otherwise."
Deakins is frank in cautioning that there are still wrinkles that need to be ironed out before the digital-intermediate process is as pliable as manipulating images for a TV commercial in a telecine suite. In one shot, for example, he noticed that an extra wearing an orange-yellow dress stood out from the crowd when the greens in the background were desaturated. He told Friede to tone the color of the dress down. That subtle color change now blends seamlessly with the rest of the shot, and the extra disappears into the background. However, Deakins notes that "you can't take a cavalier approach and just say, 'I'm going to change that green to bright red,' because you can end up spending your life timing just one picture." Deakins says, "The process is not a quick fix for bad lighting or poor photography; it is a tool to be used in the same way as any other tool."
In retrospect, Deakins wonders whether the economic need to convert the film images at 2K resolution will impose some creative limitations. "There is a definite quality loss using the DataCine system, which is not even full 2K resolution though none of us are unhappy with the resolution on the film. We found a slight loss of definition acceptable for this film, if not wholly desirable. I think it was pretty minimal, though, given that we were shooting Super 35 and could save an optical step at the lab by doing an anamorphic squeeze digitally."
Priestnall believes that the challenges inherent in using digital-intermediate technology for motion pictures will be resolved with time and experience. She says it would be impractical to scan, store and handle digital files for a complete motion picture at 4K resolution today, but notes that costs for computers and memory are coming down. She predicts that as the use of the technology becomes more prevalent, it could become more practical to work at full-film resolution.
"All in all," says Deakins, "it is a great technology and one that I feel will free me from the limitations of today's highly contrasty and saturated stocks. However, there must be a way to view the images while timing them in a digital suite on a large, calibrated screen. It is all well and good to watch a 16-inch monitor in a telecine bay, but when the results are to be seen on a 40-foot screen, it is impossible to judge the image correctly without projection."
The cinematographer says the Spirit DataCine is "restrictive, in that color timing is done from the original cut neg and not from a digital file. Thus, every correction or adjustment made involved the rescanning of the original negative. Naturally, it would make much more sense to be able to time the scanned file, especially if you are incorporating dissolves and CGI files into your master. I hope it will soon be cost-effective to output more than a single negative or positive, so that all release prints can be struck from a first-generation output and not from a dupe negative. This would certainly help preserve the image quality of the release prints."