When cinematographer Paul Laufer began formulating his ideas for the look of The Cell, he was counting on postproduction technology to catch up with his ambitious visual concepts. His ideas centered around images that were impossible to achieve photographically not because they demanded complicated visual effects, but because the colors and contrast levels he wanted could not be produced either in-camera or through any current laboratory processing technique.
"I wanted more control over the images than was afforded to me in the conventional film pipeline," says Laufer, whose background in commercials and music videos had already exposed him to the wonders of digital manipulation. The problem was that he had more than 30 minutes’ worth of images he wanted to play with, and scanning that much film at full 2K or 4K resolution was both too expensive and too time-consuming. What he needed was a way to scan the footage in real-time at high resolution, color-correct it, alter the contrast, do some multi-plane defocusing for one scene, and then record it all back to film.
Enter Toybox, the visual-effects division of Command Post & Transfer Corporation, a postproduction house specializing in visual and audio services. The facility promised Laufer a smooth solution, offering its proprietary tools and custom software in conjunction with newly developed high-definition (HD) equipment such as the Arrilaser film recorder and the D6 HD videotape recorder. As The Cell’s 14-week shooting schedule ticked by and postproduction began, however, technical wrinkles in the HD equipment still had not been ironed out. "We started this film very relaxed, but [at that point] we began sweating bullets," concedes Laufer. In the end, however, the filmmakers’ faith was well-placed.
The amount of footage to be scanned for the film eventually grew to 50 minutes. Scanning has traditionally been done in the service of visual effects, and while Toybox handled more than 100 visual-effects shots for The Cell, the majority of its work was done strictly to affect the look of certain sequences what Laufer and the film’s visual-effects supervisor Kevin Tod Haug refer to as "look only" shots.
Laufer knew he’d be sacrificing a certain amount of resolution to the digital process, but he decided to take the hit "in order to get a far more interesting look. While HD represents a lower resolution [than 3K or 4K], it’s high enough that you can cheat by ’up-rezzing’ it that is, you increase the resolution through digital tricks."
The scenes to be subjected to the digital process included all of the sequences set in the inner worlds of the characters, such as killer Carl Stargher’s throne room and the den where Catherine (Jennifer Lopez) tries to seduce FBI agent Novak (Vince Vaughn). "The goal with all of these sequences was to instantly [place viewers] in another world without going too far, because [the filmmakers] still wanted to have a certain level of belief," explains Dennis Berardi, visual-effects supervisor for Toybox, which has offices in Toronto, Vancouver and Los Angeles.
Because director Tarsem and Laufer already enjoyed a long-standing relationship with founder/ colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3 in Santa Monica, the filmmakers chose to work with him first in standard NTSC video resolution to establish the look they wanted for the surrealistic sequences. Sonnenfeld then sent the original negative, the print and a digital Betacam copy of his color corrections up to Toronto, where Toybox senior colorist Gary Chuntz matched the look. "Stefan gave us his digital Betacam color reference, and we matched that at HD," recalls Drake Conrad, Toybox’s digital-film supervisor. "From there, our proprietary TIPS [Toybox Image Processing System] came into play."
Conrad, who handled the HD transfer, explains, "The original camera negative is transferred to an uncompressed D6 tape format [in HD]. The images are then color-treated using a Pogle color-corrector, then up-rezzed to 4K through TIPS. Finally, it is recorded back to film using the Arrilaser." (For more about current digital-intermediate pro-cesses, see New Products, beginning on page 153.)
Adds Haug, "The Philips Spirit DataCine has been around for a few years it’s ubiquitous in commercials but now it can do real-time transfers in HD and immediately lay the images off to an uncompressed D6 digital-tape format so that the transfer isn’t tying up equipment for hours or days. In addition, filmmakers have access to all of the tools [featured on] the color corrector. That enabled us to play with the color correction contrast, hue and saturation as well as use power windows and do all of the things you can do in video, but technically not on film."
Berardi details some of the ways in which Laufer’s direction during the Spirit transfer affected the film’s look: "We custom color-corrected people’s faces, kicked out some of the specular highlights, and played with having some of the focus trail off. For example, on a close-up of Jennifer, we were able to pick an area of interest on the photographed frame, keep only that area in focus and have an extreme blur happen behind her head. She would come in and out of the focal plane, which was all image-processed."
Obtaining the look in the HD transfer proved relatively easy; the difficulties with the process cropped up at the other end. "The images looked great when they were output back to film," recalls Laufer. "Initially they were output flat, in normal 35mm, at which point an optical [2.35:1 extraction] was done for the [anamorphic] squeeze. There things fell apart. When the digital output was squeezed for the anamorphic print, the scenes went from being magical to being unacceptable. We therefore had to back up and find a way to avoid doing an optical [blow-up] of the digital output."
The post team wound up outputting the images to film already squeezed, at which point the problem became integrating them into the film. "These large, general-release films are printed on very high-speed printers on which you are not allowed to make any splices, timing changes or any A- and B-rolls," Laufer notes. "So once again, we had to back up. The final solution was doing two extra generations of contact-duping on the real-world sequences in other words, I had to lose two generations on my real-world sequences. In doing extra contact steps in postproduction, you pick up contrast. At that point it became a contrast-control issue."
Filmmakers are always looking for ways to increase their creativity, and studios are always looking for ways to save money. For The Cell, Toybox and its Cinema HD offered both.