In a world where video production and post-production technology have reached previously unthinkable levels of sophistication, independent moviemakers can now use their medium to accommodate nearly any artistic aspiration within a reasonable budget. If that profound statement is accurate, then the digital revolution has never looked better-and that's especially true with tape-to-film­transfers. The number of features originally shot on video and then transferred to film has been higher than ever this year. At least three struck gold: The Blair Witch Project by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, On the Ropes by Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen, and Conceiving Ada by Lynn Hershmann-Leeson. These projects could not be more different in terms of theme, genre and aesthetic persuasion, but their creators each used tape-to-film methods in a unique way, and each found distribution at the Sundance Film Festival (BWP and Ropes in '99; Ada in '98).

In an attempt to identify the "golden rules" of the 35 mm transfer, MovieMaker asked the three creative teams on these projects to share what they learned, and to discuss the advantages and obstacles posed by the new technology. We limited questions to the following: 1) Brief genesis of the project. 2) Format and equipment chosen and why, and 3) Research done on the transfer process and reasons for selecting a particular transfer facility. We've left their responses verbatim.

On The Ropes. Co-director and cinematographer Brett Morgen's first documentary, Ollie's Army, about the grassroots support behind Oliver North's senate campaign, won several awards at the San Francisco Film Festival, IDA and UFVA. (The other part of the team is Nanette Burstein, 1997 Emmy Award-winning producer). This new film follows the stories of three boxers and their trainer as they prepare for the 1997 Golden Glove tournament at the famed Bedstuy Gym in Brooklyn. Polished and impeccably photographed, the film was shot almost entirely with a 537A Beta SP camera (typically used for TV newscasts). The release by Winstar (formerly Fox Lorber) began nationally in August.

Brett Morgen: "Back in 1996 Nanette and I were looking for a documentary project  to work on together. We wanted to create a documentary that felt, smelled, and breathed like a fiction film. Around that time Nanette read about the Bedstuy Gym and heard they had a good reputation for training women, so she decided she wanted to learn how to box. (The fact that she and I were romantically involved at the time had nothing to do with it!). The first person she met at the gym was Harry (the trainer and star of our film) and through him she met the other boxers-Tyrene, Noel, and George, who later became our cast.

We began shooting in August, 1996 and filmed nearly every day until April, 1997. Our biggest challenge was to capture all the action in the present, hoping that it would work into a three-act structure. We didn't want to rely on talking-head interviews. At first we used a Sony 3-chip Hi-Eight camera, which we owned, out of necessity; we couldn't afford to rent the equipment because we had no money throughout principal photography. After a few weeks, though, we gained access to a 537A Beta SP camera from NYU, where Nanette was enrolled. That move made a monumental difference. For one, we were now working in a broadcast format. The camera was heavier and had shoulder support, which afforded me greater stability. It also had a nice lens, so I shot the film the way I wanted: shot/reverse-shot, always shooting on the eyeline-like a feature a film. We locked picture in October of 1998.

At this point, we had to raise about $250,000 to finish the film and were able to arrange a co-production deal with TLC (The Learning Channel) and the distribution company Fox Lorber (now Winstar Cinema). Nanette and Nancy Baker (who also edited the gritty docs Harlan County, USA and Streetwise) cut the film in six months. By the time we finished cutting, we had a really special film and didn't want a poor transfer to ruin months of hard labor. At the time, I was aware of 4Media and Sony. However, I had seen Ulrike Koch's documentary, The Saltmen of Tibet, at Film Forum the previous year and had been blown away by the transfer, which was done, I found out, by a company in Switzerland called Swiss Effects. The day I reached them was the first day they set up a North American office. We worked out a deal and did the transfer with them. On the Ropes was the first NTSC transfer Swiss Effects did for the U.S. theatrical market.

Working with Swiss Effects was amazing! During production we hadn't thought that far ahead and didn't do anything to prepare for the transfer. Our assumption was that at some point we would have to do a 16mm blowup for festivals. I wasn't framing for a 35mm aspect ratio. I wish I had. When we realized that we needed a 35mm print, I had to re-adjust every shot of the film in post to fit the 1:66 aspect ratio. We chose the 1:66 aspect ratio instead of 1:85 to keep more of our original frame. At Swiss Effects they worked with us to get the look we wanted. They are remarkable in that they work with filmmakers from pre-production through the delivery of the negative, making all kinds of recommendations for optimal results."

The Blair Witch Project. Written, directed and edited by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, produced by Florida-based Haxan Films and distributed by Artisan Entertainment. This year's Park City at Midnight runaway hit, The Blair Witch Project smashed existing box-office records for "fledgling" distributor Artisan Entertainment, the cultmaker wizards responsible for last year's success story, Pi. Taking in $1.5 million at the box-office on opening weekend in July, The Blair Witch Project put an indie spin on the term summer block­buster as it went on to gross a dizzying $30 million on its first weekend in wide release, second only to the Julia Roberts' Runaway Bride. Shot for an alleged total of less than $40,000 in Hi-8 and 16mm black and white, Blair Witch cleverly incorporates the use of video in the narrative to heighten the credibility of the story which, in case you spent your summer vacation somewhere other than earth and haven't heard, is built on the premise that footage has been discovered from a missing team of documentary film students who disappeared in the woods while researching a legend about a witch.

BWP's producer, Gregg Hale, spoke with MovieMaker just before the movie's July 16th US. release.

Greg Hale: "The basic idea for the movie was Ed and Dan's, from film school (University of Central Florida) in '93. In the Summer of '96, Dan gave me a five-minute off hand pitch one night and literally 10 minutes later we were shaking hands on my commitment to produce the film. We ini­tially planned to shoot the whole thing on black-and-white 16mm. From the point of view of the narrative, though, the film wouldn't have worked had it been shot entirely on film because we would have lost the "you are there" feel that's so important to building the tension. Video made sense, both because it would save us money and it helped the story where the main character is an obsessive documentarian and a poor student. We had to concentrate on the believability of the gear/formats from the characters' standpoint. The actors ended up shooting 18 hours of video in the course of an eight day shoot. Even at 86 minutes, it would have been hard to justify how they could carry so much film and how they could afford it. So we chose a consumer grade Hi-Eight, which would have been the logical choice for her to make as a character, and our cinematographer's CP16 because, well, that's all we could get. And, again, it worked story-wise-that's the workhorse camera for most film schools. Also, the CP is a solid, tough camera and we knew we were gonna be putting the gear through some rough stuff.

Having footage shot by the actors was always a part of the film; what we were hoping for was 15-20 minutes of usable footage that would then be edited in a more conventional documentary style. As Ed and Dan got further into editing, though, we saw there was a real narrative and power to the footage by itself, but we were still convinced we needed some of the traditional documentary stuff. We shot several newscasts, a 1940s style newsreel about the killer Rustin Parr, a '70s style "In Search of"... type show, and a few other things, which we called "Phase 2." By themselves, they worked beautifully, but when we tried to integrate it into the footage, it just didn't work. It took the audience out of the woods, which diminished the power of the ‘found footage.’  We were split on whether to lose Phase 2 or try to make it work Ed and Dan must have tried 30 different edits until we all sat down one night and made the (at that time) difficult decision to excise everything but the 'found footage: There were a few B-Roll type shots on film that were not shot by the actors, but they shot everything with action going on. We were definitely going for a home video look and feel. We did no research on the transfer! It wasn't much of a consideration at this stage. But I wouldn't recommend that to someone making a standard narrative film. We transferred to film after we were accepted to Sundance. Since we wanted the film to look raw, however, many of the detri­ments of transferring video to film (jerky motion, grain, muted colors, etc) became assets for us. We wanted it to look like video trans­ferred to film. We even maintained the 1:1.33 aspect ratio of the Hi-8 after we transferred to 35mm film. 4MC did the transfer, and it was a relatively pain-free process, except for writing the check."

Conceiving Ada. Written and directed by Lynn Hershmann-Leeson, the world renowned multi-media artist whose artwork is included in such collections as New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center. Her ongoing electronic diary "First Person Plural" has won numerous awards worldwide and was recently screened at the Berlin Film Festival. She was the first woman to receive a tribute and a retrospective at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1995. Conceiving Ada, in Sundance 1998 as an American Spectrum entry, is exquisitely crafted around the his­torical character Ada Byron King, daughter of the famous British poet, Lord Byron. Boldly mixing time frames and media formats, Leeson used cutting edge technology to create period locations and special effects. Shot partly in 35mm and partly with a digital Beta camera, virtual sets were used for period sections, while computer animation programs such as Quicktime were employed for animated segments. The movie enjoyed a fairly successful run in limited theatrical release this past spring through Winstar (Fox Lorber).

Lynn Hershamm Leeson: "I first learned about Ada Byron King in 1993. Sometimes known as the "mother of all programmers," she was a visionary mathematician in Victorian England and an original thinker. She predicted the advent of modern-day computer language, and foresaw many uses for "Babbage's machine" [Charles Babbage, the English mathematician, invented the precursor of the first modern computer in the mid-19th Century ed.], like music composition, poetry and art. She changed the world and revolutionized the way we think-and yet she was invisible to most people. I knew I had to tell her story, but I wanted to relate it to the way we live now-I wanted to show what she had accomplished and how what she created lived through us into the future. This was the basis of the two time frames and the main reason why I wanted to use two media. Film would tell the story in the present, while the past-which from Ada's point of view is really the future-would come out through the computer and be shot on digital video, with computer-generated effects. I used a digital Betacam because we found this to be the best equipment avail-detriments of able at the time and I needed video for the video to film compositing. It made sense to do the period portion in digital.

I had 386 pictures taken of bed-and-breakfast places that looked like Victorian England, put them into Photoshop files and these became the background sets for the rooms. We cut mats in hallways and doors that people walked through. When we wanted a different scene, we just pressed a button.  When we wanted to animate something like fire or rain, we used Quicktime movies, a computer animation program. This was all done in real time, and this is how this process is innovative. The actors loved the virtual sets (blue screen); for them it was very much like acting on stage, very intuitive, very interactive. They would look in the monitors around the blue screen to see what the set was supposed to look like, then place themselves and forget about it pure acting.

It was very liberating.  With only a full week of tests with virtual sets, though, I could have pushed it a lot more. For example, you can't pan or zoom on a virtual set because things go out of focus and you lose the background. So we had to keep the camera locked in. Had I known that beforehand, we would have planned the shots differently.  Instead we added some of the camera movement in post-production.

The total cost of principal photography in both media was $119,000. Editing film and tape together was very pricey because they each had different frame rates and at the time there were no machines to compensate for the 29/9 to 24 ratio. Most of the editing was done by hand, frame by frame, and it took over a year and a half. We transferred the digital video to Hi-Definition format and then to 35mm, then we re-edited the entire piece and finally edited the video, the 35mm portion, and everything together to take out the random frames. We edited five times, and as soon as we finished, machines were released that could have accommodated the frame rate project.

The budget estimate for this film, had it been shot in the traditional way, was about $12 million. Our original budget was $220,000 and final cost was about $400,000, though we received about for us." $700,000 in equipment, access and transfers. The transfer was done at the Sony High Definition Center, and they were the best because they helped us with the pricing. The final result was more beautiful and smoother than we had expected. It was like a watercolor wash."

These three creative teams’ experiences notwith­standing, the concern is still that the wide range of options now open to moviemakers may confuse and even mislead the uniniti­ated, yielding disappointing results. "Video is still a new medium," comments Judson Rosebush, director of special effects at Cineric, where Errol Morris's new documentary, Mr. Death, has been transferred. "It's not a bad idea to leave room in the budget for some preliminary test-shooting before committing money to a certain project. In video, it's perhaps even more necessary than in film-your choices in pre-production will permeate all aspects of production down to the transfer. Issues to consider are direc­tion of the action, lighting, photography, camera movement, choice of aspect ratio and technical decisions such as what frame rates you shoot at. The way actors act and the way you frame them, close-ups and so on, affects composition. Whereas in traditional television you have a 1:1.33 aspect ratio, in film you almost always have the wide aspect ratio (1:1.66 or 1:1.85), so a portion of the image has to go to fit t the screen aspect ratio. Certain types of lighting that might look acceptable on video could very well deteriorate in the transfer and look horrible on film. Resolution is much higher for film than it is for video, so small details that might be missed on a video shoot will be magnified in the transfer and on the larger screen. Camera movements like panning need to be con­sidered, also: traditionally the shutter would impress the image on celluloid more or less simultaneously; video will instead scan the image so that the top of the image is temporarily ahead of the bottom of the image. If you're panning rapidly, the bottom of the image won't match the top. The other issue is that television is 30 frames per second and film is 24 frames per second, so you have to consolidate some of the video frames in order to produce film frames. Basically, you have to have an idea of the look you're going for and then do your research.

Most transfer facilities offer printed guidelines, manuals or oral advice to help filmmakers make optimal decisions early in the process in terms of format, destination (which determines the screen aspect ratio and is often distribution contingent), and transfer options (PAL systems frame-rate conversion is closer to film, for instance). All other considerations, however, are tied into the final look a moviemaker is trying to achieve, whether that may be as close to film as possible, documentary-like, or home-video style. Brett Morgan of On the Ropes echoes Rosebush's advice: "The starting point should be the look you're going for," he says. "And that, no one can tell you." MM