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The Digital Post-Production Democracy
The Revolution is Now Playing at a Theater Near You!
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Have you rushed out to see The Fast Runner, billed as the first ever Inuit-language film and beautifully shot on digital video? If you missed that, maybe you saw Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3, a three-hour plus 24p HD extravaganza, which includes a demolition derby of classic vintage cars played out in a life-sized reproduction of the interior lobby of the Chrysler Building. Or maybe you saw The Château, Jesse Peretz’s improvised Mini DV comedy about two bumbling American brothers who inherit an 18th-century chateau in rance. Almost daily one hears of another digital project gaining theatrical release. While the above three films could not be further apart in terms of production values and philosophies, each one owes its existence to the cost savings and creative empowerment provided by the proliferation of digital video.
These projects represent an inspiring use of new
technologies in the service of truly visionary and independent
moviemaking.
But despite their relative success, accompanied by large quantities
of critical acclaim, these films remain obscure art house pieces,
known only to limited audiences. That, however, can be seen
as the beauty of this brave new world. Smaller, more marginal
movies are financially viable—and being made.
Although more can certainly be done with less in terms of lighting, trucks and crew sizes in the digital world, a video movie production can embody just as much support crew and transportation needs as any film shoot. It’s what happens after shooting that has truly been “revolutionized” by the DV revolution. Digital acquisition streamlines the pathway into special FX and makes it easy to use low-cost digital editing tools that can easily be purchased rather than rented. This empowers low-budget moviemakers to spend more time editing their projects and gives them access to special post FX that simply could not have been realized in films with similar budgets.
As a result of this empowerment, not only are more projects being started, but more projects are being finished. “Labs are graveyards for shows whose funding and energy ran out at the 95 percent point. Digital post is helping filmmakers get over that hump,” says Bruno George, new projects director at Alpha Cine Labs in Seattle, a lab that has specialized in supporting independent moviemakers.
Mystelle Brabbee, artistic director of the Nantucket Film Festival, has seen the outcome as well: “In the past two years, films have been coming in from so many new demographics—teenagers, for example. To see a film from the perspective of a 15-year-old, or an auto mechanic who has dreamed of telling his story for years, or an experimental film from a talented filmmaker liberated by new digital tools—all these illustrate what digital technology has added to the cinematic palette.”
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| Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3, shot on 24p HD, is one recent film that has benefited from the digital revolution. |
Last June, the Nantucket Film Festival invited me to show The Aesthetics of Industrial Scale, a short video that I shot on Mini DV and edited, narrated, on-lined and mastered to DVD in my own studio—on my own digital editing equipment—in a single day. In fact, the film was finished before my wife even got out of bed on that Sunday morning, and never before have I felt for an entire day that everything I did after 10 a.m. was absolute gravy. I mean, I had gotten up at 6 a.m. and single-handedly written, shot, edited, narrated and on-lined a four-minute documentary. This is digital empowerment at its absolute, most crystalline best! And it illustrates that the lines demarcating film projects (narrative, cinematic, expensive and meant to be projected in theaters) and video projects (abstract, experimental, and/or documentary and meant to be shown on television or in galleries) are blurring. Videographers and would-be filmmakers are embracing digital acquisition technologies in the service of all forms of storytelling and experimentation. A project shot on video has an increasing chance of being shown in venues more traditionally reserved for the projection of good old-fashioned celluloid.
But is film post-production dead? Has the revolutionary wave of digital acquisition created the perfect media democracy in which labs and post houses are being wiped out by the DV camera-toting masses? According to Vince Forcier, VP and chief technical officer at Roland House, a post-production facility in Arlington, VA, the effects are mixed.
“Many clients are buying their own equipment and foregoing the amenities in a traditional post facility to do some of the work themselves,” he claims. But rather than meaning the death of their business, he feels this trend is allowing more and more post houses to distinguish themselves. “The right talent (editors, FX artists, colorists) can offer more creative solutions to clients. This adds value and sets a facility that has a great talent pool apart from the rest.”
He goes on to emphasize that “much of the mid-level
work is now gone from the [video] post business, but clients
still come to us for the very high-end creative work.” George
of Alpha Cine agrees that the film middle-class is still going
strong and will not be supplanted by digital for a good
15 years. “The middle isn’t supported,” he states, regarding
digital video.
“I don’t think we’ve reached a point with acquisition, post-production
or distribution to make a successful product, except on the
extremely low and high ends.”
Why hasn’t the digital revolution been able to democratize everything? What’s keeping the throngs of digital mediamakers at bay? The bottleneck is distribution. Every one of the theatrical releases mentioned in the opening paragraph eventually had to be reduced to a thin layer of emulsion on a 35mm piece of acetate and have a super bright analog light source passed through it in order to be seen in a theater. Says George: “Digital projection is coming up… it is still just beyond the horizon. The technical issues will be solved well before the business issues are answered.” What does this mean for all our digital hopefuls who want to make films for theatrical release? “They need a film product at the end of the day,” George concludes. So neither Alpha Cine nor many other film labs are going to be wiped out any time soon.
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| LEFT TO RIGHT: The Fast Runner and The Château were transferred to film before hitting the festival circuit, where they both found theatrical distribution. | |
Digital acquisition, continues George, “is neither
better nor worse in my mind. It’s both different and evolutionary.
Alpha Cine couldn’t deny digital filmmaking. The question was
how best to embrace the trend.”
So while not as much film is being shot, nearly all film labs
are, like Alpha Cine, racing to provide the best quality tape-to-film
transfers, so films can screen on festival and/or theatrical
circuits.
A mistake many aspiring fiction moviemakers make is thinking that simply finishing their films on tape is enough. Tom Edmon, president of HeavyLight Digital, a post-production facility in New York that is currently transferring six films a month from video to film, says that “if a low-budget fiction filmmaker wants to get distribution, they shouldn’t wait to do their tape-to-film transfers. They should budget it from the beginning, because their project will be taken more seriously by festivals and distributors if it’s already on film.” He cites Blaine Thurier’s Low Self-Esteem Girl, which won the Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature at SXSW after being projected there on video, but has yet to find a theatrical distributor to finance the final step to film. Conversely, each of the three films mentioned in the first paragraph took their project all the way to a film print before hitting the festival circuit, where they eventually found distribution.
“The [festival] invited me to screen a short that I’d made in one morning— I got up at 6 a.m. and wrote, edited, narrated, on-lined and mastered to DVD a documentary in my own studio before 10 a.m.” — Steve Hamilton |
If you’re a documentary moviemaker, this may not be as imperative. And it’s “documentary filmmakers who have seen the greatest benefits from the emergence of digital,” according to Edmon. “Documentarians embraced video early on due to the huge cost of film stock and processing.” But that doesn’t just mean that more documentaries are being made. It means that more are getting theatrical distribution as well.
Edmon believes that documentaries bypass some of the distribution bottlenecks outlined above. “A low-budget documentary is much easier to get distributed than a low-budget feature because distributors can sell the story, whereas with fiction films they’re selling who’s in it. If a fiction film doesn’t have some kind of marketable star, it’s a really tough sell.”
Indeed, some documentarians are foregoing traditional distribution channels altogether. Witness the success of Trembling Before G_d, whose producers have been four-walling cinemas and self-marketing in key markets throughout the country.
The success of many recent documentaries notwithstanding, there is still hope for fiction projects as picture quality improves. Roland House’s Forcier says that the growth of digital acquisition has effected a shift in the type of projects coming their way. “We are doing more feature work now due to 24p High Definition.” But while he’s not convinced that digital will achieve the look of film anytime soon, he’s also not so sure that it’s absolutely necessary in order for digital to take over. “There will one day be [digital] cameras with all of the resolution of 35mm film cameras. To exactly mimic the reaction of film to light is a trick that is further off into the future. The real question may be ‘Does digital need to look like film?’ The look of film is certainly real, but the preference for it over any other look is a function of culture. Who would have thought that the extreme looks that we see in music videos and ads—and more recently, in films and television shows—would have been appealing to viewers?” Concludes Forcier, “Because the preference for the look of film—if it exists—is cultural, it is subject to change.”
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| LEFT TO RIGHT: Bruno George (l) and Master of the Game director Jeff Stolhand review settings for transferring his HD 24P master to film at Alpha Cine; participants in the Teens-Eye on the Nantucket Film Festival program. | |
So it seems that the revolution hasn’t completely
succeeded. There is still a comfortable middle-class when it
comes to 35mm film for distribution and acquisition on bigger-budget
projects (and even on many lower-budget shorts and features).
But there are some new candidates in town, and they’re gaining
momentum.
I still make a living editing relatively large-budget feature
film and commercial projects, but my own art is being fueled
by the digital technologies these projects have enabled me to
afford. And while my own tools are relatively high-end and sophisticated
(Pro Tools Audio, Avid digital non-linear video editing), Forcier
points out that soon “every third grader will have editing tools
available at home or school. The manipulation and distribution
of issues/48/images and sound will be a process practiced and understood
by most of the population.”
Indeed, while at the Nantucket Film Festival, I participated in a program co-sponsored by Eyebeam Atelier, a digital media museum and workshop in New York City. It was a program called “Teens-Eye on The Nantucket Film Festival,” which invited seven Nantucket High School seniors to learn moviemaking from visiting festival artists while writing, shooting and editing their own one-minute short films. The intensive program packed it all into the week of the festival and the students’ one-minute shorts were shown to a full house before the closing night film. Working with these young people as they struggled to express themselves cinematically was extremely rewarding, particularly because the digital tools they used to make their films were as simple as they come.
Using off-the-shelf iMac computers, free iMovie software and the simplest Sony one-chip Mini DV cameras, these kids were completely unhindered in any way by the technology. The tools were stripped down and simple, and forced them to focus specifically on shot, story and montage.
The first and the largest digital post waves were
in special FX, but as Brabbee says, “filmmaking is at its best
when rooted in human emotion—no matter what the format.” As
we see more stories from all different types of people, it seems
the revolution is still raging—and it’s being broadcast live
via HD satellite into your living room, showing at a theater
near you or clicked and dragged onto your computer desktop.
It’s a democratic revolution, though, because now you and I
can go out and tell our stories the way we want to. And whether
the audience we find is large or small, we will have a better
opportunity to find it. MM
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This story was published in the Fall 2002 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Digital Post Democracy / The Revolution is Now Playing at a Theater Near You!
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posted 12.14.09
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