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AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER JUNE 2008

Finishing Wild Ocean

by Stephanie Argy

As winter arrives in the southern hemisphere in June and July, millions of sardines migrate from the southern tip of South Africa north toward Mozambique and the warmer waters of the Indian Ocean. This enormous traveling shoal of fish can stretch as long as nine miles, and is so dense with sardines that from the air, it looks like a giant oil slick. But just as spectacular as the shoal itself are the predators that follow it: thousands of sharks, tens of thousands of dolphins, and hundreds of thousands of Cape Gannets, diving birds that plunge 40’ to 50’ into the swirling mass of fish. Meanwhile, along the shore, local residents wade or boat out into the water, scooping up as many sardines as they can in everything from dishwashing bins to buckets.

In 2006 and 2007, directors Steve McNicholas and Luke Cresswell, best known for the percussive stage musical Stomp, set out to capture the events surrounding this massive natural phenomenon. The resultant 40-minute 3-D Imax film, Wild Ocean – produced by Giant Screen Films and Yes/No Productions - called for four cinematographers and a range of equipment that spanned digital, 35mm, 65mm, 2-D and 3-D acquisition. To capture all the action, the production needed to have the flexibility of a run-and-gun-documentary crew, but their goal was high-resolution images worthy of a giant-screen release. “We decided to take a multi-pronged approach and call the best people in the field,” says Reed Smoot, ASC, the lead cinematographer on the project.

Smoot, working with McNicholas, shot coastal action along 800 miles of the Indian Ocean, from Durban, South Africa all the way south to Mossel Bay, capturing a range of images of the local culture and how it is affected by the sardine run, while also handling the aerial unit and a grueling, all-night shoot aboard a fishing boat; Peter Anderson, ASC was the 3-D director of photography, working with Smoot to oversee the three-dimensional aspects of the shoot; and D.J. Roller, a director/cinematographer with extensive experience in 3-D and underwater cinematography, worked with Cresswell on the underwater work while synching their efforts with David Douglas, a director/cinematographer who specializes in giant-screen production and who shot topside footage of the migration.

Each of the four units frequently worked with different cameras. Smoot primarily used two Imax Solido 15-perf 65mm 3-D rigs, each of which recorded the pair of stereo images onto two separate rolls of film; Smoot and Anderson also worked with Max Penner, using his Paradise (a.k.a. “Paracam”) 3-D beam splitter rig with two Arri 435s; and Douglas used an Imax MSM 9802 65mm 2-D camera as well as a Lockheed 65mm 3-D camera – also provided by Imax – which records both “eyes” onto a single strip of film. (Each frame covers 30 perfs, and thus a 1,000’ roll of film lasts about 90 seconds.)

For the underwater work, the filmmakers considered various possibilities, including Imax’s underwater system. “It's beautiful, but it's approaching the size of a Volkwagen — you need a major ship and a hoist,” says Anderson. Moreover, the film loads last 3 minutes, and the camera must be taken out of the water to be reloaded. To avoid such difficulties, the production turned to Vince Pace and Pace Technologies, who provided the team with a Black Betty, a custom built underwater version of the 3-D Fusion high-definition (HD) system that uses two customized Sony F950 cameras. Pace also provided a customized underwater SRW-1 deck, which recorded the images for both right and left eyes onto a single piece of tape, freeing up extra room for that data by shooting at a 4:2:2 bit depth rather than 4:4:4.

The two ocean-based units assigned to shoot the migration worked out of a small fishing village, Port St. John, South Africa. Each day, the crews had to make a long journey from the village into the water. “There are steep vertical cliffs that go on for hundreds of miles,” remembers Roller. “We had to go down a river in two Zodiac rubber boats, then go out into the ocean through heavy surf.” They also devised a ramp they could use to slide the 3-D rig from the Zodiacs into the water in a matter of seconds.

For those two units, the grail was to shoot a “bait ball,” a chaotic event in which sardines are herded into a smaller area (usually by dolphins) and then attacked by frenzied predators. But during the first winter of shooting, in 2006, it became apparent that there was a major problem: for the first time in recorded history, the migration didn’t seem to be materializing. Finally, at the very end of the winter — on the last day of the six weeks the crew spent there in 2006, according to Anderson — they were able to capture the desired event. Smoot recalls, “We were able to get topside footage of the birds hitting the surface of the water, and then D.J. was able to pick them up from below. I think all our efforts come together in that final sequence; it’s a battle but a bit of a ballet as well.”

Roller and Douglas returned the following winter, when the migration was more active, to shoot more footage of the sardines. Once filming wrapped, McNicholas and Cresswell edited the movie, cutting downconverted video footage on a laptop using Final Cut Pro. Once the cut was finished, Burbank facility FotoKem scanned the 65mm footage at 8K using its Imagica scanner, then down-rezzed it to 4K. “That made it possible for us to get a higher-quality 4K,” says Daniel Rapo, producer for digital film services at FotoKem. Meanwhile, DTS Digital Images in Burbank converted all the 35mm and HD footage into 4K scans for use in the digital intermediate (DI). “They oversample detail from a series of frames,” explains Andrew Oran, FotoKem’s vice president of sales and operations for large-format projects. “Through frame-to-frame analysis, they find additional detail. Part of their process also de-grains the image and makes it more presentable.”

According to Rick Gordon, Wild Ocean’s post supervisor, the DTS process made it possible to pull out all the available detail in the HD material, and he didn’t feel anything was lost by shooting in 4:2:2 rather than 4:4:4. He adds that although many underwater Imax films have been shot in relatively shallow water (because it’s difficult to see detail in footage shot at great depth), the noise reduction at DTS has advanced to such an extent that the team was able to make huge strides in what could be seen and resolved. “There’s not a scene in the film where you struggle to see detail,” says Gordon. “A lot of the credit goes to D.J. Roller, but also to DTS and their up-rezzing process, and to the attention paid to the contrast ratios and color in the DI suite.”

Rapo says it was relatively easy to integrate the HD and film material because the HD camera was used exclusively for underwater work. “If we’d had any topside HD material, [matching] might have been an issue, but when you go underwater, it’s a another world — so much so you accept the differences [between film and video].”

Once the footage had been either scanned by FotoKem or processed by DTS, the two directors, along with Smoot, Roller, Gordon and stereographer Alan Markowitz, went into one of FotoKem’s two 4K 3-D DI suites for about three weeks; they spent one week on assembly and two on color correction. The room is outfitted with a Quantel Pablo 4K system running the new stereoscopic 3-D option, making it possible to view a project in 3-D while working on it.

Working in 3-D on the Pablo allowed the filmmakers to adjust convergence — the spacing between the images for the two eyes — during the DI. Colorist Walter Volpatto explains that the jump between two consecutive shots that have very different points of focus in space can be unexpectedly tiring to the viewer’s eye. “It’s very stressful for the eye to move back and forth, and in the long run, it will give you a headache,” he notes. The problem can be addressed during the DI by adjusting the offset between the two halves of the 3-D image.

During the DI, the 2-D footage was also integrated into the 3-D world. Each 2-D shot was duplicated so that there was one copy for each eye, and then the two images were offset slightly to change their position in space. In some of the shots, the images were also skewed — widened at the top or the bottom — to give an additional feeling of dimensionality. According to Rapo, “We were able to use predetermined offsets provide by Alan Markowitz in tandem with the Pablo’s ability to make on-the-fly stereo adjustments to attain a convincing 3-D effect on the 2-D material.”

Since 4K render times trail behind 2K render times (an issue Gordon says Quantel is continually working to minimize), especially when there are multiple layers or extra graphics, the filmmakers kept both 2K and 4K versions of the show online at all times. In this way, they were able to do real-time manipulations of the material in 2K before applying the same corrections to the 4K version.

Because all of the material was graded in a single room, “we were able to give most of it a pretty consistent look,” says Gordon. “We really pushed our contrast and color saturation, because we’ve discovered that we tend to lose color snap through translating onto the giant screen. Creating a very bold color palette through the whole film gives it a real flow.”

Issue available here: http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/June2008/toc.php