American Standard is featured in a short behind-the-scenes article in the Movies section of this week's New York Magazine, where we describe the challenges of shooting in the potty.
"Production Notes: Toilet Cam" by Andrew Adam Newman, New York Magazine, February 12, 2007
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"Studio 360" airs in New York on WNYC Saturday at 10 a.m. on 93.9 FM, and Sunday at 7 p.m. on 820 AM (or check your local listings).
Or, you can click here to stream an MP3 of American Standard on "Studio 360."
To maintain proper light levels I had a full arsenal of Tiffen ND filters on hand to slide into the matte box. If the light levels rose above 5.6 I could bring them down with ND filters. Seems correct - doesn't it? Until we hit our snag.
Anytime we used ND .3 we were fine. The ND did its job and we noticed nothing strange. However, at a particular location, we needed to use the ND .6 filter. It just so happens this location was the same location that our video tap cable was beginning to go and we were monitoring on the green channel only for much of the time (the HVX component connector is terrible). Not having a spare cable on hand we moved forward.
The cable occasionally worked in full color and at one point in the afternoon the script supervisor noticed a color shift. The white walls has a pinkish tint. The green towels were dark magenta (yes, magenta). However, skin tones seem unchanged. The pink shift on the walls was more pronounced in the highlights. Our shoulders slumped as we wondered at what point in the day we slid the filter in place or when the issue started. Luckily, in retrospect, the sequences were all consistent within themselves so we did not lose any footage to this issue.
But the question still stood. What was causing this bizarre and seemingly selective color shift. We spent about a half hour checking over the camera. We could reproduce the issue by sliding the ND filter out and then back in place - the issue was clearly linked to the filter. However, the in camera .9 ND filter did not cause the same shift. So either it was the Tiffen filters or it was the interaction of the Tiffen filters with the HVX.
Move forward a week and we were shooting on a bright sunny day in a bathroom with large windows. We had put ND gels on windows before but this was the first time the intensity of the sun required 1.8 of ND to get it in balance with the interior lighting. After 2 hours of putting up gels we looked at the monitor. Holy smokes - We could not believe it. The light coming throught the windows was now tinted pink. Pull the gels off and it was white. So again, either it was the roscoe gels or it was the interaction of the gels with the HVX. We had to move on and therefore we had to block off the windows and frame them out of the shots. By manipulating the action we managed to get great footage even with this limitation. But the question still remained - Why was this happening?
In posting this issue to many message boards lots of theories came up. People asked about white balance. When the problem occurred we white balanced both before and after the gels/filter was used to no effect. We could white balance to the pink area but the rest of the frame would have been green. Perhaps a camera with a paintbox could have overcome that. We were also asked about the quality of the gels and filters. Roscoe and Tiffen are not top of the line but it is reasonable to expect a good color balance in their materials.
The best explanation I could get was that there is no true ND material. It is only ND relative to the chip or film emulsion that is picking up the light through it. So the internal HVX filters have the proper colormetry and do not cause a color cast. But other materials colormetry will differ and therefore can introduce a color cast.
Here is a thread on DVXuser I started about this issue. It does get a bit heated between another user and myself - but there was a lot of great ideas and input from other people.
Morals of the story. Do not assume ND is truly ND at high amounts for your camera. Always have a spare monitor cable on hand in case the primary dies. Finally, even test the small obvious things such as color temperature when using ND filters.
There are a few obvious advantages to a digital workflow. Most notably is the lack of tapes to track keep a hold of and log. We would shoot our entire feature without touching a single tape (not including the documentary camera). The other notable advantage is that your footage is already digitized, logged with timecode and available to an editing system. While this is true, of course the immaturity of the technology really forced us to figure out how to make the footage immediately available.
Ok - enough with the preamble. Here is the workflow we implemented.
- 4 gig P2 card is loaded into the camera and given a reel number to put on the slate. The card is formatted clean.
- The first shot is slated with the reel number and the shot number identifying the reel.
- Shoot until card is full. For us this amounted to about 10 minutes of footage.
- Pull card and call for new reel. Runner takes card to loader. Loader takes full card and hands off usable card.
- Card is loaded into camera, formatted and the next reel number is put on slate and announced to the script supervisor.
- Loader offloads the P2 card to 2 identical harddrives at the same time. Offload time is the same for 1 usb drive as it is for 2. The bottleneck is not the drive or usb speed.
- Loader then burns the P2 footage to 2 DVDs. This results with the footage being on 2 hard drives and 2 dvds.
Unbreakable rule: We could not force the loader to hand off a card until the footage was verifiably on 2 different locations. It could be the 2 hard drives or the dvds. But until there was redundancy we would have to hold waiting for the offload. This occurred only a handful of times out of the 250 reels we shoot for this film when we were allowing the actors to improvise for entire P2 cards worth of shooting.
The question arises - is 3 locations excessive for the footage. The answer is yes - probably could have done with 2 hard drives and 2 dvd but we wanted location redundancy as well. At the end of a shoot day, one drive and one set of dvds would go home with me and another with the loader. If there were a fire or other problem at one of the locations we would still have a backup of footage.
Reviewing shots on set was relatively easy. We could access any reel on the hard drive with the Panasonic P2 viewer and view the clips. We went through 4 sets of hard drives over the course of the shoot (4 pairs). This meant that on a given day we did not have all the footage with us. This presented a problem when we needed to review a shot that had occurred a long time ago. At times we knew we needed to match a particular shot so we pulled the dvd to bring to set. However, there were times where the workflow left us without a shot we would have liked to review. In retrospect, perhaps one set of hard drives should have traveled with us.
To really get a look at the dailies we loaded the clips into Avid at our editing suite. This allowed us to search easily through the clips, output full resolutions frames and clips for inspection and let us try some sample edits. The key thing is that all of this was available to us without digitizing a single clip (although we did need to copy the clips onto our media drive). In addition, the script supervisors notes immediately matched up with the shots. Every shot is a separate file so cross referencing her notes with the timecoded shots was straightforward.
I will cover working with Avid and P2 footage in a later entry.
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Which means our bathroom search continues! If you have or know of an apartment, office, bar, restaurant, store, or other location with a film-friendly bathroom of any size, shape, or color--especially color--please do send send them our way. We promise not to leave the seat up.
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IN THE CAN PRODUCTION
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New York, N.Y. 10128
(646) 202-1418
Producers
Seth Melnick: seth@slmproduction.com
Lauzanne Nel: lauzanne@slmproduction.com
Jason Kucharsky: jason@americanstandardthemovie.com
Josh Abraham: josh@americanstandardthemovie.com
David Abraham: paco@americanstandardthemovie.com
For MUSIC inquiries
music@americanstandardthemovie.com