David Bigelow: The Tapeless Post-Production Workflow
The ultra-portable Mac editing platform accompanied the Moody Street crew everywhere — from location shoots of golden fall foliage to the green screen stage where the director built layers for his ghostly special effects. “Stimpson had the whole film on his PowerBook and LaCie drive,” explains Bigelow. “He’d bring the entire post suite on set and use Final Cut Pro to make edits up to the last minute, so he was able to show us a scene in full HD and explain what he wanted to shoot next.”
Stimpson also used the setup to record green screen elements right on the set. “That is never done,” says Bigelow. “You don’t normally capture the HD and the laptop edit at full resolution on location. Usually you shoot your tapes and bring them into your edit system later. But we were able to shoot in HD, grab the footage off the 1200-A deck and just start working on it.”
That allowed an immediate and interactive feedback loop, slicing away guesswork and greatly reducing the need for covering shots and retakes. “We used Final Cut Pro with the chroma key filter to composite a shot with the green screen keyed out — right on the set,” he says. “We’d throw together these garbage mattes to instantly see how the shots and timing were working. And to be able to do that while the actor is standing in front of the green screen, so you can see the scene in context, is not a very common occurrence.”
Calibrating Scariness
Having the edit suite close at hand helped the director get the best performances from his actors. “We were on the green screen stage to shoot a ghost scene, and we’d already shot footage in which Julie Delpy reacts to seeing the ghost,” relates Bigelow. “The actor playing the ghost watched Julie’s footage to gauge how scary she needed to be to elicit that reaction. Plus, she could see exactly where to position herself in relation to the background plates — the bedroom window her ghost would float through once we composited the shot.”
Most beneficial was the ability to instantly insert the shot and determine whether it had to be done over. “It’s one thing to look at it in playback and say, ‘Oh, that looks good,’” Bigelow explains. “But that’s just the green screen. To actually edit the shot into the movie before you get your next shot was the most interesting aspect of what we did.
We’d be right there on stage with our equipment and we could key out the green screen and look at what we’d just done, all composited with the background and everything.”
“[The tapeless workflow] is so simple that it makes people more willing to experiment. You can have multiple versions of a scene and a wider palette of choices to pull from.”
Let’s Move On
Inevitably during filming directors must backfill missing moments essential to the film’s trajectory. “Having Final Cut Pro right on the set meant that we could make sure any new inserts were properly matched with the previous footage,” notes Bigelow.
In one scene, Stimpson had captured a wide-angle shot of Lucy picking up her doll, but not a close-up. “Later we decided that was an important expository shot to let the audience notice important details about the doll’s face,” says Bigelow. “So we built a replica of part of the set, lit it and got one of our assistant directors, who’s very short, to put on the costume. We shot her hand and the doll without having to bring back the child actor.”
Director John Stimpson discusses a scene with actors Justin Theroux and Julie Delpy.
They were able to match the shots with surgical precision. “We used Final Cut Pro to compare the old shot with the new one, see the littlest differences — the lighting, the position of the doll’s hair, how the cuff of the sleeve was rolled up — and make it seamless,” says Bigelow. “Then we edited the new shot right into the scene. I don’t know of anyone who’s gone to the stage, shot a scene, edited it in and called it final. But on this film we did that in three places where we had gaps.”
On tight budget indie films, it’s a big advantage. “If you can’t look at it in the edit, you don’t know if you got the best shot,” notes Bigelow. “Reshooting means thousands of dollars for actors and props and stage and crew — and time to set up and film. Knowing your shot matches the rest of the scene means you can cut out a lot of uncertainties about adding costs and missing deadlines.”
Easy File Transfers
The tapeless post workflow made it a breeze to send files to Brickyard, a special effects house, for compositing. “We shot in DVCPRO HD and used the native 24fps compression rate, so there was no better version of our footage,” says Bigelow. “A one- to three-second shot only needs between 6MB and 18MB on our FTP site — which is not that huge. So we said, we have gigabytes of FTP space available, why don’t we use that to send stuff back and forth?”
The model would not have worked had they stayed with Avid, he notes. “Avid would have meant either choosing low-res SD video, which wouldn’t be good enough for creating visual effects, or capturing these enormous files in HD — but they’d be much too large to transfer via FTP. But the Apple/Panasonic DVCPRO HD compression codec was so good we were able to zip files back and forth easily.”
Bigelow and his team outputted their green screens as DVCPRO HD-compressed QuickTime files. “Brickyard got to work on the exact same media we had brought into the computer,” he notes. “When a composite was final, they’d upload it to our side. We’d pull it down and use QuickTime Pro to create 24fps files and import them into Final Cut Pro.”
