Yes/No Productions are a small Brighton-based production company with a huge reputation. They created Stomp — the energetic stage show in which highly choreographed performers use everyday objects, such as dustbin lids and oil drums, to produce incredible multi-layered rhythms. And now, 12 years on from its first performance, the creators are winning international acclaim with “Pulse: A Stomp Odyssey” — the first large-format movie to be edited entirely with Apple’s Emmy Award-winning Final Cut Pro software.
Pulse is a spectacular display of the rhythms from around the world that inspired the original Stomp show. From wild Brazilian carnival beats to passionate Flamenco dancers, the movie celebrates the universal language of rhythm — an important conscious and sub-conscious bond that unites the people of the world. And in the Imax format, the audience is totally immersed in the experience.
Creating any large-format film invariably presents many challenges, not least finding the funds for such a venture. Because each still is 10 times the size of a 35mm frame, film stock and lab costs can be prohibitively high — up to 10 times more than a normal feature film. Consequently, co-creator/director Steve McNicholas and partner Luke Cresswell were keen to cut costs, and having experimented with Final Cut Pro in previous projects, by the time they started work on Pulse they felt they had the technical ability to do all the editing themselves using their own PowerBook G4s and Power Mac G4 towers. They also wanted to retain editorial control. “We wanted the performances to ring true”, explains McNicholas. “Whenever we’ve worked with other editors, we’ve had to force the issue that we’ve wanted the ‘real thing’”.
One common problem when working with film editing on video is that while film is shot at 24 frames per second (fps), standard PAL video runs at 25fps. So if you transfer the film to video at normal speed, an extra interpolated frame is created every second — which is bad news if you’re trying to match a rapid drumbeat to the exact movements of a performer hitting a drum. To get over this problem, Steve and Luke ran the film through the telecine transfer machine slightly faster than real time — at 25fps. They then imported the PAL video into Final Cut Pro 4, and used Cinema Tools to log all the footage and conform the video speed back down to 24fps.
Next page: Larging It With Cinema Tools
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