The Crimson Wing: Filmmaking takes flight
The field edit suite was comprised of a 24-inch iMac (with a spec that met solar power requirements) running Final Cut Studio for editing, plus two MacBooks and a 2GHz MacBook Pro. Footage, shot originally on 35mm film, was viewed on two 30-inch Apple monitors, while a Sony DSR 11 DVCAM deck was used for DV capture and several floating hard drives provided additional gigs.
Matthew Aeberhard with Maasai man.
“Thanks to the broadband connection, we were able to transmit footage, music and stills, back and forth between Tanzania, Soho and France”, says Ward. This made for a much faster review process, which helped keep the project on time and on budget. Ward says, “We didn’t have to wait until we got back to London to hand over all the rushes for editing; the principal photography stage and the post-production process were able to overlap”.
The same applied to The Cinematic Orchestra, composers of the film’s score, who were based in New York but able to receive raw footage early on in the production and begin work immediately.
Edits completed by post-production editor, Nicolas Chaudeurge, using two 2.8GHz Mac Pro Intel Dual machines with 8GB of RAM apiece, were couriered back to Tanzania on external hard drives so that Aeberhard and Ward could begin the approval process. “Any additional thoughts could be put together in the form of rough edits with audio and sent back immediately”, says Ward. “It became a tool for communicating our ideas”.
“Chaudeurge, for example, in London, was able to use Final Cut Studio to scale up incoming footage and finish it to a standard suitable for cinema release – a highly efficient and cost-effective way of working”.
Chaudeurge heartily agrees on this point. “One of the best things about using Final Cut Studio for Crimson Wing is we could affordably have up to three computers working on the project in London”, he says. “Swapping sequences between ourselves and the team in Africa couldn’t have been easier”.
He made particular use of the colour correction tool in FCP, which he describes as “very powerful”. He adds, “We also used Motion to preview some effects, and did a lot of speed changes and playing of shots backwards”.
Most of the effects in the film are invisible – flopping, for example, where images are reversed, and repeat backgrounds – plus a great deal of touching up. Final Cut Pro excelled at these, as well as at the assembly stage of the project. “It was very good at assembly”, comments Chaudeurge. “The way it operates facilitates decision making as you can enable and disable a variety of clips”. Final Cut Pro can be used to set up shot sequences that sit behind the main sequence but which can be accessed for an alternative edit. “If we wanted to try something different”, says Chaudeurge, “we’d simply bring the alternative shots to the front and see how they worked in the edit”.
Chaudeurge also appreciated FCP’s ability to select everything past a particular point on multiple tracks and move them simultaneously with the grabbing tool. “It’s great to have these sorts of options”, he says.
“Overall, Final Cut Studio is very capable”, concludes Chaudeurge. “It’s perfect for projects where you have to do a lot with a single piece of software – it can do everything!”
During their entire twelve-month period beside Lake Natron, the team encountered barely any problems with the Apple equipment. But if something had gone wrong – neither Aeberhard nor Ward were technology experts – how would they have coped? “Such is the simplicity of the Apple technology, I felt confident I could deal with any problems”, says Ward. “There was a bit of wear and tear”, he says, “but even in that rugged environment, very little went wrong”.
Another reason for choosing Apple was what Ward describes as “the seamless integration of applications”. He says, “I find once you’ve mastered one piece of Apple software, you can operate most others. It meant we didn’t need outside help to make full use of all the software – such as DVD Studio Pro, iWeb for posting communications for Disneynature, and Shake for the automated stabilisation of aerial shots at the offline stage”.
He adds, “A set-up where you’re beaming project files all over the world relies on a compatibility of systems and software, and this is what we’re seeing increasingly in this industry. People are relying on Macs”.
