Making its European debut
at the Cannes Lions 2003, there's no doubting the enthusiasm
of the high profile directors who signed on for Dreams 2 -
Joy, a collection of eight shorts produced with CineAlta.
Director David Denneen sees a fantastic future for high definition
technology. "We had a few insecurities which we ironed
out and worked around," he says. "But I can see
in three to five years, we will be using nothing else. I wouldn't
be buying a new film camera right now."
Similarly, another Dreams director,
Rocky Morton, is sure that film will eventually be replaced
by HD. "There's no question about it," he says.
"If you think about the photographic process, what one
is doing is gathering light and turning it into information,
and whether you're doing that chemically or digitally it doesn't
really matter."
Joy is masterminded by the New
York-based advertising agency Young & Rubicam, and Sony.
It aims to promote CineAlta HD kit to the advertising community
and is a showcase of eight four-minute films, all shot and
post produced on CineAlta.
So far, there have been screenings
in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. As with the first Young
& Rubicam / Sony “Dreams” project in 2002,
the directors' films were inspired by the interpretation of
one word. Last year, the word was "Dreams", but
this time it is "Joy".
Apart from Denneen (from Form)
and Morton (MJZ), the other directors taking part are Bryan
Buckley (Hungry Man Films), Jeff Darling (Radical Media),
Nacho Gayan (Traffic), Melodie McDaniel (The Directors' Bureau),
Noam Murro (Biscuit) and Mike Smith (Vinton Studios).
CineAlta is still a relatively
new medium, and Gayan, who is based in Barcelona, says, "Shooting
and post production using the CineAlta kit in this way is
something that has never been done in Spain before. The quality
of the work produced proves the medium's true versatility,
creativity and utter suitability for the commercials market."
All the films were finished in
February. So what did the directors think of CineAlta in comparison
to film? Like many in the project, Smith greatly appreciated
the monitor that accompanies the CineAlta camera. "The
quality of what we were looking at was far more superior to
a video assist," he says. “My preference is to
work at least with a 14” monitor where I can paint with
light in detail. Smaller monitors are ok, but given the importance
of monitoring in HD its always better to go big.”
Buckley agrees. "When you're
shooting on film, you get a bad video tap, and you don't really
know what you're getting," he says. "In this case,
you're colour correcting on set, and you're seeing exactly
what you're getting." This allowed him to make "definitive
choices" and saved time in postproduction. "We colour
corrected while we were shooting. So there was very little
work done in post," he says. “With HD monitoring,
where you actually see what you are lighting I believe that
light meters and video vectorscopes will be used only occasionally.”
Morton points out another advantage.
"You can just leave the cameras running, with fifty minutes
of tape in there," he says. "The flow of the performance
isn't interrupted continually with film running out. It's
a sort of seamless flow, which is more beneficial for the
relationship between the actors and the director.
"You can shoot in a lot lower
light situations," he adds. "You could almost shoot
in the dark. In fact, I once did an experiment with HD where
I shot somebody without any lights whatsoever. I was using
the light from the playback monitor itself to light the subject."
"Lighting can be easier from
a director's point of view," says Denneen, "as it
is absolutely clear to him how it is going to look on the
shoot. The depth of field is great, and you can see things
clearly, both in the foreground and the background.
"CineAlta can be given a filmic
look. "What I normally do is put Neutral Density filters
on the lens," says Morton. "You put a dark filter
on the lens to fool the camera into thinking there's less
light level."
"I've actually destroyed the
image quite a lot," adds Smith, "with a lot of things
you would do with film, like using soft filters, and putting
a lot of atmosphere into a shot. We went for more of a designed
look."
But Darling says there's no need
to emulate film. "It's not about that any more,"
he says. "There are so many formats. I mean, you look
at famous directors like Steven Soderbergh doing stuff on
three-chip [he shot the feature Full Frontal on DVCAM], you
look at the amount of stuff done on mini DV, and the big steps
in digital projection. So if you get to see movies shot in
Mini DV imagine what can you expect if you use a CineAlta
with all its technical capabilities.”
And CineAlta certainly gives the
director lots of options. "You could make it look like
a three chip piece," says Darling, "or you could
make it look like a film. The beauty I found with it was that
there was a whole vocabulary to play with. Once you got out
of the idea of the mimicry of film, it really opened up a
new world."
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