Behind the Seen Read online

  View of Cold Mountain in North Carolina.

  June 25, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Having a coffee at Primrose Hill Patisserie before I go to the airport to fly to NY for the Miramax screening. God bless this endeavor and may some good come out of it. I was cleaning out the house and discovered that half of the plants on the terrace have died because I didn’t water them. Embarrassing oversight. How best to fix?

  In New York at the SoHo Grand at 5.30. I met Albert and Ron in the lobby. Sean is on the way to the screening room—they had experienced some “tearing” in the image when they loaded it, so they did two loads (normal and progressive).

  JUNE 25, 2003—NEW YORK CITY

  Within an hour of arriving and checking into his hotel, Murch walks a few blocks to the brick building at 475 Greenwich Street, home to Miramax Films, Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Productions, and the Tribeca Film Center. There on the fourth floor, in the screening room, a run-through of Cold Mountain is about to begin. Minghella, Murch, some of the crew (costume designer Ann Roth, script supervisor Dianne Dreyer), and two of the producers, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, are there. Sean Cullen arrived one day earlier from London so he’d have enough time to transfer the current version of the film from Beta SP videotapes (made with output from Final Cut Pro in London) to a QuBit hard drive digital playback system—a process that takes nearly four hours, since it is done in real time.

  The front entrance to Miramax Films and the Tribeca Film Center in New York City.

  The video projector is an overhead box with a loud fan, and being neither bright enough nor far enough back from the screen (a distance known as the “throw-length”), the image is small. Murch is also unhappy with the sound system. It isn’t as good as the NFT theater in London, and lacks high-end frequency response. There is no time to tune the room per Murch’s modus operandi—an irritant since Murch knows how good the soundtrack really sounds. But such is the fate of the sound mixer. Compared to how it sounded inside Studio A at De Lane Lea, Cold Mountain will sound slightly different in every theater it is shown.

  But the screening goes well. Afterward Ann Roth turns to Anthony and says, “You’re not old, but this may be your masterpiece.” Murch says, referring to the script supervisor, “Dianne liked it but was immediately thinking of things to cut out.”

  JUNE 26, 2003—NEW YORK CITY

  June 26, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  People are assembling at 1:30 for second screening at MMX. About 40 people. We tuned the room and it now sounds much better. Bless this screening and all who sail upon her. Executives and Sydney P. are here, and like the changes we made and the work we did on the sound.

  JUNE 27, 2003—NEW YORK CITY

  June 27, 2003, Murch’s Journal

  Screening for MMX yesterday went well. Much enthusiasm tempered by an awareness of what the length is, and the desire to have the relationship between Ada and Inman be as intense as it can be. Technically, all went well. They felt the image looked very good—better than the resolution they are used to in Avid output screenings. A meeting in conference room afterwards. Harvey and then Bob. Bob felt there was more heat between Sara and Inman than between Inman and Ada. “But when they get together it is great.”

  MMX have agreed to shoot a couple of extra days—“no budget restraints, but let’s preview the film on July 15th and see if there’s anything else we need.”

  Anthony said it was always amazing to him how much of a hot problematical potato I was for HW and other MMXers.

  I am still just blinking in the sunlight of having completed the MMX showing with all its bells and whistles and complications.

  Now having a mojito at a Latin bar up the street from the hotel.

  Is there a way to play the mix on FCP in my room, through Dolby decoders with boom? Where can we get a CP50 Dolby decoder?

  I am overwhelmed at the logistical and statistical difficulty of people getting together with an “intended”—someone who is destined for them, to enhance and complete them and vice-versa. Just looking at people walking around the streets of NY. Everyone seems so vulnerable and guarded to protect their vulnerability. How did Aggie and I get so lucky? One hour left before the car comes to pick me up.

  Congratulations to Sean for guiding the film through all of its wiggling in the last six weeks. There is a screening for Charles Frazier on Sunday. Time to start thinking about going to the airport. God bless the forces that have gotten us to this place.

  I am sitting on Broome Street with a solid traffic jam in front of me—four lanes. Broome and Wooster. Lovely sandblasted Mission-style brick six-story opposite. People listening to the most mindless insect music on their car radios. Now the man just turned to the theme from “The Godfather.”

  Minghella stays on in New York while Murch returns to London to continue editing. At a screening room on Broadway Minghella shows this version of Cold Mountain to author Charles Frazier, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner (Disney owns Miramax), and others. Entertainment industry protocol behooves directors to share their incomplete work with financiers, key people, and influential opinion-makers, even if the movie is a long way from being finished. Like a Renaissance artist preparing frescoes for a Florentine chapel, when Lorenzo de Medici and the Pope want to come take a look, it’s not too wise to say no.

  With these screenings the concomitant set of notes—written and spoken—come, too. And for a film director whose radar gets especially sensitive from working with actors, nonverbal notes sent through body language and speaking tone can mean just as much as any memo. Now is the time when filmmakers must find space to store all this new information. Albert Berger emails a four-page memo, Charles Frazier writes two pages of notes, Michael Peretzian, Minghella’s agent at Creative Artists, sends a page and a half. It’s not a matter of whether the response is simply good or bad; in most cases the reaction is very positive. Simply opening up to other views and opinions takes a little getting used to after working in relatively cloistered quarters for six months. Even if a comment touches on an issue you, as director or editor, have been worried about—perhaps already struggling to address—it’s disconcerting to hear about it from someone else. But in one respect, this gestation period of preliminary screenings and showings is a chance once again for Murch and Minghella to adjust to the fact that a motion picture is valuable only insofar as an audience will be there to experience it.

  * * *

  Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 08:30 EDT

  Subject: cave be gone

  To: Walter Murch

  From: Anthony Minghella

  Frazier screening went very well.

  Escaping here without too much blood on our noses. Back to work.

  Thanks for everything you do for me, dear friend

  Rushing to adr

  Love

  A

  * * *

  Now, on regrouping in London, another milestone appears right up ahead: a public test preview screening in three weeks on July 21 in New Jersey. For Murch this means just about every post-production function required for finishing Cold Mountain is underway—all at once. On top of trying new editorial changes and making efforts to reduce the running time, Murch is involved in, supervising, or contributing to tasks that include special visual effects, title and credit sequences, dialogue and sound effects premixes, music recording, ADR, and even marketing (supplying material for a preview trailer to be cut in New York). It’s like that Vaudeville act of keeping a dozen plates spinning simultaneously on pointed wooden sticks: forget to keep one rotating fast enough and it soon comes crashing to the floor.

  With Murch at the hub for all this completion activity, so too is Final Cut Pro at the crux. All new and revised material, from music to digitally touched-up shots must be incorporated into his assembly, which sits in FCP on the hard drives in the attic at the Old Chapel. All the elements arrive here in the form of QuickTime files, Apple’s powerful, cross-platform format for manipulating, enhancing, and storing image and sound. QuickTim
e is the universal language through which the Cold Mountain post-production departments talk to each other.

  For example, there are many film shots that need digital touch-ups—wires removed, twinkling stars added, zoom-ins performed. These visual effects shots, done at Double Negative, a Soho-based effects-design company—can run from a few seconds to a minute or more. They are created with software applications Alias’ Maya, Apple’s Shake, and Pixar’s Renderman, then saved as QuickTime files. Dennis Lowe, the visual effects artist, or his assistant, Fay McConkey, notifies Sean Cullen and Dei Reynolds via email when the revised shots are available on the dedicated FTP site. Then Cullen transfers that shot onto the Cold Mountain shared area network (SAN). He notifies Murch by email that a new shot is ready for him to review.

  It may seem over the top that Cullen would email Murch, who is just 30 feet away down the hall, but this way of communicating allows Murch to attend to visual affects when he can, rather than be interrupted in the middle of cutting a scene. Murch views the new shot, compares it to the original, and decides whether it’s correct or needs more work. (In most cases, it’s the latter. Like most other functions in post production, digital visual effects never come out right the first time.) The portability of this visual effects shot, and its immediate viewability, is only possible because of QuickTime. Double Negative, in fact, runs on PC computers, but that’s immaterial, because Mac and PC platforms read QuickTime.

  Compare this pathway to traditional film-based, optically created effects. Aside from the fact that computer-generated images (CGI) are faster to create, more accurate, and better refined, a digital delivery system saves time and money. Formerly, a touched-up image would have to be printed on film at the lab (24 hours to process the negative and make a workprint copy), then shipped or sent by messenger to the editing room for screening on an editing machine. Or, if it’s more convenient (and can be scheduled soon enough), the film is shown at the lab in its viewing room, which might not happen until the editor is at the lab for some other reason.

  Murch describes how it was done on his film, Return to Oz, only 20 years ago: “We were doing claymation visual effects in Portland, Oregon. We’d get a piece of film in London by special delivery. They would have another print made from the same negative so we could see the same things. I would put the film on my Steenbeck in London, and they’d put their film on their Steenbeck in Portland, and then I’d phone them up and we’d start with the footage counter at zero. I would go forward until I saw something that needed a comment, ‘Okay, everything’s great, but look at frame 74. Do you see how he winks there? Let’s make that a little more noticeable.’ And they’d be looking at the same thing. Or, if I had an idea for how to do something different, I would put a piece of tissue paper on the screen and draw the new idea on it and fax that to them, and then they’d get it instantly and put it over their screen and do a change and send it back. Even back then, I began to get a whiff of this digital thing, even though that was before email or downloadable files. But there was fax, and digital information was in that fax signal, going back and forth, which did energize the process.”

  Visual effects were used to enhance details in the explosion that started the Battle of Petersburg.

  Of course, viewing visual effects in Internet time, for example, gets integrated into a compressed post-production schedule. “We don’t get two extra days to do something else,” as Murch says.

  * * *

  Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 10:35

  Subject: Fwd: jpegs on FTP site

  From: Sean

  To: Walter

  Walter,

  These shots are in your VFX project under Shots for Review, 10/7.

  Begin forwarded message:

  > From: Fay McConkey

  > Date: Wed Jul 9, 2003 7:24:09 PM Europe/London

  > To: Dei, Sean Cullen

  > Subject: jpegs on FTP site

  >

  > Hello

  >

  > I have put 2 x jpegs on to your ftp site.

  >

  > Please could you show them to Anthony and Walter to get some feedback.

  >

  > 4013

  > This temp frame is to decide the size and position of the cloud in the

  > background of the shot; at the moment it is 50% the size of 4014.

  >

  > 4014

  > This is the wide shot of the mushroom cloud that needs to be

  > ‘zoomed’. In this test frame the cloud has been scaled to 78% - the

  > smallest it can be if it is still to fit the 1.66 mask. We have just

  > copied and pasted in the sides of the field for now.

  >

  > If you could let me know what they think, it would be much appreciated.

  >

  > Thanks

  > Fay

  * * *

  An email from Double Negative, the London firm that provided Cold Mountain with its special visual effects. Minghella and Murch are being asked to review two visual effects shots, labeled 4013 and 4014, for the great explosion in the Battle of Petersburg.

  * * *

  Making a Digital Intermediate

  The digital intermediate (DI) is another filmmaking breakthrough being employed in Cold Mountain. Earlier, during production, Minghella requested and got approval from Miramax to make final release prints using the DI process.

  In the traditional method of making release prints, the lab uses the cut negative as little as possible before making a duplicate negative—the cut camera negative is far too valuable to be running through the lab repeatedly to make thousands of release prints. The chances of it breaking, tearing, or otherwise wearing out are high. Since it’s not possible to make a negative from a negative, the lab first creates an interpositive from the cut camera negative, then strikes a dupe negative from the interpositive. In this method the image quality is reduced by two generations (the interpositive and the internegative).

  With a DI the interpositive is eliminated. The “dupe negative” for striking release prints is not really a duplicate—it’s first generation, created directly from a digital file. Cold Mountain will be released in widescreen CinemaScope (2.35:1 aspect ratio). It was shot “flat” in super-35mm so the expansion to CinemaScope is also accomplished digitally. Formerly that step, “anamorphic” squeezing, would be performed using an optical printer. So this is one more compromise in picture quality averted by using the DI.

  A film scanner is used to get film negative digitized into data files. It works much the same way scanners digitize photographs or flat artwork. Instead of scanning negative that’s been cut, however, in the DI process whole rolls of uncut negative are threaded up on the scanner and then only the needed frames are scanned, using the edit decision list (EDL) from Final Cut Pro. The machine scans across each frame 2,000 times (called 2K scanning) and creates a digital image with 2,000 horizontal lines of data. To put that measure in context, a U.S. television displays broadcast signals as 640 lines; high-definition (HD) televisions range up to 1,920 lines. If a particular shot includes especially fine details, the scan rate will be doubled to 4,000 lines (4K), to prevent any visible degradation of the image.

  One of the benefits of a DI, then, is not having to cut the original negative processed by the lab. Only after the lab completes the scanning process are shots “cut” digitally in a computer to match the current EDL. Color timing can start whenever the directory of photography is available, and then the DI master can be reconformed as the film progresses toward its final version. Not having to cut the original negative also means it will remain fully intact, just as it was processed in the lab. The pristine negative will always be available to prepare even higher quality prints using technologies and formats not yet invented. A DI also means the filmmakers can use a precise, sophisticated, digitally based color correction (or grading) system not available in the analog film world. Cold Mountain will be the first feature film to use both Final Cut Pro and a digital intermediat
e. As it turned out, the Final Cut Pro EDL used to conform the DI masters worked perfectly—“cutting the negative” was error free.

  * * *

  Ultimately there will be 243 visual effects shots in Cold Mountain. Ordering, reviewing, directing, re-reviewing, and incorporating all that material through multiple rounds of approvals takes up a major chunk of time every day. To keep track of all the visual effects shots and their status, the Cold Mountain assistants line the hall upstairs at the Chapel with printed frame grabs, each frame coded to indicate its stage in the process.

  Computer Film Company lab (CFC) around the corner from De Lane Lea in Soho.

  JULY 5, 2003—LONDON

  Murch and Minghella do their first test of digital color correction on Cold Mountain at the Computer Film Company lab (CFC) around the corner from De Lane Lea in Soho. It’s exactly one year since DigitalFilm Tree spent the Independence Day holiday weekend prepping and packing Murch’s Final Cut Pro system for shipment to Romania.

  That first DI color correction test was of the rainy porch scene at Black Cove Farm between Inman and Ada. “It turned out very well on first pass,” Murch says later. “We incorporated a film output of that test into the 35mm print used in the first preview screening to see how it held up alongside workprint from original negative. It integrated seamlessly.”

  In a lengthy journal entry, Murch steps back and takes a wide view of the art and technique of film editing, amazed and curious about how it unfolds over time. Perhaps the notes are triggered by his first encounter with the digital intermediate technique, or maybe it’s that his 60th birthday is two days away.