THE DIG: Behind The Scenes Interview

Tell us about THE DIG.

“Every director has a folder full of abandoned ideas or commercials you pitched on or short films you pitched that for whatever reason didn’t go. My folder happens to be pretty deep. We first talked about how to showcase and test out VENICE and give us a variety of conditions to torture the camera. THE DIG seemed like a good one that it was nighttime, daytime, urban, desert, interiors, exteriors, driving shot and helicopter simulating film shoot.”

“I want a blank slate. I want flexibility to take an image any number of directions giving me basically what I saw in the day, that kind of neutral look, the look I created in the moment and able to push it around without breaking down. What we’re seeing with VENICE, even though it’s a prototype, the dynamic range is something you notice right off the bat. It’s fantastic. I was immediately struck by an improvement of the skin tones, the way it rolls into the highlights and the neutrality. I would say the image is beautiful.”

“A dark black car with a black interior shooting out midday desert pushing the envelope of what a camera can capture and yeah, seeing detail outside the windows, great shadow detail, the way the camera rolls into the highlights, like shots pointing directly into the sun. We have one of those in the spot. It was very clear from our first look at the footage that this was another kind of leap forward. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda, ASC talked about as well the smoothness of how it renders skin tones looked very natural and falls in really nicely. You don’t want to search for it or hunt for it. It should be there and VENICE had it there.”

Tell me about this project

“I remember Joe always wanted to do a project on his own and I thought it would be good to present it to Sony and see actually if we can get this made for this new camera. Joe and I like testing the latest and greatest cameras that are coming out and we’ve done it in the past with the F65 and F35.”

“I was especially impressed with the color rendition. What I love about the color, it feels a little more cinema, it’s a little bit softer feeling, also there’s a lot more dynamic range than before. The highlight roll-off is really smooth. I was talking to Alex Carr (DIT) and he’s finding at this very early stage, that VENICE has tremendous range in the highlights. In THE DIG, we are filming in the rock quarries, and the sun goes down behind the rocks and there’s still bright sky in the background. So I’m trying to hold that latitude and the detail that’s down on the ground and it’s holding all the detail in the shadows. Pretty amazing stop range. Smooth latitude feels like it’s not as electronic, a little bit homier, a kind of organic response. Additionally, I really love how the camera responds to skin tones, really beautiful.”

“There are actually two menu panels on this camera. One for the camera assistant side which has the full set of menu data and also one for the operator side which is a little smaller sized menu showing all the critical information the Cinematographer need to know. Everything’s really much clearer to find and you can set color temperatures, NDs, shutter angles, and other often needed functions.”

“Well, I think it’s just great to have a camera that has all the NDs built in. You can go with a really small package and can be pretty lightweight. Also, you can choose any kind of lens you’d like to use. I think the color gamut is great. It has great dynamic range, smooth highlight handling, and beautiful skin tone rendition. It has a softer kind of overall tone curve I think that feels easy to work with and produces a wonderful image.”

How did you get involved with this film project THE DIG?

“I’m Claudio’s First AC and Claudio was asked to shoot this project, THE DIG, to test these new cameras out. It’s always fun being the first to use a new camera and also challenging to use something that no one’s ever used before.”

“For THE DIG we elected to shoot Full Height 18mm anamorphic 4×3. So we used the top and the bottom of the frames and not a full Vista Vision width—as we know, the field of view of anamorphic lenses is twice the field of view as a spherical lens so it reduces your depth of field, but it gives you that look with the anamorphic flares that streak across. It’s a more organic look than Spherical.”

“The camera is a good size. It has a nice dovetail on the top with the handle that slides into that and there were several variations with that. The internal NDs are nice. Those worked flawlessly from 0.3 to 2.4 quick and easy. The user interface is clean, simple and nice.”

What are your experiences with the workflow?

“For VENICE, the workflow is almost identical, as it uses Sony RAW. It uses the same media, the same AXS-R7 recorder as the previous Sony camera generation. But there is something new. There’s now a Thunderbolt 2 card reader, (AXS-AR1) which is one of the fastest card readers of any camera right now. I back up all of my media to a solid state HDD array and I can copy one card at 1 GB per second, so it’ s very, very, very fast.”

“The menu system of VENICE is very quick, very responsive, very clean to navigate, and it uses a lot of cinema terms instead of broadcast terms. This helps the creative minds within the film industry to understand the camera not from the perspective of engineering but the perspective of a cinematographer or a camera assistant. You can understand the camera just simply by pressing the menu and going through the first few steps, you see, oh, wow, this is very simple, it’s very nice, and it’s quick and easy.”

Tell me about your history

“I’ve been in the business 32 years. When I first became a colorist, I started off doing dailies overnight from film on a Rank Cintel with its color correction system. There were just three knobs with joysticks that came off of them, and that was it. Then Da Vinci came out and went to the da Vinci Classic and then moved to da Vinci 2K back in the days of high definition. I have been on four different systems throughout my career.”

“There are certain cameras that require a lot of individual color work to get it to look like traditional film. Nowadays, the digital cameras capture so many colors, almost too much. Some of them have colors that don’t make any visual sense to me. I live in a world of dynamic range and it’s always the detail bottom end and top end of the signal. Images that Claudio gives me fall into a place where he has intended it to be. I have to stay within that. I can tell you he is incredibly happy with the amount of dynamic range and the ease in that he gets these images because it’s all about lighting the sets and he loves to shoot dark also. There is a lot of nice beautiful soft black but it’s still black. Sense of all the detail that he’s expecting to see, I look at that and I think okay, this camera nailed it.

“The detail between the bottom end and the high end is, with the combination of lenses that Claudio used, is so crisp and clean that you get that 3D feel. Claudio and Joe see things the same way mostly. I see things the same way they do now. Getting to that image was incredibly easy. No compromises. The low-light detail and the highlight detail are all there in the camera and there is a nice range between the two so the skin tones fell into a really pretty place. He wanted overhead light but there’s a real soft quality in the low-light flesh tones that I didn’t have to push or pull to work on it at all. Trying to pull color out in this condition is very difficult with other cameras, and I was really happy with what I was getting in this camera without having to fight for it, and most importantly with no windowing needed. What you see on screen is what the camera did, not what I did.”

“No new issues. Typically, the issues are with the display itself. With HDR grading, if we do have an image that’s slightly noisy in SDR, when you go to HDR, it’s going to magnify a lot of the issues. Stuff that looks great is just going to look great. Often I have to go back in and massage a little bit. In most of those cases, it’s a noise problem. The digital noise in digital cameras is a much finer size than film grain. It is pixel based, whereas film grain can be massive depending on the stock that was used and what and how it was exposed. If you try to bring that up, film grain can completely take over a face in film, whereas digital noise, the same level can be on the face. It’s easier to treat digitally than with film grain if you have to do it.”