American Cinematographer - January 2008 - 100

Billy (Richard Gere) begins to recognize what Bailey calls “the utter indifference of nature.” Achieving Color Symmetry by Iain Stasukevich With all of the software and hardware available to the visual-effects community these days, it’s somewhat surprising that a universal method for properly sharing and viewing image data has yet to emerge. It’s an obstacle almost every company faces when it shares work with another house, particularly a larger one. Haarm-Pieter Duiker has worked with a number of boutique effects vendors, starting at ESC, where he developed an imaging workflow for the Matrix sequels. When ESC was shuttered, he brought his pipeline design to Giant Killer Robots for Fantastic Four. Since then, Duiker has founded Duiker Research Corp. and condensed all of his color-space R&D into a commercial application plug-in suite called Color Symmetry. “The first big problem people think of when they think of visual effects and color is what the Cineon plate or raw DPX file looks like versus what the film print will look like,” says Duiker. “My goal was to enable people to look at a monitor and know that what they see there is what they’re going to see on film.” To accomplish this, Color Symmetry does three things: it emulates the characteristics of a particular film stock or look created in the digital-intermediate process; it carries that look across different platforms and different controls; and it provides the back end that allows the user to see everything through in a controlled fashion. Duiker developed Color Symmetry as a plug-in because he wanted to improve the workflow within applications people already use. On the 2-D side, it supports Shake, Nuke, Toxik, Fusion, After Effects, Photoshop, Framecycler, and Scratch. On the 3-D side, it supports Maya, XSI, 3ds Max, Houdini, and Lightwave. The program can easily be extended to support other platforms if needed. Color Symmetry is designed to integrate into 2-D applications as a set of nodes and display lookup tables hour scenes and scenes that had a lateafternoon look, I wanted to make the images look more neutral and contemporary,” says Bailey. The cinematographer also worked with Garvin to bring detail out of darker images. “Néstor liked to work on the edge, and sometimes things were just a little too dark,” notes Bailey. “There’s only so much you can do with the negative, but in the telecine suite we were able to key certain areas and bring them up. I felt digital technology would allow us to do things we couldn’t have done in celluloid answer-printing.” The team also used digital tools to bring down some brighter scenes. “In shots of the wheat fields at mid-day, we were able to create a sense of a slightly shadowed, tapering light to create more depth,” says Bailey. “We created very subtle windows in the fields and sky to modulate density in day-exterior scenes that had been shot in full sunlight and were therefore frontlit and very flat.” The idea was to allow these exteriors to cut more smoothly with scenes shot in later light. “What we did was pretty subtle, just enough to make a difference, and Terry [Malick] liked it very much,” says Bailey. Malick, who initially declined to participate in the transfer process, approved of Bailey’s suggestion to downplay the imagery’s nostalgic component — in fact, the director 100 January 2008 wanted to go even further in that direction. “Néstor and Terry were very unified in that regard during production,” notes Bailey. Kline eventually convinced Malick to join the team in the telecine suite, and once the director saw the work that was underway, “he realized he could really get the film to where he’d always wanted it,” says Kline. After a final color-correction pass, the D5 master was brought to Criterion’s New York headquarters, where dirt and scratches were removed via the MTI Digital Restoration System. The result is a picture that Bailey maintains is true to the filmmakers’ vision, but which might surprise viewers who have become accustomed to the look of previous transfers. “What people tend to remember about Days of Heaven is the sense of the characters playing and living in nature, the beautiful shots of the fields and migrating birds,” says Bailey. “They recall the view of nature as having a benign quality, but in fact what strikes me now is the utter indifference of nature. There’s a sense of the characters, first in their delight and later in their fatalistic entrapment, being very much a part of the cycle of nature. Allowing for the fact that it’s a period film, this sensibility, as well as the spontaneity of temperament, is very contemporary. There’s a powerful sense of the natural order, and a sense of the small place man has on that continuum.”

American Cinematographer - January 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2008