American Cinematographer - February 2002 - 54

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In a darkened room, a battle rages

silently onscreen. As a French offi¬
cer tries to rally his beleaguered
troops,
a
Vietnamese soldier
approaches him from behind, his
rifle's gleaming bayonet leading the
frantic charge. But just before the
blade pierces the officers uniform,
the action freezes at the command of

of

director

photography Dean

Sender, ASC, ACS, who is overseeing
the digital
at

timing of We Were Soldiers
Hollywood-based Efilm Digital

Laboratories.

Working with Efilm lead
colorist Steve Bowen,

Semler asks

aloud whether the bayonet's
sheen

can

be

metallic

accentuated.

In

seconds, Bowen deftly locks onto the
blade's color

signature, separates it
image, generates
that automatically tracks its

from the rest of the
a

matte

movement, and

then dials in to

adjust the weapon's brightness and
contrast.
menace

to

Also

The

result adds extra

the shot.
on

Laboratories

hand is veteran Deluxe

color

timer

Mike

Stanwick, who timed Sender's Oscar50

February 2002

winning images in Dances With
Wolves and, more recently, The Bone
Collector. He asks for

a

few other

modifications before the

bayonet

shot is matched to the rest of the
scene

and finished.

of
entirely computer-based
ColorStorm digital intermediate
process, which allowed him to knock
down "Kodak-perfect blue skies"
from this opening battle scene, match
shot-to-shot brightness and contrast,
and desaturate specific colors to
create an appropriately aged look for
the sequence. "I'd originally thought
about using a sepia tone for this scene
to give it a different mood from the
rest of the film, but I quite like the
more subtle look we've got here." He
adds, "The only problem with this
process right now is getting lost in the
number of choices you have."
But choice is exactly what
ColorStorm is designed to offer, says
Efilm president and CEO Joe L.
Matza: "It puts power in the hands of
the cinematographer, which is essen¬
tial if such a process is to become
"It's fantastic," Semler says

Efilm's

new,

Da

or a

-

Overview

Dav id (ioldbcn:

a

Pogle or a Phillips system
it's a proprietary system that
incorporates primaries, secondaries
and lab lights into a fully integrated,
digital system."
To begin the ColorStorm
process (see flowchart), the Soldiers
camera negative was scanned inhouse (using director Randall
Wallace's final EDL as a guide) at 2K
resolution (at approximately 4 spf)
using twin Imagica XE scanners. "It
was scanned at true 2K, 10-bit log
resolution, capturing all the color
information from the original
camera negative," Matza reports.
"Efilm is the only company in the
industry that is scanning entire
feature films for digital mastering at
a genuine 2K, and we're not limited
to that. We can go to 3K, 4K, 6K -
whatever is necessary."
Looking at a wide, panoramic

Vinci

We Were Soldiers

i

shot of

an

amidst the

American firebase set

hilly terrain of Vietnam,

featuring helicopters buzzing into
frame and kick up clouds of dust,
Matza notes, "It's in these wide shots
that the 2K and higher resolutions
really pay off; it's where the detail
and resolution are most apparent."
These

2K

Cineon

files

-

2.6

terabytes of them for Soldiers-
were then stored in Efilm's high¬
speed Storage Area Network,
controlled by an SGI Onyx2.
In the case of shots requiring
visual effects, digital opticals or titles,
the original photography, temps or
even lightstruck film may be used as
placeholders until the final footage
can
be insert-edited upon its
completion. On Soldiers, visualeffects supervisor David Goldberg is
working with Digital Domain and
Cinesite for 2-D and 3-D

effects,

Composite Image Systems for digital
opticals
(including
fade-ups,
American Cinematographer - February 2002

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