Leitner's Cinematography Corner

Indie feature filmmakers set their calendars by Sundance.

Most of the world follows the Gregorian calendar, at least since the sixteen century, with the notable exception of indie filmmakers, who follow the Sundance calendar.

Sundance is so consequential to the career prospects of aspiring filmmakers that entire production schedules are calibrated to match the Sundance calendar. Would-be Sundance filmmakers, after all, must defy impossibly long odds. Out of 3,722 feature-length entries, Sundance in 2010 accepted 113, or 3 percent.

The Sundance calendar begins three weeks after the Gregorian and contains a season of submission, August to September, a season of announcement, early December, and for those lucky enough to be invited, a two-month tour through the outermost Inferno, leading up to the festival’s late-January opening night.

Inferno? How about a tenth circle of Hell so fearsome that even Dante, comprehensive in his taxonomy of sinners and sufferings, declined to describe it.

There’s last-minute locking of the cut, sound editing, ADR, Foleys, solving music rights, audio mixing, finalizing credits, designing titles and end credits, color correction, conforming a master, striking a 35mm screening print or HDCAM cassette. There might possibly be a D.I. in the mix too. And of course all goes smoothly. (Not!)

Posters, buttons, flyers, post cards, and press kits also take time to design and deliver.
(Design by R.D. Granados)

This being indie film production (likened to “not-for-profit activity� in my last column), there’s probably scant budget remaining to cover all this. And let’s not forget promotional costs. Those posters, buttons, flyers, post cards, press kits, and press releases take time to design and deliver, and they don’t come cheap, especially at the last minute. In the end most Sundance filmmakers, whether they really wish to or not, opt to hire a festival PR firm, a $10K decision. With so much on the line, they’re terrified of hobbling their big chance.

As you can surmise, this is a routine I know too well. Six times, since 1987, I’ve endured boiling pitch, flaming sands, winged demons, every scourge of post-production to hand-carry a screener to the festival in the nick of time. Those ragged zombies with glazed eyes descending on Sundance each year? Those are sleepless filmmakers, aching for their premieres but also their first night of shut-eye in weeks.

Once, for instance, I kept a New York film laboratory open all weekend as I hand-dipped strips of 35mm black & white hi-con in plastic milk jugs of developer and fixer, dried them from Luxo lamps, inserted the resulting white-core end credits into a dupe negative using an optical printer, then struck a print of Reel 5—the film can still warm in my hands as I bolted by taxi to JFK en route to Salt Lake City. I arrived the morning of the premiere, bleary but triumphant. (For All Mankind went on to win the Sundance Audience and Grand Jury awards for best documentary plus an Oscar nomination.)

At least twice more, once from New York and once from LA, I arrived at Sundance the evening before the premiere lugging twin aluminum ICC cases containing our one and only 35mm print.

This year, however, the night before the premiere I raced up from the Salt Lake City airport to the Sundance print services office in Park City, arriving at 7 p.m., closing time. Breathlessly I handed over an HDCAM cassette, 27 ounces at most, which I slipped from my briefcase. And therein lies a tale.

There’s no DIY or desktop path to producing a 35mm print. What I call industrial post-production is the only solution. Post house, audio studio, and lab accounts must be set up, credit reports run, estimates haggled, schedules mapped, checks cleared. And on occasion, items or procedures have to be re-done. All of this takes time, experience, a talent for scheduling, and not least, people skills.

This year, for my latest project, Memories of Overdevelopment, an adaptation of an obscure novel (published only in Spain) by an aging Cuban writer, there was precious little budget left in the till when Sundance called with the good news. Shot in HDV and XDCAM EX, edited in Final Cut Pro, we had purposely kept costs super-low, in the microcinema range. (See Cinematography Corner 11, Park City or Bust for more background.)

Early on we had made a 35mm test blow-up of several scenes at DuArt Film & Video in New York, which looked amazing, but for reasons of diminished funds this strategy was no longer in the cards. At 1 hr. 55 min., we knew we could fit the entire film on a large HDCAM cassette (max 124 minutes), which costs about $100.

Fortunately the director, Miguel Coyula, was also editor and DP. Shiva-like control of manifold creative roles in a feature film is usually a bad idea, but Coyula is that rare multitalent who not only excels at various tasks, but bends them successfully into a unified artistic voice. Assembling the directorial, editorial, photographic, and producing staffs for a meeting to discuss what to do next meant me getting Miguel on the phone. Low-rent, I’ll admit, but also exceedingly efficient.

How I spent Christmas day. Filming a final scene north of Miami.
(Photo by Fred Salaff)

We got the call from Sundance on November 30th. First order of business was to schedule shoots of the remaining scenes, of which there were several. (Sundance invited us on the basis of an incomplete rough-cut.) That’s how we wound up on Dania Beach north of Miami, filming an actress on Christmas day, and in Forest Hills Gardens in Queens on Jan. 4, filming an exterior in which the main character, a college professor visiting London, learns his brother Pablo (based on cinematographer Nestor Almendros) has AIDS. Forest Hills Gardens, you see, was modeled after Hampstead Garden Suburb in North West London.

All the while, day and night, we were rendering Final Cut Pro timelines. Memories of Overdevelopment took over four years to shoot, piecemeal, in five countries (six, if you consider southern Utah another planet). Many sections that originated in HDV were shot before Apple introduced ProRes. As a result, much of the film was edited as HDV, which initially worked well for complex effects in up to forty-five video layers because of HDV’s modest 25Mbps data rate, however at the cost of tonal banding and other artifacts.

You probably already guessed that, for output to HDCAM, we had no choice but to render HDV and XDCAM EX timelines to QuickTime using the high-quality ProRes 422 HQ codec. Our constraints included the fact that we were cutting in FCP 6.0.6—we were reluctant to upgrade such an intricate timeline in midstream—on an older Dual 2.7 GHz PowerPC G5 Mac tower. We couldn’t trade up to an Intel Mac over concern that multiple effects plug-ins would no longer function.

Our film contains a number of sequences with animated still photos, and we learned the hard way that large hi-res TIFF files, over 16 megapixels, are over the limit that FCP can handle, at least in ProRes 422 HQ. (The same TIFFs had worked fine in HDV timelines.) The result was weeks of frequent crashes and “out of memory� messages in the middle of long renders.

As a filmmaker you haven’t lived until, racing the calendar to your world premiere, you get timeline render estimates from FCP of up to two months…!!!

In the end, as you know, we made our Sundance premiere. We learned to render the animated sequences separately using the 50 Mbps XDCAM HD422 codec. A young, hip New York audio mixing facility, The Lodge, came to our rescue, matching sound levels and equalizing sound design and dialogue tracks over a single weekend. (They did a great job.) DuArt Film & Video was wonderfully responsive to our challenges, transferring our ProRes/XDCAM QuickTime to HDCAM in a single edit session.

Scrolling our end credits in Adobe After Effects 9.0.2 (CS4).
Click to enlarge.

Me? The night before our DuArt session—T-minus two days and counting before our premiere—I finalized the credits, compiled them in Excel as center-column and dual-column text, transferred them to Photoshop to create a document 1920 pixels wide by 15,460 pixels long, and animated the results in Adobe After Effects 9.0.2 (CS4) as a five-minute scroll. I admit to burning midnight oil, and early the next morning we were at DuArt joining a QuickTime of the end credits to the body of the film. As someone who, since the 1970s, has designed and photographed credits on Oxberry animation stands, I remain astonished at the speed and ease of this process.

At the end of “Dante’s Inferno,� Dante and his companion, the Roman poet Virgil, escaped the underworld, and so did we. Ours was a squeaker however—nips and tucks took place at DuArt the morning before we boarded our 1 p.m. JetBlue to Salt Lake.

What did we learn? In an increasingly DIY world in which you can find yourself alarmingly on your own, indie-friendly facilities like The Lodge and DuArt matter more than ever, especially en route to Sundance and beyond.