Master Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku ( Battle Royale) is known for movies about war, yakuza crime and social corruption, and for inspiring Quentin Tarantino, who dedicated Japanese release prints of Kill Bill Vol. 1 to him. Fukasaku made over 65 films, and his Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, a WWII story released in 1972, posed a number of challenges to the company preparing it for DVD release, not the least of which was that only a print was available and it was extensively stained. Chicago-based i^3 had already handled restoration and color correction for several Fukasaku films on DVD, including a boxed six-DVD set, The Yakuza Papers.
Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, a story told in flashbacks, arrived as a low-contrast print with an optical audio track. In addition to dirt and dust, much of the film suffered extensive chemical staining. Colorist Mike Matusek began the project by doing a D-min/D-max transfer- to eke out all the dynamic range possible- using the facility’s Cintel C-Reality telecine with da Vinci 2K controller. This flat one-light transfer was done unsupervised and then handed off to i^3 restorer Daniel Cohen.
With the da Vinci Revival restoration system, Cohen says he was able to handle all the film’s flaws in an efficient manner. "Revival offers auto-pass, an automated way to remove dirt and scratches, with the ability to set the system to different levels of aggression," says Cohen. "Much of the dirt and dust was removed this way."
More problematic were the chemical stains, marring about 10 percent of each reel. The badly affected areas featured an average of 10 to 15 stains per frame. Using Revival tools, Cohen drew "region of interest" boxes around each stain or piece of dirt. Revival then automatically referenced the previous and next frames to recreate an unblemished portion of the frame. "Otherwise, I would have had to manually paint out each chemical stain, frame by frame," he continues. "It would have taken me at least four times as long to complete."
While Cohen was busy restoring Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, colorist Matusek took on the challenge of correcting often-faded colors. Supervising was Japanese film historian Tatsu Aoki, who teaches film at the Chicago Art Institute and is intimately familiar with Fukasaku’s work.
"Fukasaku has a style where he’ll have a color wash over a sequence, whether it’s a fight sequence or a montage of even some historic still photos," says Matusek. "The print looked magenta in all the scenes with color washes, and that’s where Tatsu came in. He felt the washes could go cooler, which is what we did."
Another challenge was the fact that Matusek wasn’t working with a negative, so he was stuck with the densities on the print. "In certain dark areas, if the blacks are crushed down, the picture is gone and you can’t get it back," he says. "Your range is limited on a print." For a handful of scenes, Matusek built up the contrast with the da Vinci 2K and then brought down the grain with the Digital Vision noise reduction system.
"Other than that, going for consistency was the big challenge," says Matusek. "The print varied a lot, so I had a few reference shots that I could go back to make sure I was in the right ballpark." Matusek notes the difference between color correcting for a restoration versus a feature film or commercial. "With restoration work, I do mostly primary color correction to balance the image and add contrast," he says. "It’s a different mindset. I rarely ever use a window, except perhaps to correct a shading error in the print. You can get creative with restoration- but you’re trying to get back to the original look the filmmaker intended, even if he’s not there."