Every time director/writer John Stimpson went walking on part of his
property on Wachusett Mountain in Massachusetts, he thought about the
local legend of a haunting that many of his friends claimed to have
experienced. There, 250 years ago, little Lucy Keyes went off to the
lake to gather sand and never returned. Her mother went crazy with
grief, the story goes, and still haunts the area looking for her lost
daughter. Three years ago, Stimpson started writing a script based on
the legend, and thought about the possibility of shooting the movie in
HD.

So he did what few other indie filmmakers do. He shot "The Winter
People," a 14-minute HD short, as a test run. "We shot it using the
Panasonic VariCam and followed the process all the way through to
film-out to see if we felt it was an acceptable alternative to shooting
film," recounts Stimpson. "And it was. It screened around the country
and held up flawlessly, right next to films projected in 35mm."

"The Winter People" also came in handy when pitching the idea of
shooting a feature in HD. "We had little pitch parties and showed the
short film," Stimpson says. "We brought our flat screen monitor and
showed it in HD, so people could get a sense of what the production
values would be like."

Approaching The Legend of Lucy Keyes, budgeted at
"around $1 million," Stimpson and his team brought a level of
confidence that their production and post pipeline would work. Julie
Delpy and Justin Theroux signed on in lead roles, and cinematographer
Gary Henoch came on board. "The VariCam offered variable shutter and
frame rates and a gamma curve in the film-record mode that made it
resemble film," says Henoch. "We passed on Primes because it was a
short production schedule [principal photography was 18 days] and we
didn’t have enough time to change lenses that often, but we used Canon
HD zoom lenses- the 4.7 and 7.5 among them." Henoch also brought in a
full lighting package and crew to handle the full schedule. "We were
doing 30 set-ups a day," says Henoch, who notes that about 90 percent
of the film was shot handheld. "And HD did allow me to move quickly."

Stimpson says the goal was to end up with the most flexible digital
negative possible. "We didn’t try to create looks in camera," he says.
"Knowing that we had different looks to come up with, we knew we’d be
safer to have a well-exposed image and then create [the looks] in
post." Shooting in HD added a great comfort level, he says, knowing
that "there’s no mystery as to what you’re getting."

"I tried to keep it intimate on set," he explains. "I didn’t want to
have a video village with lots of people sitting around. The nice thing
with an indie where you control the money is that you can control the
creative. The DP, my first AD Bob Nardiello and I ran the set and kept
the decision-making very tight."

The HD pipeline got tweaked for Lucy Keyes when
Stimpson decided to record sound with the camera. "The camera records
to a higher bit rate than a DAT, and not having to worry about syncing
audio is fantastic," he says. "Of course we did a backup recording to
DAT, but I will never let a sound guy convince me otherwise. It saved
huge amounts of time and money to not have to sync sound."

With HD on the set, there was no need to do dailies. The movie’s post
process began as soon as the day’s tapes were taken back to the
production office, where they were digitized to hard drive at full
resolution. "Then the tapes were put away and never touched again,"
says Stimpson. "We worked with full-resolution imagery from the
beginning. No more offline versus online." That’s exactly what he did
on "The Winter People," but the pipeline on Lucy
Keyes differed in one crucial way. "My post supervisor
convinced me that we should use Final Cut Pro HD, and I’m so glad he
did," says Stimpson. "Although Avid has now caught up, at the time we
would have had to downconvert to DVCAM and use the downconverted SD
image to do the offline and then conform. With Final Cut Pro HD, we
didn’t have to do that."

Storage consisted of four 500 GB LaCie drives, two working drives and
two for back-up. "The whole movie is in two drives," says Stimpson. "I
could literally put the movie in my briefcase and take it home."

Technicolor New York Executive Producer of Digital Intermediates
Christian Zak reports that the data was upresed through Discreet Fire
and exported to the Discreet Lustre, from which the image was projected
with a 2K NEC DLP projector. After it was color-graded, the HD data was
rendered and sent back to the Fire, where titles and closing credits
were integrated and the audio was re-laid. It was then output to D-5,
once broken up into reels and once as a continuous master.

With Technicolor DI artist Tim Stipan at the helm, Stimpson and his
creative team created the desired looks: for the flashbacks, an aged
look with muted, desaturated colors, blowing out the whites to give a
dream-like quality; and for the contemporary footage, which takes place
in November, a golden-brown post autumn look that’s rich but also very
cold. "It was exciting to watch the film come alive as we developed the
looks," concludes Stimpson. "We want you to feel this little girl
getting lost in the woods. And the whole DI process, especially when
you’ve originated in HD, gives you tremendous flexibility with the
looks you can develop."

Director: John Stimpson
Producers: Mark Donadio, J. Todd Harris, Miriam Marcus
Executive Producers: Tim Disney, Bill Haney, John MacNeil, Marc Toberoff
Cinematography: Gary Henoch
Editors: Joel Plotch, John Stimpson
DI: Tim Stipan, Technicolor New York