Ron Fortunato, ASC and DI Artist Joe Gawler Talk about Grading High Def Footage for Film-Out

Cinematographer Fortunato and DI artist Gawler came together in a DI suite at Technicolor Creative Services in New York to put the finishing touches on Find Me Guilty, a courtroom drama directed by Sidney Lumet and shot by Fortunato in high-def. (Fortunato and Lumet previously both worked on the TV series 100 Centre Street and on the feature Rachel, Quand du Seigneur.) They spoke with DI Studio about the quirks of HD acquisition, the power of pixels, and the dangers of a DI for the undecided.
Q: Did you plan for a DI from the beginning?
Fortunato: I'm a big believer in getting as much as possible on location, and then going in and fine-tuning it. This was my first DI for theatrical release, but my only issue was whether what we'd see projected on a digital screen would be what we'd see with the film. The film-out did pick up a little contrast and lost a little bit of finesse. But very little. I was very happy with the result.
The fact that we shot on HD meant it was already electronic. And it was just as important to color [in a DI suite] as if I had shot film. We could do much more advanced color correction.
Q: Is Find Me Guilty a movie that would obviously benefit from a DI?
Fortunato: It's a very straightforward courtroom drama, not a rock video type of movie. But the DI is still the way to go. Why go backwards in time? I think everything should be done DI now. It's like being a photographer and working in your own darkroom. You know what you can do – and you know what you can't do. The basics of what you can do in DI are pretty amazing.
Gawler: I felt like Ron's digital gaffer. He would say, put light here, take away light there. Together, we could reshape the lighting to help in the continuity. That said, Ron has a lot of experience shooting HD, and he gets it done on set. We were polishing something that already looked nice, enhancing it rather than fixing it.
Q: Give me an example of something amazing you did in this DI?
Fortunato: I think I'm a little too dramatic for Sidney sometimes. Cinematographers tend to like to make it moody, and he wanted it maybe a little brighter than I did. He'd say, let's lighten up this scene, and I'd say, let's just lighten up the face. Sidney, who's 80 and doesn't touch a computer, said, 'What do you mean just lighten up the face?' That's the magic of the Photoshop, power-window concept. Sidney was shocked at what you can do in the DI.
Gawler: He was very curious about what we were doing. He wanted me to explain it all to him before we got started.
Q: Did any issues arise specific to having acquired the movie on HD?
Gawler: Specifically, we had issues with wide shots. When we went into the screening theatre and saw it on a big screen, we realized we had to sharpen the face of whoever's scene it was. We used da Vinci's ToolBox to create a window for peoples' faces and then selectively sharpened it.
Fortunato: That is the difference between shooting film and video. There isn't as much resolution as film. But this is pre-[Panavision] Genesis. I haven't shot with the Genesis yet. So these issues are changing as we speak.
Q: Since the DI can be used to create any look, does that open up a Pandora's box?
Fortunato: There's a danger that someone will say, 'I don't like my pictures, let's fool around.' That's a problem. I've also worked with directors who say, 'Don't worry about it, we'll make it look like anything we want to in post.' That's a weird way to work, an ugly way to work. That's not committing. It's not thinking. It's relying on technology to solve all your problems.
Gawler: It's great to push a look in DI, but that's something that the filmmakers should talk about before they come in here. It's going to affect how they light the scene, the colors actors will wear, and so on.
Q: What advice would you give to other cinematographers approaching their first theatrical DI?
Fortunato: Don't think of the DI as a correction. Think of it as a darkroom, the last step of making your image. Learn Photoshop because whatever you can do in Photoshop, you can do in DI. You become Ansel Adams, the person who took a wonderful photograph knowing he could do x, z, y to it. He'd expose the negative in a certain way, develop it in a certain way and print it in a certain way. Another person could take the same picture, but it wouldn't look as good.