When documentary filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (Paradise
Lost) signed on to make a film about heavy metal superstars Metallica,
they fully expected the result to make a bit of noise. What they hadn’t
anticipated was that their up-close-and-personal look at the band, now
being released under the telling title Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,
would document in all its warts and glory the tortured mid-life crisis
of one of the most successful bands in history as the members labored
in the studio to record their new album while also going through group
therapy sessions.
Shooting at the band’s Northern California studio, the filmmakers
ultimately amassed 1600 hours of tape over 18 months. "We knew going in
it was going to be a massive project, but it just grew and grew,"
reports Sinofsky. "Luckily we’d anticipated that, and we decided to do
everything on DV, especially when we realized that the music and
therapy sessions were going to be eight hours of filming a day. There
was no way we could shoot film." The team’s longtime DP Bob Richman
used a Sony DSR-500 while Berlinger and Sinofsky each used a DSR-PD150
with a standard zoom. All three cameras were purchased especially for
the job. "It just makes sense when you’re shooting for so long," says
Sinofsky. "We were the B cameras, but oddly enough, it matched very
well with the DSR-500 when we did the film-out, and you can’t tell
which camera shot which material."
Audio was obviously a crucial part of the equation, and sound man
Michael Emery "boomed nearly everything," Sinofsky adds. "We rarely did
wireless. As for the music, we got an additional DAT feed direct from
the board, so we’d always get the best quality in both music and any
dialogue."
Because so much footage was being shot, senior editor David Zieff
started editing while the crew was still shooting. "We’d ship dailies
back to him in New York with our notes, and he’d load it into our
Avid," Sinofsky explains. The team set up a Unity system that allowed
four editors to share the same media. "It’s a costly rental, but well
worth it when you have this much footage and you’re on deadlines."
The final edit then went to Technicolor in New York for the film-out.
"They’d developed this great new system, but we were basically guinea
pigs for them," explains Sinofsky. "We were the first film to go
through it. We gave them our EDL, they transferred it to 24p and
color-corrected, then created the video master that’ll be used for the
DVD and VHS releases. Once that was done, they did the film-out from
that, which included a ton of tests along the way until we finally got
the crisp focus we needed and an almost seamless transition between
material from the different cameras."
"Although this documentary was pretty easy to shoot, the edit and post
was the most difficult we’ve ever done," reports Sinofsky. "But the
final blow-up to 35mm made it all worthwhile. It looks great."
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