Doing It All

Cinergy Creative’s Secret Weapon is an All Dual-Core Workflow and Lots of Post Experience

Cinergy Creative’s Leslie Allen has learned how to squeeze value out of a project from both sides of the camera. This year, leveraging a background in commercials and VFX — and pointing to do-it-yourselfers like Robert Rodriguez as inspiration — he tackled his first 35mm feature-film project, National Lampoon Clubhouse Trick or Treat. The FX work, all done at 2K resolution in After Effects, Photoshop and 3ds max, would be a work-out for any desktop post pipeline, but Allen says his small army of PCs loaded with dual-core processors and PCI Express graphics cards never broke stride.

"We were able to shoot a movie in June and have it completely posted and out the door by the end of October — which is out of control, with 180 to 190 FX shots and a sound mix to 5.1," says Allen. The next step is a film-out in time for a screening at the AFM in Santa Monica, CA, with a DI planned to follow once distribution is locked down.

The editorial workflow split off in two directions. The bulk of the film was handled by editor Stephen Myers on an Avid, but Allen kept the VFX sequences in-house at Cinergy. "I was the director, so I knew what I wanted to do with editing," Allen says. "We edited, believe it or not, on Premiere Pro using DVCAM footage. I knew where I could put flash frames and speed ramps, which really helped the pace, and we’ve had great success with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects."

During the process, Allen created storyboards for the effects shots in Photoshop and then sent them to the editor, who was putting together action sequences, via the Internet. The storyboards were dropped into the edit as placeholders for unfinished FX work. "That means we can do an animatic in real time— I’m drawing and he’s pasting them into the edit," Allen explains. "We’d do quick wireframe tests on top of the DVCAM footage." Once the Premiere work was finished, a visible-timecode reader was used to extract an EDL from the timecode burned into the DVCAM footage, so the FX sequences could be incorporated into the main edit. "If Premiere Pro could output EDLs for a negative cutter, I would have used this for the entire movie edit," Allen says.

Why PCs?

Cinergy’s decision to use PCs instead of Macs is a purely practical one. "When you start putting a render farm together, Macs become very expensive," Allen explains. Every 3D and compositing artist working on Trick or Treat had a dual-core Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM, an ATI FireGL V5100 PCI Express video card, and a 600 GB RAID. Each of those PCs was part of Cinergy’s renderfarm, which linked to a dual P4 Xeon server with 4 TB of RAID-10 storage via a 10 gigabit network.

"Even on desktops, we were able to throw the 2K material around very well," he says. "We’ve got a Flame, and we don’t use it anywhere near as much as we should. The market’s changing, especially on the post side. These big boxes are very expensive, so the workflow has really changed. You have three guys working on one scene— one doing clean-up on green-screen footage, one doing matte work and another doing glossy work— and you can’t have three Flames or Infernos going on one shot. You couldn’t afford it."

Allen says it’s his post savvy, along with some experience on another National Lampoon project, that landed him the directorial gig. "I think the crew and everyone else knew it was my first feature, but I’ve got more history behind me in production than most of them put together," he says. "As a VFX director, you’re perpetually solving problems. So it’s nice to go on a set and know where those problems are and how to avoid them."

Trick or Treat was shot in 35mm — he says continued resistance to HD-shot features in overseas markets was a factor - although Allen prefers working in HD. Not only does HD yield cleaner green-screen footage out of the camera, but he appreciates the immediate feedback of HD video on set. "For film, you’re looking at a little black-and-white TV showing Hi-8 footage, and it’s difficult to look at that and make a judgment, especially when you’re directing a kids’ movie, where color is a very important factor. Color plays emotionally, as part of storytelling. You move a character into a certain kind of light and his color temperature will change dramatically, and you won’t see that on a black-and-white monitor."

When a Golf Commercial Isn’t a Golf Commercial

As an example of a recent project where HD served him well, Allen cites a series of spots he directed for golf-club manufacturer KZG. "We couldn’t have cut the spot in a conventional manner," he says. "Everything’s tricked out. Cutting is not cutting anymore. I shot elements knowing I could glue them together [in one shot] and fake rack focuses and things like that, and it worked out really well. My biggest advantage was cost — it would kill me to play around like that with film. And in 35mm, grain is a real headache because of green screens. Every shot has to be de-greened to get smooth edges."

And, just like the shot of the TV news anchor or Hollywood starlet whose face is suddenly revealed as a landscape of wrinkles, ridges and pockmarks under the steely gaze of the HD camera, Allen’s raw footage caused some consternation with the client. "I asked,‘Why shoot a golf commercial like a golf commercial?’" Allen recalls. "If you’re a high-end company, my goal is to shoot you like a Jaguar commercial. So I shot the golf clubs like a car commercial, going over the curves [in close up]. There was no grain, which was great, and we sent the tapes back to the client. And they thought it was unacceptable. They said,‘The film’s all funny!’"

According to Allen, it turns out the client was reacting to the appearance of countless tiny marks on the clubs made during the casting process — marks that wouldn’t normally be seen, even in close-up footage of the clubs, but that were highlighted in the HD footage. So Cinergy smoothed out the images. "These are the best clubs in the world, but you could see every grain of sand they use in their casting," Allen recalls. "We had to clean those clubs all the time and handle them with white gloves, because HD would pick up every fingerprint."