How FotoKem Gave Lexus an IMAX Adrenaline Rush
Team One Advertising in El Segundo, CA, which became the agency of record for Lexus just prior to the luxury car manufacturer's launch in 1989, created a three-spot campaign for this new version of the Lexus IS, which hit the road in October 2005. “The three commercials had a lot of texture – they were multi-dimensional,” says Epsteen. “They mostly launched on TV, but we do big launches with integrated campaigns for the web, TV and radio.”
Going for the Rush
In the New York office, a Lexus executive had a brainstorm. He’d spoken to IMAX and came up with a new way to promote the car. The IMAX film Adrenaline Rush: The Science of Risk takes viewers on a thrilling tour of extreme sky-diving and base jumping, educating audiences on the psychological and physiological forces that are at play in extreme risk-taking and on the physics involved in skydiving. What better match for a commercial emphasizing automotive performance?
“Everyone is challenged with finding new ways to promote the car,” says Epsteen. “IMAX made sense in a lot of ways. Putting a cinema spot in theaters paired to Adrenaline Rush was a way to get more eyeballs outside of traditional media.” Team One Advertising presented the concept to the client, and Lexus gave the green light.
Out of the three commercials created for the Lexus IS, says Epsteen, the company quickly decided on “Details,” the commercial with the fewest visual effects. “From the moment of the decision to get the spot into IMAX theaters, it happened very quickly,” says Epsteen. “Taking the commercial with the least effects made it easier to transition for digital projection.”
The Big Time
Digital cinema projection ranges ordinarily from 1K to 2K resolution, but the IMAX projection posed a challenge. IMAX is ordinarily shot in 15-perf 70mm, which is ten times bigger than 35mm film. A 4K version was imperative – and the 35mm spot hadn't even been finished in high definition. “We pretty much had to start over with scanning, color-correcting, and cleaning it up to make it more graphical,” Epsteen says.
The spots were shot by French director Francois Vogel of Paranoid Pictures and finished in Paris at Buf. “But it made much more sense to keep [the IMAX post process] in L.A. where we could oversee it,” explains Epsteen.
Sky High Entertainment, the company that created Adrenaline Rush, had gone to FotoKem in Burbank for their finishing work. That made FotoKem an easy choice for Epsteen and Team One, which had already worked with the Burbank-based post production facility. Epsteen was quite familiar with 2K scans, but “Details” would be his first experience with a 4K scan and IMAX.
FotoKem’s Large Format Group provided an entire package of services – integrated into a 4K post production pipeline – to recreate the standard-def “Details” in 4K, including the scan, compositing and color-correction at 4K on the Quantel Pablo iQ, with titling in Discreet Flame, followed by a film-out at 4K to 65mm 15-perf negative. “Because we were going back to the original film, I knew it might be a little grainy, but I felt pretty confident that it would hold up,” says Epsteen.
Forensic Examination
First, the spot went back to Hal Honigsberg, owner/editor of Chrome, who created a forensic roadmap of “Details.” “We took the offline cut apart and then made animated notes on top of it that told them exactly what we did in standard-def,” explains Honigsberg. “I always have back-ups and histories of all the cuts, so all I had to do was re-digitize the media and the cut reassembled itself.” “Details,” which is a split-screen spot, required 60 seconds of material to be redigitized.
“Once it was assembled, I sent the cut into After Effects, which is how I cut some of the Lexus spots anyway,” says Honigsberg. “We used a typing tool and titling tool so we could write notes and draw diagrams, giving an almost football play-by-play of what we did.”
“It’s a car, which means that something is always imperfect – and it has to be a perfect world,” he continues. “It’s either the highlight of a bumper that needs to be brought forward, or the road that isn’t quite exquisite enough. There is always some little detail that needs to be looked at, replaced, fixed, accented.”
In addition to detailed information on fixes, Honigsberg also provided information about positioning, specifically how to crop the shot to enable the left and right element to merge into a single frame. “They could have eye-matched it, but this was deeper information,” he explains. “I created a little template showing a full frame and then showing how I cropped it.” Though reconstituting every cut and fix seems like an onerous task, Honigsberg said, “remembering what I did was ingrained. When you go through that Rubik’s Cube, you can always go back and reassemble it once you figure out the puzzle. I’m sure I could remember it today. If they ever want to do 8K, I’m ready.”
The forensic cut was handed off as an uncompressed Quicktime file to FotoKem, which had the job of reconstituting the commercial in 4K. Color-correction artist Walter Volpatto also used the standard-def version of “Details” as a roadmap. “We gave them a DigiBeta copy of the commercial to match,” says Epsteen.
Heavy Data Lifting
The original 35mm material was scanned on an Imagica XE Advanced scanner, with the resultant data stored on the Quantel iQ. The next step fell to FotoKem digital intermediate artist Volpatto. “The biggest challenge was the amount of data,” he says. “In some compositing shots we had five different 4K layers, each with different color-correction and movements. Being in 4K, even a simple shot had four times the data – plus multiply that by five layers.”
“Luckily, the Pablo iQ was capable of handling the data in uncompressed native format and playback and conform in real-time without proxies or smaller-sized data,” he continues. “We evaluated the final compositing without any intermediate step.”
One major task was stabilization of the shots. Because of the split screen, even the slightest movement would be visible. “In Standard Def, you can forgive a lot more,” says Volpatto. “On a large screen, there is no forgiveness. We had to be a lot more precise because of this. And the naked eye is a bad judge.” The images were evaluated in FotoKem's digital cinema screening room on a 30-foot screen, on which even a minor deviation or movement could be detected and corrected. This screening room was also used to evaluate the graphics and VFX, which were also done at FotoKem.
Volpatto says he was able to easily match the color-correction of the Standard Definition spot, utilizing the Quantel Pablo iQ color-correction tools. The entire 4K spot – including logging the material, the conform, all the compositing, stabilization, and color correction – took two days. “It was complicated but efficient,” says Volpatto. “Here I could have the project in the room with the client, with all my layers open for changes, both color and assembly. I was able to move around shots, tweak the compositing and color as desired, all in real time.”
“When we saw the original project, it looked very complicated,” he continues. “When we started to break it down in smaller pieces and see how easy it was working with the Pablo iQ, it became less complicated than it appeared. I have difficulty imagining how I would have done this without the Pablo iQ. The machine came to our aid to put it all together very easily. At the end, it wasn’t a headache project. It was fun to do it.”
Sections: Creativity Technology
Topics: Feature Project/Case study
Did you enjoy this article? Sign up to receive the StudioDaily Fix eletter containing the latest stories, including news, videos, interviews, reviews and more.
