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Video Versioning: Post on Be Kind Rewind
By Jon Silberg
Feb 20, 2008 - 1:06:13 AM
Director Michel Gondry's films always lean toward the bizarre and whimsical, and the premise for his latest, Be Kind Rewind, is certainly no exception. A video store proprietor (Danny Glover) leaves his small neighborhood business in the care of a couple of screw-ups--Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def)--who manage to demagnetize the entire inventory, leaving a store full of tapes now devoid of the picture and audio customers generally expect. In an attempt to cover their mistake, the two get hold of a VHS camera and pop the tapes inside to record their own versions of the movies in the hopes that the customers won't notice. The pair start with Ghostbusters and work their way through many more titles, including Driving Miss Daisy, 2001: A Space Odyssey and King Kong. Their no-budget productions might not fool the community, but they do bring a great deal of attention and fascination to the duo's endeavor.
Editor Jeff Buchanan had worked with Gondry and other directors on music videos and comedian Dave Chapelle's performance film, Block Party.
Rewind, his first feature editing gig, came with some unusual challenges. Buchanan and his team were set up in Passaic, NJ, near the storefront location used for most of the shooting. Cinematographer Ellen Kuras, ASC, shot the film on 35mm Fujifilm stocks, but the films-within-the-film were shot just as we see them being shot--with the actors using a vintage Panasonic VHS camcorder. For shots of the actors watching their work on a television, the actual VHS tapes often had to be rushed to the cutting room, digitized into the Final Cut System, edited and then output to Digital Beta or played back as QuickTime files. The turnaround was often hectic and the VHS imagery sometimes had dropouts and other strange artifacts in it, but that was part of Gondry's work method.
Au Naturel
"It's always important with Michel to try to do as much in camera as possible," the editor comments. "He really tries to stick to that on everything I've ever done with him. If he's looking for found footage shot in the 1930s, he wouldn't want to shoot with a modern camera and alter the image in post. He would find a camera from the 1930s."
Although Parisian effects company BUF did create some digital effects and the film was graded as a digital intermediate at EFILM, it is part of Gondry's outlook that he likes attain his effects naturally wherever possible. "I know [Michel and Ellen] tried some DV cameras," Buchanan notes, "but the look of the VHS was great. The colors were incredible. It's obviously not technically a great image, of course, and the focus would drift and we'd get all these really strange video hits and dropouts, but all this added to the films they were making. They're not supposed to be making slick films. They're just winging it with the equipment they've got.
"We see the image at one point and it's really wavy and messed up," Buchanan recalls. "We talked about getting the effect digitally, so he asked me to mock up what it might look like. I took an old movie and did a bunch of effects using things like After Effects, morphing and stretching the picture. But he preferred the look we got by unwinding the tape, stretching it, running a magnet near it, cutting it up and taping it back together. It has a magical element that way, and it gave their films a look and feel that is very different from the overall film."
In-Camera Editing
The look of the films within the film had certain restrictions based on the lead characters' expertise and the equipment they had access to. "It had to all look like these films were edited in camera," says Buchanan. "We couldn't stylize anything. They didn't shoot coverage and then edit shots together. But we all tried to stay away from gimmicky Ed Wood-type stuff. The idea isn't that they're making bad movies and it's funny because 'look how bad they are!' It's funny because they're making these movies filled with tons of imagination."
Buchanan's cutting rooms were based on three Apple G5s running Final Cut Pro version 6. The editor used a 30-inch Cinema Display for his work and also kept a 40-inch 720p Panasonic LCD monitor to show Gondry his progress. The editor and assistants could share media using a Facilis TerraBlock 24D system with 24TB of storage and a Fibre Channel network. "It's a little different from [Avid's] Unity or an [Apple] Xsan system," says 1st Assistant Editor Alex Kopit. "Everyone can't all write to the same project. We could all see what everyone else was doing, but you have to choose who's doing the writing, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In a project like this, we were creating new media so quickly and changing versions, so the fact that only one system could write to the media drive [at a time] had advantages."
The film negative from Kuras' cameras was telecined at EFILM to D5 and then converted to 720p DVCPRO format and digitized as a 720p QuickTime to be edited in Final Cut Pro HD at that resolution. This workflow allowed for quick, lossless file transfers, enabling Gondry and Kuras to view HD dailies (not downconverted SD dailies on DVD, as is often done) on set. No film dailies were made. Editing in HD also saved the conforming step before previews that often happens when HD dailies are edited in SD.
FileMaker Files
The assistants could also work on three satellite G4 workstations that couldn't access the media but were used instead to keep track of the media and EDLs. For this work, Kopit made extensive use of FileMaker Pro software to build databases that could keep track of every piece of audio and video in the server. The system also kept track of different frame rates, as the VHS (stored as Digital Beta) existed at 29.97 and the HD material was 23.98. "Some scenes were covered with three or four of the Super 35 cameras and two or three VHS cameras," Kopit notes. "We had audio at both 23.98 and 29.97. It was a lot of work to make sure everyone was working with the right versions of media. That's an area where FileMaker was very helpful.
"We had to turn things around at a faster pace than sometimes the dailies process would allow for," Kopit explains. "I would have loved a one-day turnaround between when the Final Cut dailies and the VHS original material came in and when it had to get to the set. It was very helpful to be working in QuickTime because we could export files much faster than real time to laptops that could go to the set or to go to previews."
The Unexpected
Buchanan worked on the film through principal photography and then collaborated with Gondry for about ten months beyond, shaping and massaging the film. The editor found the director willing to try different approaches and experiment throughout the process. "We would do different versions and move things around all the time," Buchanan says. "He doesn't have a hard time losing things because they were hard to do or took a long time to shoot or because he liked the idea originally.
"Just working with Michel couldn't have been more fun," he concludes. "Something unexpected would happen every day."
