Monday - July 30, 2007

Final Cut, Final Touch, and final stages

My blog entires have, needless to say, been sporadic over the past several weeks. Sorry. We've been slamming forward at full speed on post. Three major things are happening simultaneously:

• Kristopher Carter is finalizing the score;

• The folks at Juniper Post are editing the sound; and

• Our DP Jason Cochard and I are hard at work finalizing the visual elements of the film at Keep Me Posted (a division of FotoKem).

The color correction on Yesterday Was a Lie is particularly challenging. Jason is, I dare say, pioneering a bold new approach to color-timing motion pictures using Apple's newly released Final Cut Studio 2 and the integrated professional Color application (formerly Final Touch). Using Color's all-digital workflow, we are selectively altering the hues and tones of different elements within each shot for the purpose of gaining specific control over the contrast and brightness of everything in the frame. This allows for an unparalled level of control over the black-and-white image, using color-based keys, shapes, grades, and filters.

We're also processing the images to emulate the appearance of older black-and-white movies. In addition to the overall desaturation of each shot, we apply a vignette filter in Color to simulate the light response of lenses from the 1940s. Finally, we add a 25-point Gaussian blur at 40% opacity on an overlayed channel once the film is conformed back into Final Cut, for the purpose of emulating the unique manner in which the backs of older film stocks reflected a slightly out-of-focus "ghost" of the image back onto the emulsion layer, thus creating the "glow" or "halo" effect which added to the beauty of classic films noir.

Jason and I chose to perform this latter step in Final Cut Pro because we felt that Color's Blur filter introduced moire interference patterns into some of our shots. The unintended side effect of using layers and opacities in Final Cut is the introduction of a miniscule, virtually imperceptable amount of pale blue color data into the image. We've elected to retain this slight cyan-shift rather than re-desaturating the film. Ironically, I think it actually makes our black-and-white images look MORE black-and-white when viewed on a color monitor or projector.

For the next few days we'll be on the scoring stage with the orchestra. Looking forward to hearing Kris's beautiful music come to life.