The transitions between the helicopter and Steadicam footage required a cut from an extreme telephoto lens (moving at 100 m.p.h.) to the handheld Steadicam fitted with a 10mm lens. To cheat this transition’s velocity, Planet Blue effects artist Nathan McGuinness executed a foreground matte painting of palm trees with the Steadicam shot beyond. As with the splash elements in the previous shot, very close foreground objects such as branches and leaves also sold the illusion of a continually rapid pace.
Reliance on digital technology for the transitions, however, led Jackson to other innovations during the trailer’s postproduction phase. Ordinarily, a live-action piece would not be subject to computer manipulation, but the digital transitions meant that the entire trailer became high-resolution digital data one continuous effects shot. Jackson’s decision to postproduce the trailer in the digital realm was influenced by his experience as both a commercial director and as the helmsman of the effects-heavy Imax sci-fi/action-adventure film The Journey Inside. "I’m a quality maniac," he confesses. "And with TV commercials, I have the luxury of perfect high-resolution effects on the Flame. I’m able to deliver my final product on a digital format D-1 or Digital Betacam that always looks the same.
"For the Imax film," he continues, "all of the special effects were done with traditional optical printers. Because there were so many subtleties, if the color and light didn’t look right from shot to shot, it would ruin the power of the piece. I gained a lot of insight into how careful you have to be to make sure that your final results have the latitude to survive the printing process."
Adamant about quality control, Jackson decided to do all of the compositing in the Inferno system at Planet Blue. To maintain the greatest possible consistency, "all of the colors were defined in look-up tables in the Inferno so we knew the colors would be right." After Planet Blue completed its task, Jackson took all of the data to Cinesite, where the entire piece was color-timed in the Cineon; he did film-outs to ensure that the hues met his specifications. "All of the color timing usually done in a lab was done on a computer, which allowed me to better match the color and texture of photographic layers and scenes shot under wildly varying conditions," he explains. "What we ended up with was a fully color-timed piece at Cinesite, so we needed no scene-by-scene color correction in a lab."
In fact, Jackson enthuses that color-timing the trailer in the Cineon was "more like my experience in telecine than that of color timing in a laboratory, because I was able to turn the knobs and see the color correction I’d asked for on the screen. With so many tools at your fingertips, you can enhance the look of your picture, as opposed to just getting the best color that you would with a [standard] color timing. For example, you can animate the contrast of a scene, or make the greens in a jungle more bright."
Another first followed when Jackson skipped the step of creating an original negative and instead output an original anamorphic widescreen and flat 1.85:1 electronic interpositive. "We stayed in the digital realm as long as we could," he observes. "With a release like this, there will be thousands of prints, for years. By skipping the original negative, we skipped a generation and the resulting loss of image quality.
"Another rationale was that the intermediate stock that we used to make interpositives and internegatives [Kodak 5244] is vastly superior to original negative film," he continues. "The contrast range is totally different and has a much higher resolving power. So going straight to that interpositive gave me higher quality and a much more consistent-looking print. When you go through intermediates from the original negative, things become more contrasty. Special effects shots suffer the most from these intermediates, but we were able to preserve the original contrast levels of the scenes."
[ continued on page 3 ]