"back To The Future" Onfilm Article

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This article was published in OnFilm Magazine September 2009

Back to the future In order to fully grasp the tools of today (and beyond), camera lecturer Dan Wagner reckons students need a strong understanding of those of the past.

One of the main challenges facing film schools today is the delivery of courses that are a dynamic blend of tradition and innovation. We need to arm our students not only for the present but for an unknown future, while providing them with a sense of context and history. We must immerse them in the working parts of traditional filmmaking and also ready them for entry into a digital world that’s developing exponentially. “We’re bringing the past with us into the future,” is how one tutor described it. At the beginning of this year, the Film & TV unit of UNITEC’s Department of Performing and Screen Arts crossed the digital threshold into the world of high definition. At face value, this step may appear to be a mere quality upgrade. However, the move to HD (via P2) has actually been a major brain-jiggle for lecturers, affecting both what we do (in terms of workflow specifics) and how we teach (craft skills and techniques). Going HD has brought about changes to many of our specialisations, affecting issues the students need to address and processes they need to follow. It's affected how sets are designed and dressed, as well as set protocol; how scenes are lit and shot; how shot footage is handled and cut; and how the final product is displayed. “You just have to be fussier,” says art direction lecturer Brent Hargreaves. “We used to be able to get away with a lot more. Take black, for example. Black used to be great for hiding things – ‘just put some black tape over it’; ‘throw a black rug over it’, etc. Well, black doesn't hide things so well any more. A tiny dot on a table from an erasable pen (such as one borrowed from the focus puller) used to be fine as a mark for prop placement – everyone was happy, focus puller especially. It was okay because that dot was out of the resolution range of an SD chip or even 35mm.” With HD's more intense scrutiny of all that’s placed before it, Brent's team has recognised the need to think and work in new ways. Where before they were able to tape and paint over the joins between flats, they now must come up with more clever solutions. For a recent project in which Year 2 students engage in full-day studio shoots (the sets for which turn around overnight), Brent's art department students crafted a series of curvy jigsaw-cut plywood relief panels, which were mounted on various set walls, creating both texture and nonstraight light/shadow patterns. These served as both interesting design elements and also as distractions from the screw marks, irregular paint textures and flat-joins behind them. “This was an HD solution,” says Brent. “Where film does better at reading tonal gradation, digital – especially HD – tends to see line more. It just loves scratches, putty, paint lines, small shadows, irregular texture. So the jigsaw relief panel was all about, ‘Well, we’re going to have shadows anyway, let’s make a big thing out of them.’” The one saving grace for Brent and his students is the ostensibly shallower depth of field HD provides.

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Then there’s the obvious issue of workflow, along with the less obvious aspect of equipment upgrades all down the pipeline. UNITEC now has a rushes room, where the data wrangler ingests the footage into our storage computer, providing a redundant backup to the same footage captured into its designated edit computer. A server is coming soon. The first thing editing lecturer Glenn Thomas noticed about the change was capture time. “With tape,” he says, “we used to have to capture in real time. Now, with HD, it's longer than that, because of data size.” Another new aspect is file conversion. Previously, whatever resolution it was recorded at was the same resolution it was captured at, edited at and output at. “Now,” notes Glenn, “anything goes. You have to plan your work path in relation to optimum compression, based on deliverables, which was just not an issue before. And if you're going to compress it, what will you be compressing it to? In fact, the whole complex area of compression ratios is something an editor has to know these days.” Another ratio is also affected. Glenn estimates that where his teaching was once 50/50 practical/theoretical, it’s now more like 70/30 in favour of the practical, thanks to having to teach the various technical issues and how to cope with them. One area of importance for editing, art department and camera alike is that of focus, which HD’s increased resolution is bringing back in a big way. The discipline of being a focus puller has its origin firmly rooted in film craft. Interestingly enough, however, says Glenn, “In some situations, we actually find ourselves softening the image to hide imperfections made visible by the high quality of the image.”

When I pondered the tutor’s comments about bringing the past into the future, the statement rang in my head like a gong. It occurred to me that this notion is a tad more complex than it seems at face value. True, HD does represent a significant departure from days of grains and pixels past and, as such, it is a step toward the future. But many feel that HD is just a stop on the road toward ever more beefy resolutions – witness Viper, Origin, Genesis, and RED as the initial steps of that journey. Few would argue with the assertion that, for today’s film school to retain its relevance, it must foster conversancy with the digital domain. Going a step further, though, I say that it’s our obligation to deliver graduates to the market who are not only knowledgeable and skilled in the tools of the day, but who have their eye on the future, armed with a base of knowledge and technical hipness to not just survive but thrive in an ever-changing digital landscape. But how do we get there? Do we just blithely let the past go, jumping onto the bullet train of more, cheaper and faster pixels? Or do we owe something to the history that’s brought us here? The middle ground might be to integrate traditional methodologies with newer tools and protocols to produce a more informed hybrid way. By way of example, let's talk about exposure for a sec. Many seasoned DOPs, long wedded to their trusty Spectra and Minolta incident meters, have now come to rely more on the waveform monitor for a quantified analysis of the values in a given frame. Spot meters will come out of the case more often on HD shoots, being the ideal tool for balancing levels from the camera’s viewpoint. But for many, the incident meter, by and large, has morphed into the waveform monitor.

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With the picture-in-picture waveform monitors inside our HD LCD monitors, you’d think that – as long as they learn how to read and use the waveform monitor – the students have all they need to knowledgeably expose a given scene, right? Indeed, since they begin using video equipment as soon as they start here – and they need to get a quick upskilling in very basic exposure in order to generate Year 1 projects that have data in them – we start them off with how to use the zebra stripes in Semester 1 and then with a little bit about gain & ped and clipping & crushing in Semester 2. We even put a grey scale through a waveform monitor and have them play with the iris, so they can see what the effect is on either end. That's all video stuff. But it's when they receive the secrets of the H&D Curve in Year 2 that the exposure penny really drops. It's when they learn to use and interpret an incident and a spot meter, and have a play with placing their exposures on the curve and balancing to existing sources, that they actually begin to feel in control of their exposures and their use as a tool for transmitting the emotion of a scene. That's film stuff. Meters and sensitometry: just one example of old-world thinking with new-age tools.

Our first responsibility is to imbue our students with time-tested skills developed over the past hundred-plus years of filmmaking – skills such as framing and composition (rooted in the elements of design, which we also touch on), plus basic principles of camera operating, camera assisting, lighting and exposure, and camera movement. Having spent 20 years in film, during which I worked my way up through the camera department, and recently having shot my first project on RED One (Alan Brash’s short film Be Careful – see Onfilm June ’09), I think I can safely assert that in order to most effectively (and knowledgeably) shoot for HD, today’s camera student still needs a solid grounding in the craft of shooting film. In order to move forward under power, we do indeed need to bring the past with us.

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Dan Wagner is one of two camera lecturers at UNITEC, along with DOP Alan Locke. ©2009: Mediaweb Limited