At the end of June we managed to print out the first reel (22 minutes, containing the film’s audiovisually most complicated scenes) on The Chimney Pot’s Arri Laser Printer. It didn’t look right! The Chimney Pot brought experts here from Arri to upgrade their laser printer and the improvement was aston- ishing. We then did a new 35 mm print and the colourist at FilmTeknik decided, with the best of film intentions, to add a little bit of yellow. The reel, with Dolby SR sound, was delivered at the beginning of July to IB on Fårö, where he has had his own 35 mm home cinema for the past five decades.
IB’s opinion was that close-ups worked quite well, wide shots were generally a bit out of focus, the print generally ‘piss-yellow’ and the sound ‘completely useless’ (he had screened in mono). ‘Let’s skip the whole idea of cinema release and consider this a total fiasco!’
Now, here comes an interesting phase. Per Sundin and I met Nils Melander, the colourist at FilmTeknik, and studied the ‘yellow’ print espe- cially from a contrast range viewpoint. It turned out that the added yellow was bad for resolution. RGB is RGB and if you add a complementary colour like yellow it affects resolution. Per and I still thought that contrast range and colour depth could be improved, the most common problem when transferring standard video to film. But Nils exclaimed, ‘For heaven’s sake, there is no more to get out from my 35 mm negative!’ And we said ‘But there’s obviously plenty more on our HD tape!’
So, back to The Chimney Pot. We started working with the gamma curve, which you can do in the Arri Laser Printer. Instead of the previously rela- tively steep curve we applied a more levelled curve, we even lifted the black level and, of course, removed the added yellow. Other than that, the same basic filtration. And we were amazed by the quality of the next 35 mm shoot-out! The resolution had now improved considerably. We showed it to Nils Melander, who has 40 years’ experience as a 35 mm colourist, and asked him: ‘How can you distinguish this from a print from a 35 mm nega- tive?’ ‘There’s an easy way for me to answer that,’ he said, ‘it is in 16:9 and not in 1.85:1, but other than that ... very difficult. Well, on a really big cinema screen it might be a bit easier for me.’
End of interview with Torbjörn Ehrnvall.
Conclusion
The road to a successful TV release, future HD and DVD versions and, above all, a 35 mm cinema release version was full of ups and downs for
Conclusion
53
Saraband. In June 2002 the original idea of shooting on HDTV was totally discarded, but revived enthusiastically a month later, causing SVT a tremen- dous hi-tech rearmament at short notice. Camera noise problems brought the production to a complete halt after the second day of shooting – the second cause of real headaches within the production team. That was how- ever solved due to good teamwork and an amazing flexibility from a then 84-year-old director. In July 2003 the director claimed that the idea of a 35 mm cinema release should be abandoned for technical quality reasons. That problem will be solved too, and as you have just read a colourist with 40 years’ experience at a major 35 mm film lab had a hard time distinguishing the
Saraband35 mm cinema release version from a print made from a 35 mm camera negative.
Sarabandgot its grand TV premiere on SVT Channel 1 on 1 December 2003. On 3 December it was followed up by an excellent 47 minute behind- the-scene film from the production, Direction: Bergman, which should be shown by every film-school in the world with a serious ambition to educate film directors.
At the beginning of February 2004 Saraband was screened during the Film Festival in Dangères, France (as part of an Ingmar Bergman retro- spective), for an audience of 1500 in a congress hall and as HD video projected on a 8 × 14 m screen. It was honoured by long, standing ovations. HD video production techniques, both for film and TV, are today very well suited for sport, gala events or feature films with a lot of ‘Bang! Bang!’, pixel-pushing SFX action and post-sync. For low-voiced, intimate studio productions Thomson, Sony, Panasonic and others obviously still have some homework to do.
I can however almost promise that silent progressive HD ‘film’ cameras will be shown during IBC 2004 in Amsterdam. If it proves so, send a thought of thanks to Ingmar Bergman.
3.2
The Swedish Digital Experience, by Lasse Svanberg
T
he first feature film entirely shot with Sony 24/25p HD CineAlta cameras to get cinema release was not, as you might think, a George Lucas film. It was Hem ljuva, hem (Home, Sweet Home), produced by Sonet Film in Stockholm and released on 3 March 2001. The second was not a George Lucas film either, it was Livvakterna (Corporate Protection), also produced by Sonet Film and released 15 August the same year.Twenty-six Swedish feature films were released in 2003.The list of shooting formats looks like this:
25p HD CineAlta 9 DigiBeta 2 DV-CAM 1 IMX 720p 1 35 mm film 7 Super 16 film 6
In other words, 50% of the national feature film output that year was shot not on film but on digital video media. (That figure can only be matched by Denmark in a current international perspective.) Why is that? And why was Sweden first to screen domestic HD feature films? Are we techno-freaks? Or just plain stupid, begging for ‘arrows in our back’?
The answer can probably be found in the fact that Sweden (and other Scandinavian countries) have a long tradition of being so-called early adopters of new technology. History tells us that cinematographic industrial production in the longer fictional format moved north from France to Sweden and Denmark (which holds the oldest still functioning film production com- pany in the world, Nordisk Film, founded in 1909). The early adopter concept also applies to the implementation of new technical inventions like telephony, colour TV, home video, home computers, broadband networks and mobile phones (with Finnish Nokia being the world leader) in Scandinavia – small, relatively wealthy countries with a hi-tech oriented population and industry.
A large country, like for instance France (Europe’s biggest and oldest film producer), has bigger institutions, bigger companies, stronger unions, more powerful bureaucracies and also closer ties to traditional ways of making and showing films.The powers of inertia are lower in smaller countries and thus their ability higher to implement radical changes relatively quick. Size can be an obstacle to change (which certainly applies to present-day Hollywood). On the other hand, size also dictates the techno-economical conditions for large scale changes, as we will see when business model- based Digital Cinema gets it global roll-out in a few years’ time.