Wanted...

[Jannard]

There seems to be some confusion about RED on "Wanted" even though I posted the following a couple of weeks ago.

During production, we were told that some RED footage (from pre-production prototypes) would be used in the movie so we added "Wanted" to "Shot on RED" on red.com. As soon as we heard that would not be the case, we pulled "Wanted" from our website. It is not necessary for us to take credit for things we aren't doing. We have plenty of good news to talk about.

This is my earlier post:

"RED was on the "Wanted" set last summer to "see how it would do". The RED ONE prototype (several months before our 1st shipment) was shot sparingly but in several different setups. Everyone seemed very happy with the footage. In fact, Timur bought a RED camera (and paid for it and took delivery when his number came up). So did Jon Farhat (VFX supervisor). At that time the workflow was not smooth with their Avid system and I suspect that integrating some token RED footage would have been a courtesy they did not have time for. This is entirely speculation on my part. Maybe they couldn't find an appropriate "add film grain" filter?

I am anxious to see the movie. It looked like it would be very interesting. They had a great DP (Mitch Amundsen), great talent and Timur has a very unusual vision that I think will translate wonderfully to the final cut. We had a terrific time learning on this set and the 1st AC (Todd Schlopy) gave us tremendous guidance on setting our camera up and features we needed to add.

We looked at this movie as an opportunity to learn and prove that the footage could stand up next to film. I think everyone on the set will agree we succeeded. Several members of the "Wanted" crew, in addition to Timur and Farhat, ordered cameras."

I would also add that at one point during the production, Jon Farhat did a filmout comparison between RED footage and the film footage. According to Jon, no one could tell which was which... until Chunky Richmond noticed the aspect ratio difference.

Jim

 

[Rick Darge]

Cool Jim..

When did Wanted go into production? I can't even remember..

 

[Jannard]

Cool Jim..

When did Wanted go into production? I can't even remember..

Early last year. We began shipping serial number cameras last day of August.

Jim

 

[Shawn Booth]

Jim -

Have you seen the film yet? Planning to?

 

[Adrian T.]

Here's a quote from Jon Farhat, comparing FILM to RED:

FILM

1. We were shooting Kodak, 5218 film stock. Mitch, the DP, and the Gaffer Andy produced a great, balanced neg. And still they had a real gutsy style of exposing for the shadows and letting the highlights pop.

2. The blue record in this stock is very, very grainy. Essentially hellish for bluescreens. The green channel is beautiful - thus green screen.

3. DP's like 18. It's fast, and has a wide latitude. VFX people cry when trying to pull mattes from it.

4. When you scan Super 35 (35 full neg) and do so at 4096 h., you take a real sharp picture of the grain structure.

RED

1. The camera crew thought it would be telling to take the early RED prototype and point it directly into lights, bright windows behind our subjects, etc. Jim and Jarred, (and even myself then) were cringing. We were shocked when we analyzed the takes, (instantly I might add) and there was an amazing amount of detail in the windows and sky. More than the 5218. We had to clip the RED a bit to match.

2. The blue record on the RED images is quite amazing. Even a major improvement since we shot in Prague. The cameras we used later in Chicago sported a greater dynamic range and an even more improved blue record. In both cases, we needed to add some contrast and throw some data away to match the film response.

3. Pulling mattes from green screen using RED is much easier than film and frankly any other digital image and works much better than the Genesis system for instance. For a couple years people have been been saying that pulling keys from Genesis is easy. True, but only for the body of the key. The sharper edges means that when you do have a problem with an edge, it's real ugly. Instead, RED's 4k resolution defines the properties of an edge without the need of sharpening. The keys AND EDGES are stunning.

4. Ahhh. The grain. Do we add grain to RED images to be intercut? Or rely on the output stock? We did both. Pre-grain helped. However, I might add that if I were shooting a movie entirely RED, and the delivery was film, I would forget the idea of post grain and go straight to film.

Having said all that, film has been our standard. But now, we are seeing that we might actually be able to over-sample to achieve the 'film look'.

Another quote from Jon:

"We're shooting RED side by side film. We scanned the film 4k and took both into the Baselight, compared them and then did a filmout of both. When we screened side by side, we literally could not tell the difference. In fact, most people picked the RED footage as film because of a greater dynamic range in the highlights than in the 5218. It's not enough to say it is the best digital image out there. The fact is, finally, we can intercut digital with film. It looked remarkably better than the filmed images. I thought I would never be able to say that"

Jon Farhat, VFX Supervisor, "Wanted".

 

[Patrick Wynne]

It's a great movie, you won't be disappointed.

 

[vincelucero]

Hopefully more than just a Matrix clone... :matrix: :matrix:

I'll check it out for sure though. Angelina's still one hot mama.

 

[ninjaleprechaun]

Well to my eye there are definitely some digital shots in the film. The motion gives it away. I suspect if you froze a frame in those shots it would be hard to tell the difference, though.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Hopefully more than just a Matrix clone...

As soon as something has either visually stunning action sequences or philosophy like Descartes in them those movies are always called matrix clones. With this in mind you could say that any drama movie is a clone of another one. A movie is it's own, as long as they don't put leather, sunglasses, bullettime and descartes philosophy in the same movie it's never going to be a clone of matrix.

 

[Ken K]

Interesting... I didn't know Red wasn't used in this at all. At the end of the credits, I was wondering why Panavision was the only thing listed.

Anyway, I caught the midnight showing of this Thursday night and... wow. Rarely do I go see movies more than once in the theater, but I am definitely catching it again this weekend. I'm a big fan of Timur's Night Watch and Day Watch, so I knew what to expect as far as style coming into this. I went in with high expectations and it definitely exceeded them. I'm interested in hearing the opinions of people who are not familiar with his style, though.

 

[KStephens]

Thanks, Jim. There has definitely been some confusion:

http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-camera-poised-to-alter-filmmaking/80357/
(notice the date)

Confusion aside, Farhat's report on their Red usage was excellent (including the support and hard work from the Red team). Definitely a success.

Cheers

 

[TVGUIDE RUSSIA]

Watched a WANTED movie today, that's cool! Explosion action on the verge of foul and decency Cool mass killing of people at the end Main problem when viewing the film - force myself not to think!

 

[Eren Ozkural]

I noticed quite a few shots that had motion characteristics of video and blown highlights. This was reminiscent of Apocalypto where the majority of the film was beautiful but the jungle chase scenes' motion characteristics just pulled me out of the picture.
Did Timur, Jon & Co test any other digital camera during the shoot and decide to keep some shots in the final edit?

 

[Jannard]

I noticed quite a few shots that had motion characteristics of video and blown highlights. This was reminiscent of Apocalypto where the majority of the film was beautiful but the jungle chase scenes' motion characteristics just pulled me out of the picture.
Did Timur, Jon & Co test any other digital camera during the shoot and decide to keep some shots in the final edit?

No to other digital cameras and no to RED footage. Everything was film. Looks like film can have issues also?

Jim

 

[Stephen Williams]

Looks like film can have issues also?

Jim

Hi Jim,

It's usually the DI that makes film look like video.

Stephen

 

[Jannard]

Hi Jim,

It's usually the DI that makes film look like video.

Stephen

... and usually missed exposure that makes RED look like video.

Jim

 

[Steve Freebairn]

... and usually missed exposure that makes RED look like video.

Jim

Love the quick whit.

 

[Ruairi Robinson]

Hi Jim,

It's usually the DI that makes film look like video.

Stephen

The Insider had heavily burnt out highlights etc, and no DI was used.

In the case of Wanted, I think the motion artifacts being discussed are more to do with a lot of the shots being massively slowed down in post, leading to liquidy swirly motion issues - some shots where the motion blur pulsates in intensity, meaning alternating frames are more, then less blurred as interpolated frames are reconstructed from between the actual frames shot, so these in between frames tend to look more smeary.

 

[Álex Montoya]

Listen to Ruairi. He knows what he's talking about.

 

[jordibares]

Spot on as usual, the swirly bit is normally caused by optical flow tools, a typical case is Kronos plugin for shake/flame which, if stretched too far, tends to produce all sorts of artifacts when you go from fast to ultra slow although not so much from slow to ultra slow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_flow
http://www.fxguide.com/article333.html

On advertising we manually clean every frame to fix that particular swirly effect but the motion blur means painting and we do it, but man is painful and takes tons of time.

Of course this could be prohibitive on a movie even with the budget that they have.

Now if the camera is rolling shutter based, well, this breaks the single motion assumption isn't it? i will most defenitely test this asap.

hope it throws a bit more light so you can google more.
jb

The Insider had heavily burnt out highlights etc, and no DI was used.

In the case of Wanted, I think the motion artifacts being discussed are more to do with a lot of the shots being massively slowed down in post, leading to liquidy swirly motion issues - some shots where the motion blur pulsates in intensity, meaning alternating frames are more, then less blurred as interpolated frames are reconstructed from between the actual frames shot, so these in between frames tend to look more smeary.