How Do Digital Cameras Work Article

LONDON -- Boy meets girl, boy practices wedding vows by putting ring on finger of dead maid, boy marries corpse. That's the macabre spin to a classic tale story in Warner Bros.' animated tale, Corpse Bride. Directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson, this gravely pleasing detraction comes to the big screen as the first digital stop-motion feature film.

"What I love about stop-motion animation is that it's so tactile," says Burton. "There's something astonishing about being strong to physically touch and move the characters, and to see their nature really dwell. It's comparable to making a live action film--if you're doing it all on bluescreen, it doesn't allow you the feeling of absolutely being there, which the stop-motion process does."

"The vision Before Christmas [directed by Burton] spawned a new genesis of stop-motion fans," says Johnson, who was an assistant animator on that film, "it has a certain texture, a bearing, that just can't be achieved with computers."

Production and post took place in and around London. Voicing the film's lead characters are Johnny Depp as Victor, Helena Bonham Carter as the Corpse wife and Emily Watson as Victoria. numeral designer Carlos Grangel designed fully-animatable puppets based on original character sketches made by Burton. tool masters McKinnon and Saunders brought these designs to energy. They devised foundation-tall figures with a new flexible silicon skin and heads that contained an intricate adjustable gearing agency capable of producing complex facial expressions and unheard-of subtly of emotion.

Meanwhile storyboard artists were busy blocking out the all the scenes shot by ammunition and filling the panels with the dark and brooding spirit that Burton is influential for.

THE EDIT

In the hands of editor Jonathan Lucas, voice tracks and storyboards converged into a precise 75-minute previsualization of the spent movie. Lucas built the narration reel in Apple's decisive Cut Pro .

"Shooting this movie digitally was, for me, almost instant gratification," says Lucas. "Once a shot was complete I had it cut into the reel within a few hours. This movie couldn't procure been exhausted any other way. The amount of time it would procure taken if the film had to be processed and telecined before substance cut, we would never have hit the release date or been ingenious to get the instant feedback that was allowed us by this new digital technology using irrefutable Cut Pro."

Burton's long-time editor Chris Lebenzon, ACE, who recently wrapped up work on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, oversaw the edit and further developed it within Avid.

GOING DIGITAL

During preproduction, Corpse wife producer Allison Abbate, freelance VFX administrator Chris Watts and Warner Bros. visible effects senior VP Chris DeFaria were having dinner in London and discussing the project. Watts mentioned casually, "Well, you're shooting this digitally, right?" The startling suggestion was quickly discussed and someday adopted for the production.

The original plan was to shoot on film, but "when Chris DeFaria and Chris Watts heard about the cumbersome process of shooting one frame at a time and accordingly waiting a day for dailies, they suggested using these digital still cameras. Their size and availability made perfect sense for us, so with six weeks to go before we began principal photography, we emphatic to nominate the switch. Everyone really rallied behind the move. It was a big knowledge curve but the excitement and the advantages made it stature the work."

Watts depleted the next months devising and refining a workflow based on using a digital still camera to do stop motion animation. After testing many cameras, the field narrowed to the Canon EOS-ID symbol II equipped with a CMOS megapixel chip and Digic II processor. In the decisive movie some shots were captured by other cameras, but most of the movie was missile with 32 customized Canons on 32 separate sets at Three Mills Studios in London.

Watts, leader of photography Pete Kozachik and motion control technician Andy Bowman modified the SLR camera back, attaching a video tap that swung out for prudish focusing. A distinct convenience of the smaller camera, mounted on a computer motion controlled jib arm, was the dexterity to get deep and taut into a location and way up close to a tool grain.

Watts devised a base line calibration system that emulated the color space and gamma of Kodak 5248 negative, the film stock Kozachik selected when the project was celluloid based. He rated the cameras at ISO 100 and sometimes ISO 50 when shooting actually dark subject matter. He moreover lit every set film style, and captured every frame in the native camera 3504 X 2336 raw format--the uncompressed data coming off the CMOS chip. Watts used a freeware program built by David Coffin, called , an ANSI C program that decodes any camera raw file. That code was incorporated into a policy application built by programmers at FilmLight, UK, to convert the camera raw files into standard Cineon images.

Each folder of Cineon frames represented a shot and was turned into a QuickTime pare. The editorial gang methodically replaced all the storyboard clips with the QuickTime clips and built an elaborate temp audio track, filled with sound effects and temp music to get a better emotional sense of the finished film.

THE BIG FINISH

While the maturity of the movie was shot "in-camera," there were still over 460 digital effects shots created by Moving Picture presence (.com), or MPC, in London and supervised by Jessica Norman. Some shots were scene enhancements such as CG clouds, flames, cobwebs and smoke elements composited into many multilayered shots for environment. fresh digital tasks included rig removal, and modeling and animating crows, spiders, butterflies and the wife's diaphanous veil. MPC effects artists also extensive the city and country backgrounds with digital matte paintings.

As the CG shots evolved, updated QuickTimes were sent to Lucas and incorporated into the offline.

MPC was again guilty for the online censor using their Quantel iQ to observe all the Cineon files and visible effects shots into a digital mediocre master. Max Horton used Pandora Pogle for irrevocable color grading on the DI. The irrevocable color corrected DI was sent to MPC's in-legislature Arrilaser recorders.

How does Abbate feel knowing that they've permanently changed the way that stop-motion feature animation is accomplished? "This was a outstanding matrimony between the worlds of cheerful and low tech," she says. "We used the new technology to enhance and simplify the hand-made charm of stop-motion action. I think it will change the way folk look at the medium. And this is only the birth."

By DANIEL RESTUCCIO