Old Cameras Article

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

"What I love about stop-motion pep is that it's so tactile," says Burton. "There's something strange about being accomplished to physically touch and move the characters, and to see their nature truly subsist. It's similar to making a live action film--if you're doing it all on bluescreen, it doesn't give you the conviction of really life there, which the stop-motion process does."

"The fantasy Before Christmas [directed by Burton] spawned a new generation of stop-motion fans," says Johnson, who was an partner animator on that film, "it has a real web, a presence, 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 conqueror, Helena Bonham Carter as the Corpse wife and Emily Watson as Victoria. caliber designer Carlos Grangel designed fully-animatable puppets based on original vein sketches made by Burton. tool masters McKinnon and Saunders brought these designs to life. They devised foot-lofty figures with a new malleable silicon skin and heads that contained an tricky adjustable gearing instrument efficient of producing complex facial expressions and unprecedented subtly of emotion.

Meanwhile storyboard artists were engrossed blocking out the all the scenes effort by shot and filling the panels with the dark and brooding mood that Burton is famous for.

THE revise

In the hands of editor Jonathan Lucas, voice tracks and storyboards converged into a precise 75-minute previsualization of the fulfilled movie. Lucas built the story shake in Apple's Final Cut Pro .

"Shooting this movie digitally was, for me, relatively instant gratification," says Lucas. "Once a shot was complete I had it cut into the waver within a few hours. This movie couldn't deflower been spent any fresh way. The amount of time it would have taken if the film had to be processed and telecined before vitality cut, we would never keep hit the release date or been able to get the instant feedback that was allowed us by this new digital technology using supreme Cut Pro."

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

GOING DIGITAL

During preproduction, Corpse Bride 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 reminder was quickly discussed and finally adopted for the fabrication.

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 decided to make the switch. Everyone really rallied behind the move. It was a big learning curve but the excitement and the advantages made it worth the work."

Watts spent 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 trademark II equipped with a CMOS megapixel chip and Digic II processor. In the definitive movie some shots were captured by other cameras, but most of the movie was opening with 32 customized Canons on 32 separate sets at Three Mills Studios in London.

Watts, governor of photography Pete Kozachik and motion control technician Andy Bowman modified the SLR camera back, attaching a video tap that swung out for right focusing. A distinct advantage of the smaller camera, mounted on a computer motion controlled jib arm, was the cleverness to get deep and tight into a spectacle and way up close to a puppet character.

Watts devised a base line calibration theory 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 really dark subject matter. He again lit every set film style, and captured every frame in the native camera 3504 X 2336 raw format--the uncompressed proof 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 regulation was incorporated into a custom application built by programmers at FilmLight, UK, to convert the camera raw files into standard Cineon images.

Each portfolio of Cineon frames represented a shot and was turned into a QuickTime pare. The editorial team 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 final 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 Company (.com), or MPC, in London and supervised by Jessica Norman. Some shots were locale enhancements such as CG clouds, flames, cobwebs and smoke elements composited into many multilayered shots for environment. Other digital tasks included rig removal, and modeling and animating crows, spiders, butterflies and the wife's diaphanous veil. MPC effects artists moreover broad 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 moreover responsible for the online edit using their Quantel iQ to adjust all the Cineon files and visual effects shots into a digital intermediate master. Max Horton used Pandora Pogle for final color grading on the DI. The final color corrected DI was sent to MPC's in-ancestry Arrilaser recorders.

How does Abbate feel knowing that they've permanently changed the way that stop-motion feature gaiety is accomplished? "This was a great nuptials between the worlds of high and low tech," she says. "We used the new technology to embroider and expedite the ovation-made charm of stop-motion animation. I suppose it will change the way population look at the medium. And this is only the birth."

By DANIEL RESTUCCIO