The Belgium film “Nuit Noire” shot on HD format was the receiver of the Bronze Frog at the recent Camerimage Film Festival Lödz. We publish the article about the making of the film by its cinematographer Louis-Philippe Capelle SBC

« Nuit Noire »

Directed by Olivier Smolders
Photographed by Louis-Philippe Capelle SBC
Bronze Frog for Cinematography at Camerimage 2005.

Format 1,85mm, colour, 100 min.

Grading and Kinescope by ACE, Brussels
Kodak Negative Film 5245
Laboratory Meuter Titra Brussels
Kodak Positive film Vision Premier

Produced par Parallèles Productions, les Films du Scarabée, Euro HD, The Kassander Film CY, Tandem Films with the help of Centre du Cinéma et de l’audiovisuel de la Communauté Française de Belgique, des Télé distributeurs wallons, de Promimage et du Rotterdams Fonds voor de Film en Audiovisuele Media.

Equipment:

Camera Thomson-Technicolor-Grass Valley serial n° 001
Accesories matte box, follow focus,… Arriflex
Viewfinder extender Optex
Fujinon Cine Style Prime Lens Serie 3
5mm T2, 8mm, 12mm, 16mm, 20mm, 34mm, 40 mm T1,5, MOD 0,4-0,6M
Lens Micro Nikkor 105mm, f2.8 with Nikon to B4 adaptor, Century Optics
Monitoring Barco 20", on camera Teletest 7"
Recorder Panasonic HD-D5


Script

Nuit Noire is a tale about the union of the black and the white, the snow and the night, the blood and the milk, Old fashioned Europe and the Africa as she made it, about the underground life of the beetles and the airy one of the butterflies.
Trapped between the desire and the repulsion inspired by the lost paradise of his childish romances, Oscar gradually gives up his fate to frightening ghosts. As a mentor and a victim of his imaginary world, Oscar favors the birth of a seductive and threatening shadow. He brings his desire to become a deathly reality.

The sets

Studio Polygone: Oscar’office, puppet theater, Oscar’s appartment
(sleeping-room, livingroom, workshop-lab), Leon’s cave
Museum of Natural Science: gangways
Musée of Africa in Tervueren (interiors): entrance, different exhibition halls

Night exteriors Evere (park), Etterbeek (streets),
The taxidermist workshop

Olivier Smolders and the mood of the film
At the beginning the film was to be produced as a regular movie. Filmed in 35 mm and post produced the classical way.

Financing the project was not an easy task as the script was difficult, obscure and not all audience oriented.
An opportunity came from the Walloon Fund for new technologies, Promimage to give a positive start. Olivier reworked on the script and the aesthetics for a HD filming process.

In this movie you can find three different kinds of scenes
- dreams
- realistic: the supposed real life of Oscar
- Entomological (hyper macro photography of insects)

In fact nothing is real. The movie is a fairytale. An artificial world, issued from Oscar’s imagination.

And this must be absolutely obvious from the first seconds of the story.
The question of shooting black and white or colours was asked at the really beginning of the preproduction process and that is mainly because Oliver is accustomed to the B/W from his first short movie on.

Anyway, filming will be in colours and this discussion could occur later in the postproduction process.
Style should be expressionist: building the space by the lightning and contrast, very dark areas, sometimes bright highlights with references such as:
* Eraserhead (Lynch),
* L’heure du loup (Bergman)
* Le procès (Welles),
* Kafka (Soderbergh)
* Europa (Lars Von Trier)


What an enormous challenge, it was to compare with these masters.
If anyway for practical reasons, the movie ends with a colour copy release (artistically choice, production or distribution), this one should be unnaturalistical. The idea of bringing very warm tones towards the end of the story would compare with a no-bleach process in negative film. (like old postcards, colours of the insects…)


Preparing the filming
Relatively small budget movie.
It will be difficult to complete shooting, post and ending with a 35mm release print.
Of course that means many talks in preparation to find the best but cheaper solutions regarding the equipment.
Tests are made with an HDCam cinealta 900 with regular zoom lenses. No fantastic results, mainly due to the poor quality of the lenses. Olivier looks disappointed with the reactions of the video system to contrast, grey areas… he is so accustomed to 35mm B/W.
If 35mm is too expensive, why not thinking of Super 16mm?

My main concern was more about the monitoring on the set and the quality of the lenses.
We discover that rental of a 24 »Sony monitor is awfully expensive: 12000€
So we are going to use the old Barco 20 » monitors from the production company. They are all, so we switched of the chroma (the film was intended to be in BW) and we tried to have a good set up. But they are old and not really stable.

The new Zeiss digiprimes are just out but not available yet for commercial use. They were used for demos in the US and Europe.
We had a good contact with Fuji Europe via France (thank you Michel Chaumiez) and Germany and finally we were granted a brand new serie of Cine Style Fujinon Prime Lenses and 2 zooms.

There are many sequences in the film about hypermacrophtography of butterflies, insects, ants…After comparative tests I decided to use a Micro Nikkor Photograohic 105mm Lens (very cheap in comparison) and send back the 2 zooms.
Then the next step was making the choice for the camera and the frame size.

At Thomson’s Breda plant, engineers are finalizing the development of the new Viper camera.
This is brand new and very hot topic but also an unknown world in terms of going back from video to film.
The way of recording the pictures is also not yet clear.
This revolutionary camera, existing only as a prototype has not been already on a real scale movie set. There are no adapted accessories not even a bridge plate, viewfinder extender…
The camera is noisy, after awhile, ccds are running very hot. This is a main discussion because an automatic fan switch on with the heat and sound recording becomes difficult if not impossible.
But luckily, our film will be mainly without direct sound…
You are able to record the pictures issued from the Viper 2 ways: digital-uncompressed-raw style 4: 4: 4 called film stream mode. Unfortunately, the technology is working but not practical for a long feature film (hard disk fast enough, reliable… are not available or too expensive)
So we decided to go for the best format of HD recording: Panasonic HD-D5.


A few figures:
D5-HD: records 1920x1080 pixels at 235megabits/sec in 4: 2: 2
HD Cam: records 1440x1080 pixels at 140 megabits/sec in 3: 1: 1

(It is been said that the « missing pixels » in HD cam are not mandatory because they consist of video background noise, altering the quality of the picture more that rising the definition.
The main advantage of HD-D5 is of course less compression, which means better quality in terms of luminance and chrominance. That is the reason why it has been chosen as a mastering format closer to 2K.

In Nuit Noire we took also the advantage of HD-D5 while shooting blue screen scenes. These are easier to process in post because of the lesser compression.
The drawback is the poor portability of the system. It is bulky, needs a specialised operator and 240V supply.
We had an 80% time studio shooting so that was not a major inconvenient.

Connecting the camera to the tape recorder is easy via a single BNC cable (HD SDI output) whose length (we’ve tried it) could go up to 100 meters.
A first look at the camera menus brings you very few options.
Maybe it is not too bad.
First choice is interlaced or progressive. To keep the maximum of the definition and the film look, we decided to go for 25P. Every picture is scanned in one step.
We set up marking lines in the viewfinder corresponding to 1036 lines, that means a ratio of 1: 1,85.
The mechanical shutter is fixed on 312°, we decided for a 1/50-shutter speed.
Detail was reduced to a minimum and 2 black gammas were set up: one for interiors and night shots (10 to 15%) and another higher (20%) for daylight sequences.
Black level was set at 21mv that means not too low, but keeping some contrast and detail in the black areas.
The sensitivity of the camera stands around 320-400 asa but one could say that subjectively we have much more in the dark zones and low level details, close to 1000 asa.
The highlights are compressed with a soft curve of the knee: 94IRE at 600% that means latitude of 2-½ stop.

Assistant’s work is very tough, especially maintaining the perfect control of the back focus of the lenses. We did not have any »sharpmax » type aid so that it was very critical to perform these adjustments accurately whenever you change lens.
Better do it with an oscilloscope. When the traces are slim and focused, then your lens is properly set.
You have to be very careful with the wide-angle lenses because the camera mount is not that stable with the temperature variations.
On the Cinestyle lenses, graduations are from the film plane (engraved on the camera body)
Focusing in the viewfinder is still very difficult despite the focus aid ad you really need a siemens chart on the actor eye level to control.
Now I am sure that with the Accuscene viewfinder life is easier for focus pullers!
For all the lenses I decided to stay at an average aperture of T2,8 to keep depth of field narrow.
We did not run not so many test before the real shooting began.
We ‘d got technical and enthusiastic support from the Breda team.
Well that was a world premiere for them also. To see their « baby » on the set and meant to be back on film.
We decided to have the camera as a one light set up; which keeps all the information of the pictures into the dark areas as well as in the highlights.
It is a little bit as shooting reversal film: better be a slightly underexposed and soft than contrasty and highlighted.
Everything that is not in the dynamics at the shooting can never be retrieved in post.


Shooting
We started in the studio.
We are in Oscar’s office. Through the windows we discover the blue screen. A night view of the city will be added in post.
Quite difficult because I have chosen to keep the glasses in the window frames and play with the reflections.
Practical lamp fixtures in the frame, on graduators.
We look at the control monitor in BW.
The only coloured pictured we see are the one coming from my digital camera, and they look terrific.
After this first week we are shooting some dream sequences mainly in blue screen.
The filming is smooth, serious, concentrated but with no stress due to the video system. Sometimes we are looking back at some takes to see if they are rights. Olivier seems happy. He is behaving like he would have been using 35mm: few takes, precise.
The only sad man on the set is the sound engineer and his boom man: the fan of the camera makes an obtrusive noise, Olivier and myself are talking together and giving indications to the actors.
As we don’t have any aerial view in the viewfinder, it makes the work of the boom operator rather difficult as he is always intending to be as close of the borderline as possible. Light level is very low, set colours are very dark and I must say the quality of the picture in the viewfinder is not fantastic. So it is not a piece of cake staying safe from the frame for the boom!!!
At the end of the day, we stay in reduced team for shooting the macrophtography of the insects especially raised by Olivier’s brother who’s an entomologist.
For these beauty shots I am trespassing the dogma of staying at T2.8, because I need depth of field. At T11, my Nikkor lens gives astonishing results and quality. We feel very impatient to see these shots on a 15 meters basis screen!!! Unfortunately, light level need and heat did not make it the more comfortable situation neither for the insects nor the crew.

We have also funny moments but tense while shooting the animal and children scenes: elephant, giraffe, zebra, cow, leopard, dogs, wolf… nice and gentle but intimidated to become film stars.

In the film we also encounter some flashback sequences. These were shot in Super 8mm B/W, transferred to Beta Digital. Sometimes they are full screen, sometimes they appear on the set on an Apple 23 » Cine Display.
After the first 10 days of studio shooting we decided to make a film test: a few scene are selected, edited on hard disk. One shot with Blue Screen is also finalised. We are going to the theatre. The copy is good; definition and contrast wise excepting a bluish cast in the black and white (because of the Colour positive) and some aliasing problems mainly in Oscar’s office window.

Then the crew goes out for some street night sequences, including some « on the shoulder shots », tracking the actor walking in the park.
We are using the well-known blue handles from RBI. The camera is very light, with too much weight on the front because of the lens. Power supply comes from a battery belt and the recorder remains in the truck, 100m from the set.
We also are shooting some sunsets and sunrise shots to be accelerated in post. (Not in the final cut) As a conclusion the « combo » camera –recorder was extremely reliable except for a small « software » problem with the HD-D5 which brought us 2hours later in the schedule.
This was not really a drawback for an 8 weeks shoot.

For the director, he feels that the main convenience with a video shoot and especially with a separate recording system is the time lapse between the moment he says: « camera » and the 15 seconds later when he is able to say « action » This gap brings lack of concentration of the crew and the actors and makes really the difference with a film camera.


Post Production
HD D5 dailies were first transferred to Digital Beta and DVCam for off-line editing.
Olivier did a major part of the editing at home on his Apple G4, Final Cut based system.

Very shortly after the beginning of the editing it appeared that the film had a great look in colours. even if desaturated and with an increased contrast.
After going on line on Hard Disk, grading of the film was made on a Poggle Platinium console, in SD( the edited on line on Betacam digital). This is a simple rand cheaper procedure. When it is completed you are able to apply the same timing set up on the HD datas.
A lot of work has been done on each picture mainly vignetting and playing with masks. Creativity limits are only in time limits and production financial limits.
Peter Bernaers responsible for the grading did a great job at ACE facilities in Brussels. Dreams sequences have a cool, blue cast, with skin tones on the light magenta side.
Then the tonalities of the film are becoming warmer, even goldish with saturated tones. The super 8mm archives, blown up to 35mm look like an old family movie in BW.

Set, style, costumes, lightning even if they were designed for a Black and White release are coherent and there is not a single problem of intercutting and mixing the scenes.

* selecting some colours we were able in grading of desaturating and even changing the hue of some disturbing patches
* same results with a night exterior, sodium lit which had a very strong orange main

My main problem in timing was getting the most of one of the rare daylight exterior scene with a burned sky on top.
There was no other solution than bringing a matte for the sky in post.
Blue screen scenes were treated separately, first timing the backgrounds and the main scenes separately and then brought together in a Flame 2K compositing.
On line confo was made directly from D5 to Flame as data files and recorded on Hard Disks La Cie (5x250 gigas for the whole movie)
We had a final look at the D5, graded copy on a Sony 24 » monitor and this is almost the end of the process. That means, we are ready to go for film transfer.
In the meantime we edited a selection of representative shots to be transferred and screened to see and decide the final look.
I asked for Vision Premier Positive that will bring velvet blacks and contrast while maintaining saturated colours.

Transfer will be on a Celco machine and not Arri Laser more expensive. Quality is said to be the same, but it takes longer

Celco ; transfer on a crt screen, black and white, 3 expositions for the RGB (twice the time in the red) 3x6 sec/ frame
Arri Laser, 2 sec/frame
Definitive format of the frame will be decided and each frame will be electronically cropped at 1036 lines, that means a 1 :1,85 ratio.

The making of a film is not limited to the shooting nor the editing, everyone involved knows that you have to be patient. But with Nuit Noire this could not have been truer.
It took almost 3 years from the filming to the release print; this is due to a limited budget compensated by everyone’s goodwill.

Louis-Philippe Capelle sbc
February 2005

capelle.usui@skynet.be
+32 475 48 95 08