Spirit Press: Film & Video

If you haven't heard enough about how I finally got to do that thing I was talking about, Debra Kaufman has written an excellent article for Film & Video called The Spirit Closes the Distance Between VFX and the DI.

The Spirit, directed by Frank Miller and based on the Will Eisner comic book series, points the way toward a new integration of digital production and post. That’s thanks to The Orphanage, a VFX/production company in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and its co-founder Stu Maschwitz, the movie’s second unit director and visual effects supervisor. “Every movie is a collaboration between visual effects artists and the DI artist, but they never meet and they never see each other’s work,” said Maschwitz. “They get approved in a vacuum. The colorist doesn’t get to pass any wisdom back to the VFX artist, and the VFX artist thinks, ‘We’ll color this in post.’ It’s an important collaboration that’s broken. We’re still scheduling the DI at the end of the process, approving visual effects shots before we’ve thought much about the digital intermediate."

With The Spirit, Maschwitz saw an opportunity. “I thought, here’s a chance to put my money where my mouth is,” he said. “Because of its principle creative, the movie is going to be a visual feast. I wanted to put into practice some ideas about how to better integrate those two really important processes: visual effects and DI.”

Comments

[Brian]

Look at you! Revolutionizing the post process, but you still cant convince Canon to do 24p on the 5DII. I don't know whether to be proud or disappointed.


(Way to go, Stu, it's good to see you accomplishing what you have said is so important for so long. Do you think other productions and post houses will follow suit?)

[kylemallory]

Stu,

This is awesome stuff!, and congratulations. I know, I'm about a month behind. Catching up on what I've missed over the last month..

A friend and I have been having heavy discussion on the entire 'collaborative' process of filmmaking. In the Studio Daily article, you use the word "collaboration" to describe the old communication process between VFX and DI. A recent video from Edutopia, with Randy Nelson (http://www.edutopia.org/randy-nelson-school-to-career-video) describes this, near the end of the video, as cooperation, rather than true collaboration.

This is interesting to me, as an amateur indy filmmaker (DV Rebel w/ a RED, if you will), I'm surprised by this "cooperation" and equally excited about your approach to make it truly "collaborative".

My friend and I are interested in further developing and refining those old-school "cooperative" processes of filmmaking into a more "collaborative" one, even as much as extending collaboration into ALL aspects of a film, bringing writers, directors, talent, vis, Art Dept, DPs, editors, VFX, audio, DI, et-al, into the process as early as possible so everyone has this same level of real-time cross-communication and collaboration right from the beginning.

As you move into writing and directing, I'm curious on your thoughts in these regards?