Scorsese Goes Underground in The Basement
As the visual effects supervisor for blockbuster productions like Titanic, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Good Shepherd and The Aviator, Rob Legato has logged years in some of Hollywood’s biggest effects studios. Over the past few years, he has been investigating facility-less production and recently began implementing some of his desktop production ideas while supervising effects on The Aviator.
Legato amped up his in-home Mac systems to handle features and commercials, and found that his basement was the most convenient studio space in town. Legato rounded up Macs and PCs, HD CRTs, and Blackmagic Design hardware to allow him to manage and process hundreds of 2K shots, including all the visual effects required for The Departed and The Good Shepherd. Legato and his partner, producer Ron Ames, call their new anti-facility The Basement. It’s been a busy year down there.
The Basement, though it may seem like a facility, is a workshop for new digital production ideas developed by Legato, Ames, and digital artist Adam Gerstel. There is no rate card for The Basement because it only exists to implement Legato’s effects supervision in ways tailored to the special requirements and working methods of select clients, such as directors Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Errol Morris.
The idea of desktop artists operating out of their homes is not an entirely new concept, but few home boutiques boast the kind of firepower The Basement has assembled. “All elements of the Basement system connect through Blackmagic Design Workgroup Videohubs, providing full HD-SDI routing,” Ames says. “Each of the two hubs has 24 outputs and 12 inputs that provide full routing and distribution capabilities, along with RS-422 device control. The Workgroup Videohubs are set in parallel with each other so that both sides of any 4:4:4 source can be easily directed. The routing interface can be controlled on any PC or Mac in the basement through Blackmagic software running via the local network.” Blackmagic hardware manages data in both the analog and digital realms. Multibridge Extremes are used for the Beta SP deck, DVD player, VHS deck, and consumer CRT HD television, converting the SDI signal routed into the Workgroup Videohubs into an analog signal for these devices. Blackmagic Design products are at the center of The Basement’s system, providing the kind of flexibility that helped Ames and Legato offer some unusual solutions to production challenges on The Departed, the latest film by Martin Scorsese.
Starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Matt Damon, The Departed is a version of the 2002 Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs. The plot follows the parallel story of two moles: one infiltrating the police force and the other in a crime syndicate. This is a movie without obvious visual effects, but there was still the opportunity to add close to 200 effects shots from set extensions and dozens of other “invisible” visual enhancements.
Squibs and Shots
Scorsese, like Sam Peckinpah, has never shrunk from portraying violence. He choreographs domestic violence, gunfire, and boxing matches in a precise, operatic style. Shooting scenes like these normally requires hours of setup for the pyrotechnic crew and makeup artists. Each take of a shot produces smoke that must be cleared and bloodied wardrobe that must be replaced. Squibs, the small explosive devices attached to actors to simulate bullet impacts, are not only time consuming to set up, but limit the movement of actors and stunt doubles as well as camera placement.
Faced with filming a complex shoot-out in the cramped quarters of an elevator in The Departed, Legato suggested a new approach. “We did all the bloodshed and muzzle blasts digitally,” Legato says. “This provided some immediate advantages. Because the tiny wired squibs used to create bullet hits were eliminated, Marty [Scorsese] was able to put the camera just about anywhere.” This still left the problem of creating bullet hits, blood spatter, and other impact effects that had to be generated separately and composited with the live action footage of the actors.
While a CG house could easily conjure digital smoke, muzzle flashes, and gouts of blood, these natural events are time consuming to produce digitally and the results frequently fall short of gritty reality. “We chose to shoot the live explosions and liquid effects on a stage in 35mm and add them into the film backplate,” Legato says. When the effects shooting was wrapped, Legato screened the gunfire elements and the live action footage in rough composites that he created himself. While Legato is a director of photography and not a trained visual artist, he was still able to create rough composites in After Effects so Scorsese could make selections for the final shots. These were evaluated by Scorsese in the editing room of his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker. While Schoonmaker mainly uses the Lightworks NLE, Legato outfitted her with a Final Cut Pro system and a Blackmagic Decklink HD Pro card to transfer HD footage. When a shot was approved, Legato sent the rough composite to a compositing artist for completion. Not surprisingly, Legato often uses visual effects artists who work from home.
The elevator shoot-out was just one of hundreds of shots that has passed through The Basement’s system. With backup files, test composites, and alternate takes all in HD at 4:4:4 10-bit log, the system’s storage has to be fast and capable of handling a huge quantity of data. “Both our Mac and PC editing systems are complete finishing stations,” Ames says, “each with 3 terabytes of high-speed storage using HUGE and Medea RAIDS capable of realtime playback of 4:4:4 uncompressed 10-bit high-definition footage.” Legato makes decisions on shots and effects on monitors, but he also screens projected footage to make sure work holds up in a theater. “Each system has a third display, which is connected directly to the Workgroup Videohub using Blackmagic Design HDLinks, allowing any source to be displayed on each of these two HD LCD screens,” Ames says. “A third HDLink is also used to connect the projector to the Workgroup Videohubs, also allowing routing of any signal to the basement’s 8-foot screen.” This digital workflow was worked out over time, taking advantage of the flexibility of products from Blackmagic Design. The company’s founder, Grant Petty, has a policy of considering the needs of clients like Legato and Ames in designing desktop solutions, with a goal of creating products capable of the same quality and robust data processing found at a major visual effects studio.
However, it is unlikely that even Petty envisioned an effects legend like Legato creating a fully functioning visual effects service in his own home, giving new meaning to the phrase “doing work in-house.” For Legato, the goal is simply producing high-quality work. “I’m not going to use any of the visual effects facility way of doing business,” he says. “If you scrape all that away, all of a sudden it just frees you up.” Additionally, Legato and Ames have said goodbye to overhead and excessive management in changing the client/vendor relationship. As Legato explains, “We are not a vendor, we are a collaborator. We handle aspects of previz editing, production design, and visual effects cinematography.”
It’s no surprise that Martin Scorsese, one of the world’s great directors, has chosen to work with Legato on two consecutive projects, with a third in the works. Scorsese, of course, is not concerned with the flow of data. But he is interested in how ideas flow, and Blackmagic Design products allow Legato and Ames to make a technological advantage into a creative advantage. The Basement, for all of its impressive gear, is really focused on how artists collaborate.
Adding a Visual Effects Element in DI
Legato is particularly pleased with the way The Basement is able to turn shots around on a dime. Because overhead is so low, his systems can be dedicated to a single project without worrying about amortization, rent, payroll, and the other business realities of big facilities that require expensive gear to be making money around the clock. When these considerations are reduced to a minimum, scheduling issues go away.
This advantage gave Scorsese the ability to make a quick call to Legato even after picture and sound on The Departed were finished and the digital intermediate process was under way. Typically, any changes made at this point are a major interruption in the postproduction process and cause costly delays. “A couple of hours before we were supposed to hit the button to film out the movie with the entire color correct complete, Marty was unhappy with one of the shots,” Legato explains. “This concerned a moment in the story when Leonardo DiCaprio is reminiscing about pictures of his mother. Marty wanted the background of the picture to appear more upscale in contrast to the character’s present day life. Marty notices that the insert they were putting the new photograph into didn’t match the photograph of Leo holding a picture of his mother. Thelma [Schoonmaker] called and asked if we had footage of Leo holding the picture. We didn’t.”
This was all taking place while Legato had already moved on to another project. “At this point my involvement in the movie is over and I’m directing a commercial the following day,” he says. “A production assistant was sent around to pick up my gear for the commercial and I notice he looks like Leo. I asked him if he wanted to be in a Martin Scorsese picture. I had a Panasonic P2 camera, so we set up a shoot in the basement and dressed the background to look like the location. I had Adam Gerstel, our editor, pull up a 2K file of the background plate and extract the image of the mother. We printed out the extracted picture on my Epson printer, and we had the production assistant hold it. We photographed the shot and raced a FireWire drive over to Technicolor Digital Intermediates in Burbank. We color corrected the shot and it went into the movie.”
Legato says he considers this way of working an extension of the editing process. Typically, there are levels of management between a visual effects facility and the director. The Basement communicates directly with Scorsese and Schoonmaker, providing immediate feedback on options and solutions. This eliminates delays and interruptions in the editing process since The Basement can respond to requests immediately. This interactive relationship with the director allowed Scorsese to direct a visual effects shot while 3,000 miles away from the locale. “Written in the script is a scene where a rat appears,” Legato explains. “In preview screenings, Marty wasn’t getting the audience response he was looking for.” At this point, the movie is basically complete, with color correction about a week and a half away. However, Marty was unhappy with the last scene.
Scorsese requested a reshoot of the rat shot. By this time, the set had been struck and was not available, so Legato turned his basement into an insert stage. “We staged the scene in my basement and I had my daughter do a storyboard that we sent to Marty,” Legato says. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s the shot.’ That was just previz, but now we had to shoot the real shot. It was easiest to shoot in L.A., but Marty wanted to direct the shot and he was in New York. So on the day of the shoot we aimed iChat at the video tap on the camera.” Across the country in New York City, Scorsese and director of photography Michael Ballhaus watched the action on a Mac. A speaker connected to the Mac was placed on the camera dolly, and iChat allowed the Scorsese to direct the scene with the crew listening to him in realtime.
“We shot on a Monday or a Tuesday, but Marty needed to screen it in New York on that Friday,” Legato says. “We made that deadline and the shot stayed in the picture – this is one week before color correction. So we did it in a low-rent way, but it doesn’t look that way on the big screen and Martin Scorsese gets what he wants.”
As it turns out, Rob Legato's statement was prophetic: at the 2007 Academy Awards, two Oscar Awards were given to “The Departed”: Martin Scorsese received the Oscar for Best Director, an acknowledgment that was long overdue and Thelma Schoonmaker won an Oscar for Best Achievement in Editing.
