“Fracture”, the 27-minute film from French editor, writer and director Nicolas Sarkissian, had its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious International Critics Week, which showcases first and second feature films by directors worldwide. <a href="www.wallpp.net/Wallpaper/Accueil.html “>Wallpaper Productions in Paris, France used ASSIMILATE‘s SCRATCH® Digital Finishing Solution for the post-production data workflow.
The film follows Paul – a man with a great job, a devoted wife, a lovely daughter and an amazing villa. But as he relaxes by his pool to watch tennis on TV, he begins to feel oppressed by an invisible evil force.
Shot in France on RED by French DP Benjamin Chartier, “Fracture” was conformed and graded in SCRATCH by Yov Moor at <a href="www.wallpp.net/Wallpaper/Accueil.html “>Wallpaper Productions in Paris. The project was delivered as a JPEG 2000 DCP in readiness for a digital screening. Yet, in spite of being an all-digital project, the finished product has a genuine photochemical look, as Moor explains.
Thrilled: It’s great news to have had our work shown at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. People can see the power we have with SCRATCH to create film-looking results of the very highest quality from digital camera to DCP.
Film-look: Even though the whole production, post and DCP deliverable were totally digital, “Fracture” has a naturalistic, 35mm photochemical look. We have Kodak, Fuji and Agfa LUTs on our SCRATCH. I showed the director and DP how these can give you precise and more interesting looks, and an easier path for the DCP and for 35mm shooting. In the end we went with a Kodak LOG LUT, and the final result is that “Fracture” really does look like it was shot on 35mm.
Grading: I used SCRATCH to convert the RED 4K R3D material from LIN-to-LOG color space, and graded in LOG throughout via our Christie 2K CP2000 projector. After an initial balancing grade, I used SCRATCH SCAFFOLDS to work on the visuals more intimately – isolating and grading areas of the image, typically faces. But it was also interesting to work with the Texture and Canvas tools, and to employ SCRATCH as a type of compositing system to strip in new skies where the highlights were overblown, or to remove unwanted objects or props from a scene.
Creative: SCRATCH lets you experiment artistically. When grading with SCAFFOLDs you can swap LUTs, try out new grades, and save these versions very quickly – all with the client sitting by your side. Most other grading systems don’t have this capability, which means you can’t experiment and need to decide the look well in advance.
RED Rocket power: With the arrival of RED Rocket cards, the RED workflow for SCRATCH is better than ever. RED Rocket optimizes the performance of our HP8600 workstation, meaning that the RED 4K workflow is so much faster, and we don’t need to continually upgrade workstations. Along with a master to JPEG 2000, we also output in real-time to HDCAM and Beta Num from SCRATCH for various TV channels.
