In March ’95, four Danish filmmakers-including the renowned director Lars von Trier and the filmmaker-on-the-verge Thomas Vinterberg-outlined a manifesto called Dogme 95 (dogme is translated in English as "dogma"): a set of 10 rules that sounded a polemical wake-up call in the world of filmmaking. An attempt to "counter certain tendencies in film today," the rules were designed to invigorate filmmaking with a rigorous code of artistic and dramatic austerity. True to the Dogme "Vow of Chastity," Vinterberg shot a feature
using digital video cameras, a decision that enabled him to remain true to his credo as well as explore new aesthetic territory. In The Celebration, the first digitally shot feature film handled by a major distributor, October Films, Vinterberg used a Sony PC-7, which is about half the size of a hardback book, and captured reams of dramatic material without worrying about the large expense of film stock. He also was able to shoot quickly, and because the Dogme rules insist on natural lighting and props already extant in the shooting location, there was no need for a large production team. The Celebration took six weeks to shoot and cost $1 million.
In the wake of The Celebration, Vinterberg and his Dogme 95 co-horts have been lauded and excoriated as the harbingers of a new digital era. Two stateside film production companies have since announced they are creating branches to produce digital features. Next Wave Films, a subsidiary of the Independent Film Channel, announced in early January that it was forming Agenda 2000, a division that will fund features lensed on digital formats. And New York-based Open City Films announced at the Sundance Film Festival in January the creation of Blow Up Pictures, a division that will produce digital video projects ranging in budget from $50,000 to $1 million.
"All of a sudden everybody wants to shoot [on] digital video," says Sharan Sklar, the head of Blow Up Pictures.
If Dogme has helped launch a revolution in movies, what are the implications of that transformation on the allied industry of spot production? How will the decision to use digital formats as an aesthetic and financial option trickle into the world of commercialmaking? Will shooting spots digitally help kick-start the current slowdown in spot production by offering an affordable option for clients?
These are just some of the questions circulating within the spot community today; they are questions that people are already beginning to answer.
Cruising Along
Director Bennett Miller of bicoastal Hungry Man says that he has been described-much to his chagrin-as the latest "digital poster boy." Miller shot The Cruise, his feature film debut, on digital video which was blown up to 35mm and distributed by Artisan Entertainment. The release was critically and financially successful, and based on the strength of the film, Hungry Man signed him to direct spots. He recently directed a campaign for a driving school called Top Driver, via New York-based agency Dweck & Campbell, in which he blended sequences shot with a Sony digital video camera with sequences shot with a 16mm camera.
In this case, Bennett used digital video as a specific aesthetic choice in order to capture a real-life/surveillance camera feeling. It was not chosen to cut costs or start a Dogme-like movement. Miller advocates the use of digital video only when it’s appropriate to the content at hand. "The only time I’ve used digital video is because it has its own aesthetic and because I like the convenience, the relative inexpensiveness of it, and the intimacy it can create with your subject," he says. "If you’re talking about doing commercials where you’re competing with that film look, I don’t know if video is there."
Miller’s experience points out a sobering reality. "Film look" is the lingua franca of advertising, and the only format that comes close to it in the world of digital tape is the higher resolution and better imaging capabilities of HD.
When advertising historians gather years hence to discuss the origins of the HD or hi-def movement in commercialmaking, they will probably find their Rosetta Stone in the person of Barry Rebo, a straight-shooting New Yorker who has been involved in the format for more than a decade. Rebo, of Rebo Associates, New York, was ready for hi-def long before hi-def was ready for him. In the late ’80s, Rebo shot hi-def spots for clients such as Sony, Panasonic, and Reebok under the auspices of now defunct Rebo Studios. "The reason [the companies] were interested at the time was that hi-def had amazing blue screen or composite photography possibilities," says Rebo. "Almost all of those were special effects commercials. It looked phenomenally better than what you could do in standard definition at the time." Rebo is currently working with The Ad Council to develop PSA’s that will be shot and/or posted in hi-def.
Jon Kamen, president of bicoastal/international @radical. media, and who describes Barry Rebo as the "Johnny Appleseed" of the hi-def image, has also planted some hi-def seedlings of his own. Kamen notes that in the late ’80s while he was working at New York-based Sandbank Films, director Jeff Zwart, now represented by @radical.media, shot a Honda commercial using a hi-def camera. "We used it as a tool, and it was a good solution," he says. According to Kamen, @radical.media director Anthony Hoffman recently completed shooting digital video segments of Microsoft spots which are still in production.
John Alonzo, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer of Chinatown, among other features, and a noted spot director, is another American hi-def pioneer. Last year, Alonzo shot and directed "Mountain Tide," a :15 for Cincinnati-based Proctor & Gamble that was created entirely on hi-def and was produced by Nolan/LaMonte Films, Santa Monica, in conjunction with Mustapha Khan, New York, for Saatchi & Saatchi New York. In ’94, prior to the P&G spot, Alonzo had shot World War II: When Lions Roared, a television special for NBC which he also lensed entirely on hi-def. The "Mountain Tide" spot features cinematography of natural settings, and when the production team found settings that didn’t quite fulfill the visual criteria that they wanted, that didn’t pose a problem. "If you can’t find the composite that God gave you, then you make it up," Alonzo says, explaining that he shot the spot knowing that the landscape would be digitally altered in postproduction. "We were hoping to find it all together the way we wanted it, but it was pretty impossible … It’s a lot easier as long as you’re shooting digital to do visual manipulation than if you were shooting on film."
Director Bruce Nadel, represented by bicoastal OneSuch Films, is a strong advocate of shooting on hi-def and is on a mission to prove just how capable the medium is. Though he’s only actually posted one spot, for Sprint, in hi-def, Nadel is planning to shoot a :30 spec on hi-def. "In that :30, I’m trying to explore every little nuance, every little problem that the HD people say this thing will solve," he says and elaborates that he would like to shoot with a small crew, use only available light and employ a variety of lenses, all the while demonstrating what he says is hi-def’s speed and flexibility. "I’m trying to wind up with a :30 piece that will address every concern that clients-whom I’m trying to get to embrace the idea-throw back at me."
Rick Catzen, producer at OneSuch who is just as agog about hi-def as Nadel, says that the company recently helped cultivate two hi-def shoots that almost came to fruition. In both instances, the clients-who Catzen will not identify-got cold feet at the last moment and the spots were shot on film instead.
Another production company striking out into hi-def territory is Santa Monica-based Trailhead. Gary Buonanno, executive producer at Trailhead, says that the company has joined with Wexler Video, Burbank, and Post Logic Studios, Hollywood, to look into the production and postproduction possibilities of using hi-def. "What I’m involved with is a research project," Buonanno explains. "Can we, given all the same tools at our disposal as with film, which is what Sony is trying to do, make [the hi-def camera] a user-friendly camera? Can we produce something that’s a viable alternative to shooting on film?" Buonanno echoes the thought that hi-def is going to be another aesthetic option for commercial makers. "Anything that’s new and could potentially be a viable option, I think it’s another tool to have in your kit," he says, but later adds, "I’m not selling my Kodak stock yet." Buonanno plans to shoot a spec that will test the capabilities of hi-def. "It’s not going to be a game, in the sense of ‘Is it live or is it Memorex?’ We want to see if [hi-def] lives up to what its promise is," he says. "If it does, it becomes a showpiece. We can say to our clients that we can do it for ‘x’ number of dollars less if we shoot on this format."
Money Matters
When it comes to determining the production costs of shooting on hi-def, Alonzo defers to the choice of producers in determining what medium spots or features will be shot. "My attitude as a DP is that you don’t have a right to dictate what the guy who pays the bills is going to do," he says.
S.D. Katz, partner/director at Pitch, New York, has been in discussions with Nickelodeon to shoot television programs on hi-def and is developing an electronic cinema demonstration that will be shown at the Cannes International Film Festival. While hi-def might present savings for long-form projects such as television programs or indie films, Katz doesn’t think that the savings would be an incentive for agencies or production companies to switch to hi-def. "No one [on a spot shoot] is sitting around saying, ‘Let’s save seven grand,’ " he says. "Everything that you’re doing goes to :30. This is not true of series television. The economics are different. Also, when you’re shooting a commercial, the agency is marking this thing up. They’ve done something which they want to be a little piece of film."
Some production companies have made budget comparisons between shooting on hi-def and shooting on film. The budgets end up about the same, with hi-def less expensive on one end and film less expensive on another. "It’s getting much more competitive," Barry Rebo says. "When people do these budget comparisons, it’s productive, but at a certain point, there’s gives and takes. You save money there, you give some there. At the end of the day, I believe that people can do a hi-def commercial for the same budget they can get with a standard definition if they know what they are doing." Walt Lefler, creative director of N.Y.-based Rhinoceros Editorial and Post, who acted as an advisor on Alonzo’s "Mountain Tide" spot, echoes those comments. "What you’re saving in shooting, you might be spending in post," he says. "As technology progresses, it’s going to be closer and closer."
On the surface it would appear that there would be significant savings shooting spots on tape, as the jobs would thus avoid expensive film processing, film to tape transfers and telecine costs. Katz says, however, that "it’s a mixed bag," explaining that in these early days of hi-def postproduction, the infrastructure isn’t quite ready to accommodate the mobility of files from place to place. "There are savings but moving the files around is a little pain in the neck … We’re talking about the first year of hi-def; it’s certainly not totally seamless. That’s on one side of the ledger, but there are many instances when hi-def is more inexpensive."
Spot Dogma
No one SHOOT spoke to for this article is gung-ho about shooting on hi-def unless it’s the appropriate aesthetic option. Commercialmakers often sing the praises of the confluence of form and content, and what most practitioners or advocates of hi-def or digital video argue is that it’s simply another brush on the palette now available. The question of how commercialmakers will use the new possibilities of this palette remain to be seen. Perhaps hi-def cameras might be used to create whole new aesthetic genres of advertising. It certainly would be a useful technique in the real-people category of spots where intimacy is the desired ingredient.
Most companies remain in the exploratory stages of hi-def spotmaking because the technical specs of hi-def are not yet up to par. Jon Kamen, of @radical. media, says that while his company has been doing some hi-def exploration, he doesn’t believe it will be the primary focus of the company anytime soon. "It’s great, it’s fine, we’ll use it, but it’s not a topic of conversation as anything more than just another tool," he says. "It’s still not any more practical than our going out with a film camera. Anything that we shoot on film can be broadcast on high definition."
Observers agree that with the introduction of 24 frame hi-def cameras at NAB this year, shooting on hi-def will become more attractive since the frame sampling rate will be equivalent to the number of frames per second of the traditional film format. The current breed of hi-def cameras samples imagery at 30 frames per second, using two interlaced fields that appear to be a single image when viewed. The new hi-def cameras that Sony will introduce are progressive, meaning that instead of two interlaced fields for one image, there is one continuous field of visual information.
Once directors and cinematographers have available to them the same number of options for shooting on hi-def as they do on film, shooting hi-def spots will be more attractive. But even Nadel, the tireless advocate cum digital rabble rouser, admits that the same range of lenses is not available for hi-def cameras as are available for 16mm or 35mm cameras. Nadel, who has also been encouraging Canon to develop new lenses, believes that it won’t be long before hi-def is up to par. "That is the true test-to be able to adapt all those film lenses that [directors and cinematographers] are used to," he says.
Beyond the question of the equipment, one obstacle with any new artistic tool is that its practitioners need to become familiar with how to use it. Cinematographers, directors, and producers will have a steep learning curve in getting acquainted with hi-def.
Persistence Of Vision
Across the board, production companies are cautiously exploring the brave new world of digital and hi-def. The medium is in its infancy, and no one can say with absolute certainty how digital filmmaking will alter the production company landscape. Hi-def may fizzle. Or it may spark the kind of remarkable transformation that new technologies such as the Internet and cellular phones have wrought. Will digital cameras create new opportunities, new jobs, a new breed of director and perhaps a new kind of production company? If feature film companies are shooting specifically on digital, might there also be commercial production houses that shoot exclusively on high definition or digital video?
The possible transformation from film to digital and hi-def hinges on a much-debated question of perception. Will there be a perceivable difference between film and the 24 frames per second hi-def cameras? Whether or not there is, advertising folks may not want to shift to hi-def. Rebo notes that no matter how far digital and hi-def advances, there will still be creatives who want the texture and feel of film. "High-end advertisers are going to want the film look," he says. "If the next generation of high definition technology can accommodate that look as certain people will describe it, then you’ll find that people will shoot it electronically."
"I think we’re in love with film because that’s what we grew up with," says Alonzo. "Along comes a new media, you either acquire a taste for it or you don’t. The idea is not to put anything down just because it’s a new format."
