With the awards season and a good portion of the festival circuit in the industry’s collective rearview mirror, it’s time to reflect on those under-the-radar contributors spanning postproduction and visual effects who played key roles in the success of showcased films.
While these artisans are too numerous to fully chronicle, here’s a sample of several whose expertise, acumen and artistry helped to do justice to storylines, characters and environments essential to projects:
Re:Generation Music Project Debuting at last month’s South By Southwest Film Conference and Festival in Austin, Texas, was Re:Generation Music Project directed by Amir Bar-Lev who is represented for commercials and branded entertainment by RSA Films. Produced by music-focused entertainment studio GreenLight Media & Marketing in association with RSA, the documentary found an ideal venue in SXSW in that it too is known for marrying the worlds of film and music.
Made in association with the Grammys and sponsored by Hyundai Veloster, Re:Generation follows five noted DJs–DJ Premier, electronic duo The Crystal Method, Pretty Lights of dub-step fame, Grammy winner Skrillex and producer Mark Ronson–as they remix, recreate and re-imagine five traditional styles of music. Ronson creates his take on jazz, Skrillex on rock ‘n roll, Pretty Lights on country music, DJ Premier tackles classical, and The Crystal Method forays into soul. Each artist collaborates with another artist or artists from each respective genre. For example, The Crystal Method teams with soul singer Martha Reeves (of the Motown group Martha and the Vandellas).
Editor Dan Swietlik of editorial house Stitch, Santa Monica, was the primary cutter on Re:Generation, later bringing in editor Darrin Navarro to contribute to the documentary. Swietlik appreciated Re:Generation on several levels, including the fact that it was a piece of branded entertainment that “had a lack of handprints from the brand, Hyundai, that was sponsoring it. The documentary had high entertainment value and branding didn’t feel forced upon it.”
Swietlik is also a music lover who found appealing “the notion of a fish out of water, with these DJs having to work in genres they would not normally be involved in. It’s a great premise and in a true documentary sense, whatever happens just happens and we convey that.”
Swietlik, who’s well known for his work in commercials, is no stranger to documentaries as evidenced by such feature-length projects as director Michael Moore’s Sicko (edited by Swietlik, Geoffrey Richman and Christopher Seward) and director Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (edited by Swietlik and Jay Cassidy; Guggenheim is repped as a spot/branded content director by Bob Industries).
Re:Generation, observed Swietlik, was “more like An Inconvenient Truth in that it had a certain built-in structure. Sicko had no real chronology but An Inconvenient Truth and Re:Generation both did. We moved some things around in Re:Generation but you couldn’t turn it too much inside-out or it wouldn’t make sense. Perhaps the biggest challenge in the editing was that in our first assembly of some scenes, especially when the musicians are working on their songs, we realized we were revealing too much of those songs at that juncture. We had to go back and judiciously eliminate some of that music heard during the recording sessions, to tease things a bit more in order to make them more of a revelation later.”
This marked Swietlik’s first time working with director Bar-Lev. The editor got the gig because of his working relationship with Tom Dunlap, one of RSA’s executive producers on Re:Generation. Dunlap’s past exploits included his being on the agency side and it was during his tenures at TBWAChiatDay and Deutsch, both in Los Angeles, that he collaborated with Swietlik. “Tom thought I was right for the project and that I’d get along well with Amir. I did. He was wonderful as a director and open to working together.”
While Re:Generation was his introduction to Bar-Lev, Swietlik brought onto the project an accomplished artisan whom he has collaborated with extensively over the years, colorist Bob Festa of telecine house New Hat in Santa Monica.
“My relationship with Dan goes back 25 years. He’s a good friend,” related Festa who observed that the creative challenge as the colorist for Re:Generation was to give each artist and city a look that matched each one’s distinct music genre yet still being able “to blend those five different themes so they would play as a seamless whole film.” Deploying Baselight, Festa maintained that delicate balance while depicting the unique vibe of each musical/genre and matching city. “New Orleans was more colorful, gold and green. Detroit was a bit more desaturated, a little bleaker. We had to color for the L.A. vibe and Skrillex. It all went hand in hand.”
Festa described Re:Generation as being “the most rewarding job I ever worked on. The people involved believed in the project, the material was terrific and to see your work projected at the premiere during a red carpet event at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood [prior to SXSW] was an amazing treat. Seeing the color science displayed on the big screen at that historical venue was gratifying.”
Big Easy Express Festa’s colleague at New Hat, colorist Beau Leon, also felt gratification from working on the feature documentary Big Easy Express directed by Emmett Malloy (half of The Malloys, a directing duo handled by HSI Productions).
Debuting at SXSW as this year’s closing night film, Big Easy Express invites us aboard a train ride/traveling concert tour unlike any other with the likes of Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, and Old Crow Medicine Show. The documentary went on to win the SXSW Headliners Audience Award.
Leon has collaborated fairly regularly over the years with The Malloys spanning commercials, music videos and the full-length documentary on the White Stripes titled Under Great White Northern Lights.
For Leon, the greatest challenge he encountered on Big Easy Express was properly marrying the imagery captured on the Canon 5D with 16mm footage. Towards that end, he deployed CineGrain on Baselight, adding grain to the 5D scenes to better incorporate them with those lensed in 16mm.
Additionally, Emmett Malloy opted to shoot 16mm reversal black and white film on several occasions, which called for Leon to make some of the 5D shots black and white.
“You’d have for some of the concerts three to four 16mm cameras shooting and four or five other guys walking around with 5Ds,” noted Leon. “Plus for most of these shows they can’t control the lighting all that well; you’re at the mercy of the concert people, especially for what’s shot on 5D. A lot of the material was super bright. I had to knock it down a little. Again, you try to make a unified whole out of these elements while doing justice to what makes each scene unique.”
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom From its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival over to the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize for best short nonfiction film, to the Academy Awards–earning an Oscar nomination in the documentary short subject category–The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom has enjoyed quite an industry odyssey.
Directed by Lucy Walker and produced by Supply & Demand Integrated, the production house that handles her for commercials and branded content, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom plays like a poem about the people of Japan and how they are coping with the devastating earthquake which hit the country on March 11, 2011, resulting in a horrific tsunami and well as a nuclear radiation crisis. For many Japan residents, the inspiration to persevere and come out the other side hopeful and renewed comes from the ancient Japanese cherry blossom which grows in the spring, signaling a new beginning, a new opportunity.
For The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, Walker gravitated to editor Aki Mizutani of post house Cutters. “When Lucy returned from Japan, she felt that the best person to edit this film was a Japanese/English bilingual editor,” related Mizutani.
“After Lucy saw a music video/tribute that I cut with Jared Leto and 30 Seconds To Mars that was also cherry blossom focused, she and I met and our connection was pretty immediate. She saw quite quickly how important this subject was for me and we began work immediately.”
Reflecting on her contributions to The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, Mizutani recalled, “As I viewed the footage, one woman had stuck in my mind–her emotions and expressions were just so rich that she really pulled you in and you just felt for her. I knew she would be a great way to begin and end the story we were trying to tell, the transition from death to life. Her town Minamisanriku was completely ‘swept away’ by the tsunami, and her interview made us feel so close to the people who had been living there. In the film, she is interviewed on top of a hill overlooking the destroyed town of Minamisanriku, and I realized that I recognized the hill and perspective of the town–I had seen it before. I was actually in Japan when the earthquake and the tsunami happened, so I had watched news broadcasts, YouTube, online news sources, etc., so I remembered that I had seen footage of the town of Minamisanriku being swept away, and it was shot from exactly the same hill that the woman was being interviewed on.
“Lucy and I discussed and agreed the [news] footage would be a very powerful way to begin the film and firmly place the audience right in the middle of the tsunami to help them understand the true power, fear and emotion of this disaster,” continued Mizutani. “In addition, following the opening scene with the interview of the woman–as she looks down on the town that we had just witnessed being swept away–really pulls you into the film. I think the opening structure of the film turned out very strong in both the presentation of fact and emotion.”
As for the biggest challenge The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom posed for her, Mizutani noted that she was born and raised in Japan, “so some of this was just heartbreaking for me to watch. Normally, as an editor, you can see the footage from a bit of a distance, more objectively, but in this case, my heart was so close to the subject, that from day one, I was emotionally and physically immersed. At the same time, being so close also gave me great motivation, and kept me full of energy during our tight post schedule–we only had six weeks for the offline.
“Another challenge was trying to have smooth transitions between the segments and the stories. Essentially you are shifting between desperation and hope, between death and life. This is a very emotional film but at the same time it is also very philosophical about our place on Earth and the future of Japan. Lucy Walker is a very knowledgeable person about the culture of Japan and its philosophy, I am very impressed with the story that she was able to tell.”
Robot & Frank Though Robot & Frank marked a number of firsts–the feature filmmaking debut of commercial director Jake Schreier, a world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and the initial theatrical motion picture out of Park Pictures‘ narrative feature film company–there was a return engagement of some note, the renewed collaboration between Schreier and visual effects supervisor Martin Lazaro who at the time was with Method Studios.
The two had first worked together on a Verizon commercial out of mcgarrybowen, New York, and produced by Park Pictures.
It was that positive experience, and the sophisticated feature film pipeline and resources at Method, New York, that had Schreier gravitating to Lazaro for Robot & Frank.
Set in the not-all-that-distant future, Robot & Frank follows aging curmudgeon and retired jewel thief Frank (portrayed by Frank Langella), a confused loner with a love for books. His one friend is the librarian Jennifer (Susan Sarandon) whom he regularly visits. Other than his library outings, and weekly visits from his son, Frank lives a quiet, lonely life, until his grown-up kids (James Marsden, Liv Tyler) install a caretaker robot to look after their dad and an unlikely friendship begins. With the help of his new robot buddy, Frank looks to woo the librarian and resume his criminal career.
Robot & Frank performed well at Sundance where it secured a distribution deal–with Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions and Samuel Goldwyn Films partnering on the U.S. theatrical release in addition to jointly acquiring North American rights. Additionally Sony acquired all media rights for Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.
Lazaro said the biggest challenge posed by Robot & Frank was it being set just some 20 years into the future. He observed that for your typical futuristic storyline spanning many decades, if not hundreds of years, there are inherently more creative liberties that can be taken. But a relatively modest 20 years means that the environment still has to be grounded in today’s reality yet show marked differences and improvements technologically and otherwise.
This means more subtleties and nuances have to be put into the visual mix. How, for instance, would a television screen look 20 years from now? How will communication takes place and through what devices? “We were building experiences and environments that took careful consideration,” related Lazaro.
While Lazaro wasn’t involved in the practical effects, including the robot character, he and his Method compatriots also had to create the on/off button for Frank’s non-human buddy.
Throughout the collaborative process, Lazaro said he felt fortunate to work with Schreier whom he described as very open-minded. “Jake is a super nice guy and a talented director. He made it easy for us to work together and problem solve.”
At press time, Lazaro had exited Method and was about to embark on a new career chapter.
