With an Oscar Nomination for the Academy Award of Best Short Film of 2009, Australia’s “Miracle Fish” is a Bluetongue Films and Druid Films production. Chaotic Post designed and implemented its leading-edge digital post production using the RED ONE™ Digital 4K Camera and ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH 4K Post Workflow. “Miracle Fish” has also garnered numerous film festival awards since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 209. The film was directed by Luke Doolan and produced by Drew Bailey.
Seth Larney of Sydney’s Chaotic Post supervised the post-production for “Miracle Fish,” which included establishing a 4K workflow for the RED ONE footage and metadata. The workflow included fusing the time-of-day and edge time-code from the RED RAW files into the Avid suite; bringing the EDL from the finished offline into the SCRATH DI suite to perform the online conform; extensive key-framed shot reframing; color grade; title and credit design; numerous eye-replacement VFX shots; finishing; and mastering for both HD and SD deliverables, Digital Cinema Package, DVD 5.1 encoding, and authoring.
Chaotic Post also designed a logarithmic workflow for the online and graded with a gamma-encoded LUT so that it could easily add a film-LUT later and perform a film-out with minimum fuss.
Chaotic Post added SCRATCH to its workflow in 2008 on an Intel i7 8-core 4.4GHz platform running Windows 7 64-bit. This allows the post artists to debayer RED R3D material in real-time 2K at high-rez quality.
“Digital filmmaking has come to a point now that with the correct approach and understanding, outstanding results can be achieved at lower cost than ever before,” says Seth Larney, Chaotic Post.
“It’s a huge benefit to take a RED conform all the way through the grade and to output without requiring any rendering. We also have the creative freedom that access to the 4K raw data brings. All this in turn helps us save time throughout the DI process and thus money for our clients,” says Larney.
Larney adds, “Our SCRATCH suite is fed directly via dual, 4Gb/s fiber channels from a 16TB SAN RAID array, providing around 500MB/sec transfer rates. This allows us to playback and record 2K uncompressed DPX sequences in real time, providing enough storage and speed for pretty much any project we can throw at it. We also have 24TB of networked RAID storage as general working space for the facility. All this is backed up onto LTO-3 tapes via our 24-bay and 16-bay LTO-3 tape loaders. Footage plays out through a Quadro FX5600 HD-SDI card.”
Award Winning “Miracle Fish“
“Miracle Fish” is indeed a big winner. In addition to its Oscar Nomination 2009 for Best Short Film, Miracle Fish has garnered a long list of festival awards:
Best Short Fiction Film, 2009 Australian Film Institute Awards Best Screenplay in Short Film, 2009 Australian Film Institute Awards Best Live Action Short, 2009 Sydney Film Festival Youth Jury Prize, 18th Aspen Shortsfest Craft Award, 2009 St Kilda Film Festival SBS Television Award, 2009 St Kilda Film Festival BAFTA/LA Certificate of Excellence, 18th Aspen Shortsfest Best Short Film, 2009 In The Bin Festival Best Director, 2009 In The Bin Festival Jury Award Best International Short, 2009 Trimedia Film Festival Onda Curta RTP Prize, 2009 CurtoCircuito Special Jury Prize Short Subject Production, 2009 Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival Youth Jury Award Best Short Film, 2009 San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival Movie Extra Special Jury Prize, 2010 Flickerfest
Miller Australia Award for Best Cinematography in an Australian Short Film, 2010 Flickerfest Runner Up Best Short Film, 2009 Anchorage Short Film Festival Honourable Mention Best Short Narrative Work, 2009 Woodstock Film Festival Other accolades include: Premiere: Official Selection Sundance Film Festival, 2009
Official Selection Montreal World Film Festival 2009 Official Selection Stockholm International Festival 2009 Official Selection Edinburgh International Film Festival, 2009 Official Selection 15th Annual Palm Springs International Shortsfest. www.miraclefishmovie.com
