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Skellig

A couple of years ago Sky dipped their toes in to high definition drama and produced a couple of Terry Pratchett adaptations shot in HD with the ARRI D20, as it was then. They have now returned to HD drama with another adaptation of a book called Skellig. Annabel Jankel, of Live From Abbey Road fame, held the screen rights for Skellig and persuaded Sky to invest in making it. Sky has repeated the Hogfather deal with them keeping broadcast rights here and internationally, there is also an international cinema release planned for later this year.

It’s the words 'cinema release' that starts putting pressure on everybody because you know then you’re up against film in it’s own backyard. Although Hogfather looked good on Sky HD, whether or not it would have benefitted from a cinema release is debatable.

Keith Mottram is somebody this magazine has talked to before from his editing of Live From Abbey Road, so he already had a connection with Annabel and came on board not as editor but as a VFX and Post Supervisor. So not only was Skellig to go in to cinemas but there was going to be CGI and a rumoured flying scene.

Keith is also well versed in where digital cinematography is headed and was to supplement his VFX job with some very innovative HD workflows from the set to VFX vendors, mostly The Mill in London. “I unfortunately didn’t have the relative credits to get the editor job but I was going to be involved in some way, shape or form and the obvious place for me to be was in the FX realm where I’ve always had on foot in.

“When we were spec’ing up the job there were a couple of things I wanted to try – I also had very good relationships with Apple themselves. So I proposed very early on a way we could streamline this production and actually save money to get more of it on to the screen, especially as it was going to be seen in cinemas. There is a difference between theatrical quality FX and say ‘Doctor Who’ quality FX! It does cost a significant amount of money and we needed to makesure we had all those resources available.

“The thinking was that the way you can overspend on any film includes things like re-shoots through lack of preparation etc... On set there’s not much I can do about that but I could provide a way of everyone seeing rushes straightaway and seeing them in sparkling high definition. I proposed using the AJA IO HD system for on set rushes, for immediate dailies and as the start of a full hi-def workflow which would enable everyone to be working at the highest quality picture possible to hopefully save any problems happening down the line.

“So in practice what this meant was when we were shooting in muddy fields in Wales we had instant access on large LCD screens to playback. The Arri D21 cameras were fed through HDCAM SR straight in to the AJA boxes where we were recording full HD with ProRes.

So that enabled the FX people and crew to see what exactly they were getting in terms of focus etc… Also what it meant was that we had the rushes straight back in to our edit suites whenever we wanted them. Usually that did end up being at the end of the day just for convenience sake. Sometimes we had rushes come back half way through the day, sometimes I was on set actually doing some bash edits and bash comps for the sequences I was actually working on.

VFX SEQUENCES
“So being a fantasy film there are obviously some significant effects sequences in it which initially were I did by editing storyboards in conjunction with our effects supervisor and team at The Mill. When it came to the flying sequences for instance we only had about a day to sort it out when usually we would have a week with green screen. So you really have to be able to quickly knock these shots together, be able to key things up very quickly, to be able to intercut with all your pre-vis’ and storyboards right there on set and get as close as you can in that kind of way to bridge the funding gap you have on a non-Hollywood feature. The whole workflow was I suppose something that would have scared some people, it was a little going in to the unknown but I had full confidence in the system. Bar a few tiny hiccups it was fine and everyone was shocked at the quality they ended up working with.

“We ended up using two picture editors for creative reasons and even though they were used to working on Final Cut Pro systems had never sat with a 42inch LCD screen and seen the high definition pictures like that. Interestingly that really changes the editing process because you’re seeing that much more information – it’s unusual especially in British productions to be working at this kind of level. You hear about things like Fincher’s film when you’re cutting on DVCPRO HD but we were doing 1920x1080 offline/online effectively. Those files we captured on set stayed the whole way through the chain until the final grade where for reasons of latitude we re-conformed off the SR tapes to grade on Baselight at The Mill with Mick Vincent.

“I was in Wales sending over HD files down the pipe to The Mill so they could be working on very high quality shots straightaway. So we had HD files and low resolution proxies for speed going to and from The Mill in London and Cardiff with that level of immediacy. So this was good for checking problems before any sets were taken down, thing like that. We were getting mostly bits of pre-vis from The Mill at that time. For key sequences we had an FX Supervisor on set in Wales.

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