There is normal time and there is RED time, the speed of their and others development. In the time before the RED SDK had been given a fast track by most post production equipment vendors, RED workflows were still quite adventurous, workarounds and specialist programmes filled the gaps when incompatibility threatened.
At the time plans for the Wallander series didn’t include the RED camera – it was thought that 16mm would be the format, but then the BBC banned the use of 16mm, which gave producer Simon Moseley a big problem. “As I understand it the reason for the ban on 16mm was because it is not as stable as it should be when it’s being scanned. So the result was that we had to look around for another format, we didn’t immediately think that 35mm was going to be too expensive partly because there were a lot of deals around at the time to give film a new life.
“We also started looking at the different digital systems and saw one set of comparison tests that had been made by a guy in Sweden. In these tests RED compared very favourably and we thought it was superior to the other digital formats like the Arri D20 and the Genesis. The thing about these other systems was they still required tapes and an amount of cloning that had to be done which would have meant using a post production house. If you use a tape based camera system it is more expensive.
“But I think going with RED was based on more than cost, at the end of the day it was about the quality of the image which we were incredibly impressed by.
“To me it didn’t look very digital and certainly no more digital than scanned 35mm. The decision from there was fairly easy – it was a risk because it was an entirely new system and we were the first complete BBC TV drama to shoot on RED.”
The British dramatisation of the Henning Mankell’s books about the detective Kurt Wallander was to be co-produced by the Yellow Bird Television company in Sweden, Left Bank Pictures in the UK and Kenneth Branagh’s own production company who Simon Moseley works for.
SLUMDOG TO WALLANDER
UK DoP Anthony Dod Mantle was to shoot the movie and he was fresh from shooting Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire in India which was 60 percent shot on the Silicon Imaging SI 2k camera: “It was tough persuading the BBC to use the RED system, me and Yellow Bird were ready to go with that camera five weeks before we began shooting and already had the people, the expertise and the knowledge ready to go. We spent the next five weeks and up to two days before shooting explaining to the BBC what we were doing and why we were doing it. There were trying to get me to shoot on the D20 which is a dinosaur, I love Arri but they wanted the D20 because they had a workflow that fitted. The D21 is really great upgrade but they suggested the D20. The RED was good to shoot on because of the way you can explore that chip. Dave Klafkowski from the Farm was very instrumental in making it happen as he does a lot for the BBC and they trust his opinion. The BBC were blowing up the image and looking in the corners and finding small artifacts which you can find in any electronic image. The RED does have inherently some issues but if you blow up a picture for long enough and you look at it hard enough you will find something. We felt we were mature and sensible enough to go with it and the pictures looked beautiful. There was a lot of questions going to and fro which we had already answered, it was very frustrating and an uphill ‘negativity’. It was a genuine concern mixed with a very skeptical feeling which I felt wasn’t creative. I approve of people being cautious especially people with the money, it was a high end BBC project but they should listen to people like me and a lot of other good post boys I had around who do know what they’re talking about.
“I also think that they were using us to learn from because they didn’t know anything about it, at one point they wanted me to come over and talk to them about it. Their boffins hadn’t green lit the camera and technically they were behind. I was with people in Sweden who knew what they were talking about, who were trouble shooters and who solve things.
“Danny Boyles film Slumdog Millionaire is a case in point where plans changed for good reason and digital was used. I could have gone into the slums in India with what the producers wanted me to, with a bit of MiniDV and put it together with film – we got away with it with 28 Days Later. But I just knew we would be in high contrast areas where I would end up with 30 percent of what my eye saw because the chips can’t cope with it. We found this SI 2K camera and really configured it to suit our needs. I was going to shoot about 30 percent with it and ended up doing 60 with 40 percent on Super 35mm 3-perf. Sometimes the tools you are using suit the script, they may not be the official tool to use or that the industry prescribes but sometimes certain stories need certain tools and people just have to wake up to that.
“The RED is still difficult to use handheld and I was doing a lot of that for Lars Von Triers’ Antichrist. It’s still fragile if you’re moving fast, but we built a rig and got on with it. It was tough physically and I’m not a weakling.”
ANTI CHRIST
“I’ve been shooting RED for the last five months on Wallander and Lars Von Trier’s new movie Anti Christ and the only clear weakness I can see, as I jumped from Danny’s film in India on the SI 2k with an extreme contrast situation to the RED chip was that I noticed I lost about one and half stops in the highlights quicker, whereas in the dark you can redeem, bring up stuff on the RED which is a great thing when you’re under pressure and want details in the shadows.
But it’s still got to be improved in the highlights and I think they are working on that. But things will happen fast, sooner or later you’ll have chips that can absorb more latitude or certainly as much as any film camera has ever done, its getting there.
“As for ergonomics I’d rather have a film camera, its getting better but still tough going compared to celluloid. I used Primes and also some of the high speeds because I like the slightly flarey look. I did a lot of flare work on the film anyway, I used a set of Lens Babies, there are like the poor man’s Swing Shift lenses. You’ll see the slightly weird out of focus stuff which was shot with these lenses.
“At last we’re away from the adapters and we’re getting a decent depth of field, I’ve spent the last few years playing around with those adapters trying to get the best out of them.”
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