The Red Machine

Using a High Def workflow to create stylized palettes of color and sound, the blue-grey world of a spy intersects with the brown world of a thief, as the two unlikely collaborators join forces on a nearly impossible assignment.

Set in 1935, The Red Machine is the story of a professional thief who is forced to help a Navy spy steal an encoding machine that Japan has begun to use to encode its secret military and diplomatic messages.

Mental Slapstick LLC started out as a boutique production and post company, doing work for clients such as Sony Playstation and Mazda. But over the last few years, we’ve been doing more and more projects of our own, building our skills on a series of short films and a feature-length documentary. Last year, we finally felt ready to make a narrative feature, so, working with producer Ken Cortland, we developed a caper adventure called The Red Machine, which we shot in HD.

We like to do a lot of research and experimentation, so as we were preparing for The Red Machine, we did a series of tests with various high definition cameras. Ultimately, we decided to shoot the movie with the Panasonic AG-HVX200, which shoots in DVCPRO HD, producing a 1280x720 image. We loved the look of the footage produced by the camera, and we found that its P2-based workflow perfectly suited our post-production system, which is built around Final Cut Pro on a PowerMac G5 dual processor.

After our tests, we bought the HVX200 and before starting production on the feature, used it on several other jobs. While doing those jobs we developed a workflow with the camera that was very fluid and reliable, and worked flawlessly for The Red Machine.

After shooting we put the P2 cards into the PCMCIA slot of an Apple PowerBook. We used the last generation PowerBook, the one that came out right before the MacBook, because it has the right size PCMCIA slot. (There is now an adaptor available from Duel Systems that makes it possible to use the MacBook.) To use a PowerBook for P2 downloads you need a small utility program on the CD that comes with the HVX200. We downloaded files onto small G-RAID-mini bus-powered jump drives (powered through the FireWire 800 cable that connects them to the computer) made by G-Tech. To look at the footage while it was on the laptop, we used the program P2 Log from Imagine Products. When we returned to our studio at the end of each shoot day, we would transfer the P2 files to the local drive on our editing system and then import the footage into Final Cut Pro, removing the MXF wrapper, and then turning the files into QuickTime movies that Final Cut Pro could read.

Much of the work we’ve done over the years, both for ourselves and for outside clients, has been very stylized, which gives us a lot of latitude in terms of our look. With The Red Machine, the high definition format left us with no room to cheat. Moreover, this movie has some very nuanced performances, and we wanted to make sure that we would clearly see the minutest expressions as we edited. There is an ongoing collaboration between the editor and the actors all through post, as the editor chooses and finesses moments that will create performances that are natural, yet layered. To make those kinds of decisions it’s essential to be able to see those subtle expressions and gestures that bring humanity to a character.

We also wanted to be able to judge the on-screen colors accurately, because color is very important in The Red Machine. We made extreme choices about the palettes in the movie to establish a sharp distinction between the world of our thief and that of our Navy spy. In the thief’s world, we kept all the set dressing, costumes and lighting brown or green, very soft and very organic. While everything in the Navy world, was hard and blue, gray, black, or white. Moreover, there are several flashbacks to the Navy spy’s troubled past in Japan, and we shot those with extremely bright, saturated, theatrical colors.

After doing a lot of research, we decided that the best, most cost-effective way to monitor our footage would be to use an Apple Cinema Display with HDLink for monitoring, connected to a Blackmagic HD Pro DL card. This definitely addressed our need to see the detail and color better. In fact, when we hooked everything up and looked at some of our footage we discovered that in a scene where one of our characters kisses, he ended up with a little lipstick smeared on his own mouth. This was the first time we’d ever been able to see that level of intricate detail.

But we found that there were other benefits to using the DeckLink card and HDLink that we hadn’t expected. We have a lot of matte paintings and subtle visual effects in our movies, which we create ourselves using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. In The Red Machine, we needed to enhance many of our backgrounds to make them seem more like Washington DC of 1935 and Tokyo of 1928. The DeckLink HD Pro is compatible with both After Effects and Photoshop, and the card’s RGB QuickTime preview output made it much easier for us to accurately judge the quality of what we’re doing in After Effects as we worked.

We also found that adding the Blackmagic equipment to our editing facility greatly enhanced our ability to monitor audio. The HDLink enables us to bypass the G5’s built-in audio card and instead output two channels of 24-bit audio to our Behringer Eurorack MX 602A mixing board and then into our Tannoy powered speakers. This ability to listen to our audio more clearly was important to us because sound design is a key element of the narrative in The Red Machine. The audio of the Navy world and the Thieves’ world are differentiated in the same way as the visuals; the Navy world harder, more metallic and more synthetic, and the Thieves’ world, more organic and musical.

With all the visual effects and the stylized color and audio work, post production has been a very involved and lengthy process for us - particularly because we like to do so much of the work ourselves. However, it’s also a thrilling experience to explore the movie and uncover its final form by working with the footage and the performances.

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