Sanctum: Developing the workflow

Encore spoke with the team from Digital Pictures, about their work on Sanctum.

How did you prepare for this project?
Rachel Knowles, head of post production: We met with Andrew Wight, line producer Brett Popplewell and post-production supervisor Marc Van Buuren back in early 2009. Our GM John Fleming had 3D on his radar for a long time and we were ready to make the investment; Sanctumwas the perfect opportunity. Andrew knew he’d be bringing a lot of expertise to the table from Avatar and his relationship with James Cameron; our guys learnt a lot but they also assisted in perfecting and adapting the technologies and workflows as well – we managed to set up a 3D editorial workflow which they hadn’t had back in the earlier days of Avatar.
Nic Smith, technical director: Coming into Sanctum we’d spent a lot of time in R&D looking at what other people in the industry were doing in terms of stereoscopy, what standards were in place, what technology was available and trying as much as possible to give ourselves a general education on the subject. We got an opportunity early on to start to field test our approach as a 3min 3D promo was needed for the Cannes Film Festival. This not only gave us a live, timepressured test but gave us Sanctummaterial that we could then start working with in terms of ironing out our processes before we went into the 3D DI. We’ve really had a double benefit from this project as we’ve been able to learn so much for ourselves about working in stereo and develop our own approach which differs quite a lot from what our research tells us other companies are doing but we also had experienced people like Andrew Wight and stereographer Chuck Comisky to draw from, which allowed us to accelerate the learning curve exponentially.
RK: Firstly we had to develop an approach to workflow, look at system, storage and viewing requirements and begin drawing up our pipeline. Secondly, we started to look at the colour element of the equation and how we wanted to approach translations between 3D and 2D deliverables.

What was it like, working with Cameron’s team?
RK: It was so high profile with his name attached we all just knew we had to step up (for Australia!) and pull it off.

NS: Early on in the shoot we had the opportunity to go up the Gold Coast and spend a couple of days in the “Pod” with Chuck Comisky getting a personal master class in stereoscopy and picking his brain to get as much information as possible about the approach to post they used on Avatar. Chuck is like the wise sage of stereoscopy; he sat there with his eyes fixed on the screens showing him the direct feeds from the camera’s and he would just throw comments out explaining what he was doing or begin to discuss a particular part of the 3D process. It really was invaluable, in all our testing time I was constantly referring back to the notes from  those sessions with Chuck. During the whole process, especially the convergence passes we had Andrew Wight in the room, Andrew early on was really helpful I developing our “stereo eyes” and giving us pointers for the stereo rules that he, Jim and Chuck had developed working together.
RK: The best feeling was when the DP post-producer and I met Cameron after the cast and crew screening and he gave us his congratulations. He was genuinely impressed with what DP and iloura had achieved for the film.