The Bronx is Burning, produced by Tollin/Robbins Productions, is an eight-part baseball-themed miniseries for ESPN Original Entertainment that captures the flavor and the look of one of the most tumultuous years in the history of New York City. Adapted from Jonathan Mahler’s nonfiction bestseller Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning, the miniseries explores events of New York City in the summer of 1977, with an emphasis on the Yankees’ quest for their first World Series crown in 15 years amid considerable team turmoil and tension. This theme is supplemented with events that occurred in the city at the same time, including a mounting crime wave, a citywide blackout, the Son of Sam murders and a memorable mayoral race pitting Mario Cuomo against Ed Koch.

The series was shot on location over 12 weeks in the fall of 2006, primarily in Connecticut’s New Haven, New London, Norwich and Waterford. Additional filming took place in New York. The miniseries was directed by Jeremiah Chechik and edited by Jerry Greenberg, ACE (The French Connection, Apocalypse Now), with 1st Unit Director of Photography Douglas Koch, CSC, and 2nd Unit DP David Stump, ASC.

Encore Hollywood was tasked with final color correction, visual effects production and online editing—a job that involved integrating live-action material shot with the Thomson Grass Valley Viper camera with hundreds of clips of archival material, including news footage and taped broadcasts of Major League games, to help bring the summer of 1977 to life.

Production Workflow
The mandate that ESPN gave to Bill Johnson when they hired him to produce The Bronx is Burning was to shoot, post and deliver the film in a high-definition digital format. The production team was faced with a dilemma: They had chosen the Viper FilmStream digital camera and an HD 4:4:4 digital workflow due to the show’s extensive visual effects and graphics, but they were shooting in Mystic, Conn. The closest full-service digital studios were many miles away in New York City or Boston.

Stump, who was brought on board by Johnson to design and implement the digital workflow, was familiar with Creative Bridge’s Mobile Digital Lab & Theater (MDLT), a custom-designed digital suite housed in a 36-foot trailer that offers extensive pre- and postproduction services on location.

The MDLT houses a Globalstor ExtremeStor DI workstation with an Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI by PNY graphics board and runs Assimilate’s Scratch data-centric workflow solution. With Creative Bridge’s MDLT plugged into Sonalysts Studios in Waterford, Conn., the production team had easy local access to a complete digital “pre-post” pipeline that delivered everything they needed: real-time color correction, real-time HD-SDI playback and color accuracy.

Creative Bridge co-founder Dan Lion notes, “With our MDLT, we bring the critical studio/post tools to the project location. Directors, cinematographers, editors and colorists are able to efficiently get their work done with substantial time savings, and in a comfortable and professional environment. Within the trailer, we’re able to ingest the digital film on-site and the pre-post process begins.”

Creative Bridge co-founder Brian Gaffney adds, “We have an incredibly powerful real-time digital workflow for developing looks on set and providing immediate feedback to the directors and DPs. We bypass the proxies and move to full-resolution playback/review. Primary and secondary color correction are applied in real time based on predetermined lookup tables [LUTs]. The LUTs are also applied to the raw DPX files during the final transfer to film or finishing. This type of performance is achieved by rendering in real time. With HD-SDI output on the Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI graphics board, we can monitor the display LUTs in our native 1920x1080 projector while simultaneously driving our desktop and cinema displays.”

The raw imagery from the Viper camera, recorded full-resolution in 4:4:4, received preliminary color correction on set by Colorist Jeff Olm. “The workflow was great. The dailies didn’t have to go to New York to be processed; they only had to go as far as the mobile lab parked in the back of the studio, where Jeff [Olm] was waiting. We looked at colorized dailies the next afternoon,” Johnson explains.

“Shooting an all-digital eight-hour miniseries was a completely new experience; I’d say it was very intense,” Johnson adds. “Color correction and visual effects played a critical role in The Bronx is Burning. The series takes place in 1977 New York—it not only covers the New York Yankees but other major events in New York’s history, like the Son of Sam murders. We needed our footage to emulate the look and feel of the 1977 source footage we found so we could blend the old with the new. It worked! For example, we were able to seamlessly merge existing newsreel footage of Son of Sam with new footage shot with the Viper. To help establish an efficient digital workflow, I brought in David Stump, my guru for all things digital. He worked with our DP, Doug Koch, to develop the entire digital pipeline,” says Johnson.

The Pre-Post Pipeline
“The Bronx is Burning was shot primarily with the digital Viper camera, which minimized film costs and telecine issues. The overarching issue for the production was determining how to achieve looks to view on set and guaranteeing that all looks would match in postproduction,” says Lion.

“Jeremiah, David and Doug shot three days of test footage in all different types of settings and then established over 50 different looks that they wanted to use,” says Johnson. Based on this test footage, colorist and Scratch artist Olm pre-visualized the 50+ looks in Scratch and saved the looks as LUT files.

Before each scene was recorded, Koch and Chechik would choose a look for the scene and note its LUT number on the camera report and slate frame. The LUTs were simultaneously loaded into the Thomson Grass Valley LUTher boxes that fed the on-set viewing monitors, exactly replicating the look achieved in the screening room/color-correction suite. Back at the mobile lab, Olm was then able to use the real-time color-correction capability of the Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI by PNY combined with Scratch to make the clone master while simultaneously downconverting a copy for editorial.

This process helped to avoid a common problem in television production: variations in color and lighting in scenes shot over the course of multiple production days. “If we shot part of a scene on day one and the rest on day 30, Jeff could simply pull up the LUTs from the first day and apply them to the new material,” explains Rex Teese, the series’ associate producer of post.

“Having Creative Bridge on site gave us the ability to close the color loop,” adds Stump. “After the shoot, we could go straight to the trailer and color-correct the dailies, viewing them on a projector that was exactly calibrated to match our on-set monitors; it turned what used to be a one-and-a-half-day ordeal into a 10-minute process—speeding up production and significantly reducing costs,” says Stump. “In fact, the color correction became so reliable that we pretty much stopped checking the dailies altogether, which is an incredible testament to the system.”

“We really had an amazing team working on this project, which made it a great experience. Jeff Olm was able to reproduce the colorized images that Jeremiah and Doug were after and deliver accurately colorized rough cut assemblies of sequences within three days,” says Johnson.

The preliminary work also helped final color correction with Encore Hollywood’s Steve Porter move efficiently. “Our first episode had 880 edits in 45 minutes and used 105 source tapes—still, we got our color correction done in the time we had,” Teese says. “That’s because Steve is very good, but it’s also because of the material he was working with.”

Color correction for the archival material was a different matter. News clips and baseball footage originated in a variety of formats, including Beta SP and 2-inch video, the state-of-the-art format in 1977. Additionally, the intervening years had not treated all of the material kindly. “In some cases, the material looked horrible and we had to work hard to get everything we could out of it,” Teese notes. “The Beta SP material, in particular, was a challenge to bump up to HD.”

On the other hand, Teese adds, they weren’t striving to meet a contemporary broadcast look. “We wanted to marry it to the new material, but only up to a point,” he said. “We wanted it to retain the look of original game footage so that viewers feel like they’re there.”

Visual Effects
Encore Hollywood also provided visual effects for the production, in association with CBS Animation, the lead VFX house on the show. Specifically, Encore created visuals for the last several episodes of the series, primarily involving the re-creation of historic environments. Artists Doug Spilatro, Jamie Fortuno and Bob Minshall re-created Yankee Stadium and Royals Stadium in Kansas City. The artists built the stadium backgrounds from high-resolution still photographs of the facilities and then composited crowds into the seats from stock elements. Live-action images of actors, shot against greenscreen, were then composited into the foreground.

The same crew added period background images of the New York City skyline to exterior scenes of a Yankee Stadium box office. “The biggest challenge was to give the scenes an authentic ’70s feel,” notes Encore Hollywood visual effects supervisor Tim Jacobsen.