Encore Hollywood provided digital intermediate postproduction services for Deadgirl, an independent horror film from directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The film, which was shot with the Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream camera, was graded in Encore’s DI theater and mastered to HD for eventual film-out. Ascent Media’s Bob Curreri was the DI colorist. Dave Feldman and Mark Skowronski produced the DI work for Encore Hollywood.

Deadgirl, an unsettling tale of two high school students who discover an apparently dead woman in an abandoned asylum, employed a completely tapeless pipeline. A Codex Digital recording system was used to capture the uncompressed widescreen (1:2.35) output from the Viper camera and store it as full-resolution DPX files. The system was also employed to output QuickTime files for editorial and data for final post work at Encore Hollywood.

“Because we used a lot of new technology in production and planned to premiere the film via D-cinema, there were a lot of things to consider,” explains Sarmiento. “Encore went to bat for us, and whenever we encountered a problem, they quickly found a solution. They were available to us night and day.”

Encore Hollywood developed a flexible workflow in order to accommodate Sarmiento and Harel’s desire to do some final post work themselves. “We wanted to do titles and transitions, as well as some of the compositing and effects work, at our studio,” Sarmiento says. “Encore helped to provide the ability for us to do that while still working within their requirements for the final DI output.”

Encore’s expertise was also invaluable on the aesthetic side in helping the filmmakers to achieve Deadgirl’s distinctive look. “The way we colored the film was a bit off spec,” Sarmiento observes. “We wanted the blacks in our film to be more milky grey, and that required a careful balancing of our creative needs and the technical guidelines in terms of what is acceptable for distribution. It took extra effort on everyone’s part.”

In addition to the Toronto International Film Festival, Deadgirl has screened at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, Sitges New Visions in Sitges, Spain, the AFI Fest in Los Angeles, and elsewhere. A full theatrical release is expected next year.