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| Dean Devlin, Producer, 'Leverage' |
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By Staff, December 9, 2008
In the pantheon of big-budget visual effects extravaganza, there's one name that stands out above the rest: producer Dean Devlin. With titles like Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla and Flyboys on his resume, Dean Devlin leads the pack when it comes to effects films and, in recent years, Devlin has led the pack with digital technology as well. Starting with The Librarian, a made for TNT movie that was shot with the Sony CineAlta F900 in 2004, Devlin has turned to the digital-side and hardly looked back. This year, he is producing Leverage, a new sci-fi series for TNT and shooting with RED cameras his company has purchased for the production. DV caught up with the busy former actor turned producer turned producer/director on the Leverage stages in North Hollywood for a discussion on the evolution of digital.
DV: What was the last straw for you, so to speak; the final realization that you were going to start going all digital from now on?
It was actually about 2004, we were about to start a movie for TNT called The Librarian and I kept thinking 'We're gonna be going all digital soon, I'd rather be on the front of that curve than behind it.' So I said we should shoot this thing digitally, and everyone said 'yeah, but this is a show with a lot of action, in the daylight, in the jungle, a lot of hot spots – this is going to be a nightmare.' And I said, 'yeah, but if we're going to fail, let's fail on a TV movie rather than a feature when we don't have to go back to film – it lives in the world of video anyway, this is where we can, at least, learn.'
We got to the jungle, we set up our cameras, we started to shoot and the first day of shooting, sure enough, I'm seeing these big white hot spots and it's blowing out where the sun is here and when I'm panning too fast I'm getting strobing, and I said, 'we'll just have to find a way to turn it into a style to hide it.'
Then two days later, a friend of mine who is a DIT showed up to help out on second unit. Literally, as he's walking to second unit, he passes by the monitor and asks me 'What's with these hot spots?' And I said, 'Well, it's HD,' and he goes 'You don't have to have hot spots!' He walks over to the camera and my other DIT says 'You can't touch the camera!' he says, 'Get out of here!' [Devlin mimes fiddling with camera controls] – poof! Hot spots go away! My DP says, 'What else can you do?' and my friend says, 'What else do you want?' Suddenly we realized there was nothing you couldn't do if you had the guys who knew how to do it. So then our first unit DIT moved to the second unit and the second unit DIT became the first unit guy and we shot the show with him and we did all the things they said we can't do.
From there we did The Librarian Two and we did the six-hour mini series Triangle and when we went to shoot Flyboys, that's when the Genesis camera came out. I told my DP we should use the Genesis, but he didn't want to shoot digital. He said, 'We've got airplanes flying at full speed into the sun!' So I asked Panavision 'How would you feel if I strapped your camera on the wing of an airplane and flew really fast?' They said 'Sure!' So we did!
We went out to small airport outside of Los Angeles and we strapped the Genesis on the wings of planes and flew around in all different kinds of light, including right into the sun, and then I did it again with regular film cameras. We printed both out to film and I took it to my DP in England. We put it up at the Odeon Theater – the biggest theater in England – and I said, 'Alright, you tell me which one is film.' And he didn't know! So he said, 'Alright, I gotta see this camera!' We got him a Genesis for a week and he played with it and he came back and said, 'Dean, I'm never shooting film again!'
How has that evolved into this production; you're currently using the RED cameras on Leverage, not the Genesis?
Actually, the pilot was shot with Genesis, and then we moved to the RED for the series. We're actually using a combination of cameras on the show, the RED is our main camera, the second cameras is the Sony PMWEX1 and the third is the Sony Z1U. We had used the RED for The Librarian 3, and it's just been great!
It's not just the technical thing of having more flexible material – which is awesome, because the image is much more flexible material than film – but it also changes the whole workflow; it changes the way you direct actors on set, it changes the way you shoot, it changes the way you post – it changes everything, physically and creatively. I'm doing things now so much earlier in the process than we ever used to do with film because I can! It changes how I think about the show. Just the ability to color correct my dailies, alone, is amazing. I always had to live with one light dailies before, but now I can color correct with the DP at night, every night! It's all so liberating.
How did you decide on the combination between the Z1U, the EX1 and the RED?
After Flyboys, I was in England at Double Negative waiting for an effects shot and, believe it or not, there was a copy of DV on the table. I picked it up and read about the V1U, the predecessor to the Z1U and I was like 'Wow! I just shot with the highest end HD, this is the lowest end HD, but it's still HD – I gotta see how this looks!' So I bought a V1U in England and used it for all the behind-the-scenes – and then came back to the states and bought the new Z1U and shot some test footage with that. I turned it into an uncompressed QT file and brought it to EFilm and had them film it out for me and then asked them to analyze the footage and tell me what they thought. They basically said it had the exact same quality as Super16mm film. That was amazing! The idea that you could have this little $3000 camera that gives you S16 quality? It blew my mind.
We then wound up shooting a movie for TNT called Blank Slate completely on the EX1, and that was a great experience. When we started on The Librarian 3, I was actually seriously considering shooting it on the EX1. We used the F900 on the previous two and when I did a green screen test with the EX1, it was very similar results to the F900, and in some regards it was better. Our DP was a bit worried about the EX1 purely for the lack of interchangeable lenses. With no available wide-angle or telephoto attachments available, at the time, for the EX1, he was very concerned that we wouldn't get the shots we had planned. He recommended the RED, which would work with regular film lenses. The RED was an exciting camera, but I had never played with it, so we met with Jim Jannard at RED and he walked us through the camera, and let us play with it and we got very excited! I knew, at that point, that it wasn't anywhere as rock solid a cameras as the Genesis, but what it could do visually, the image quality, was really exciting. They were on build 13 at the time, which is nothing compared to now – on build 16.
Through our tests, we fell in love with the RED and felt it would mix well with our C, D and E cameras, which would be all EX1s. At that time, the build 13 on the RED wasn't good in low light, but the EX1s were great in low light, so that became our rule of thumb, we'd shoot with the EX1s in low light, but the rest of the show would be RED for the main A and B cameras.
Also, for cameras like the EX1, these prices are so low – it's incredible. In the old days, if you purchased your own equipment, you'd need 4 or 5 or 6 years to amortize it. The fact that we can get the EX1s for $6000 a camera, I can't rent the F900 for the show for that amount. If, at the end of the show, I threw all the cameras in the garbage – I'd still be saving money!
I think that is what is going to drive a big change in the industry, as much as I love the Genesis, on an economic level the EX1s and the RED just make sense for me.
We also loved how much RED supported us. So when Leverage came along they said 'We gotta get you on build 16,' which was a little scary because a change from 15 to 16 is irreversible. You can't undo it. When they started to develop build 16, they broomed out all the previous builds and started completely from scratch, so it was like a whole new camera. It was a firmware and software update. Build 16 on the RED solved about 90% of the issues we had with the camera – including low light. Where RED was not good in low lights before, it was now spectacular!
RED is a young company, but they're really committed to making their product better and better. When we got back from Librarian 3, the first thing they wanted to do was sit down with us and hear about everything we didn't like. They weren't defensive about anything, they just wanted to make it better.
Is there something, other than the low light capability, that you can point out that RED corrected?
The eyepiece was a big problem. The operators just didn't want to use it at all. It was okay for a bright scene, but they just couldn't see anything through it if the light was low. They were all using these on-board monitors instead of the eyepiece. With build 16, they re-routed power and have improved the eyepiece amazingly. I think there's still room for improvement, but it's much better than it was.
They improved their GUI, made it better and easier. They also improved the image quality. It was always a really beautiful image, you couldn't stretch it too far. The further you stretched the image, the thinner it got and you'd start to see artifacting and noise issues. Now, the image is really remarkable and you can keep yanking this stuff and it holds solid. That was really a big improvement. I still want them to have a 1080i live output to see it 1080 on a monitor. Right now all you can get is 720 live, or 1080 on playback, but I really want to see 1080i live. I think that's going to be their next change, but it's a power issue now. That's probably the only thing I don't like about the camera.
Was there any issue from the network about shooting a series on a brand new camera?
When I first went to do digital with TNT they were nervous because they had a bad experience before me, they had another show in HD and they weren't happy with the quality. So, they were very nervous, but they said 'Look, if it was anyone else we would say 'no,' but let's see how it goes. Let's see some dailies and let's talk.' They loved what they saw on The Librarian and they trusted me to handle it well. After the pilot of Leverage, which we shot on the Genesis, I told TNT that we were going to switch to the RED and they said [covering his ears] 'LALALALALA – don't tell us, just show us, because otherwise we'll freak out!' In the end, they're really happy with the show and how it looks, so they've signed off completely.
Combining the RED and the EX1, are you shooting 1080 on the EX1 and 2K on the RED?
No, actually, we're shooting 4K on the REDs and 1080 on the EX1s, but we're turning all of the footage into ProRes422 and cutting and delivering it in ProRes. Once you convert to ProRes, it basically all becomes 2K, so it all kind of evens out. There are some color space issues that you have to address in Color, but it's not radical, so we've been able to blend them together remarkably well.
How much footage are you generating shooting multiple cameras and keeping everything – how is that going into workflow and creating a storage issue?
Well, again, I'm a big believer in ProRes. I think ProRes is the most underrated codec out there. I've done a lot of testing, short of going to film with it, and I really love it. We took outputs of the ProRes and projected it on the largest screens at 20th Century Fox, Sony and Paramount, and it holds up. It looks spot-on, and I'm a real stickler for the image. People who have worked for me in digital effects will tell you, my nickname is Eagle Eye because I can find every little tiny flaw – and I'm looking at footage and I don't see any flaws. I don't see anything wrong with it! And if you feel that way, about ProRes, the size of the ProRes files are the same size as SD, so suddenly you have a lot more room to store your images. The way that we do it is we do it in parallel drives so we're working entirely in ProRes, but we're also mirroring it in 4K in case we need to go back to those files. We do go back a fair amount because we're blowing a shot up or reframing. That's another giant advantage to digital images; with film you can blow it up 10, maybe 15% because your quality goes to crap. We're regularly blowing our footage up 200 to 250%.
To go in for tighter close up to zoom in to elements within a shot?
Sometimes we only shot a two shot and we wish we had close ups. Sometimes we want to do a post move, sometimes we just like the framing better in a revised shot. When we do that we'll go back to the 4K, cause if you do blow up 250%, in the ProRes, then you'll start to see some softening, some more noise, but if we go back to the 4K and do that same blowup, you see nothing. We've only gone 250%, but I would guess that you could probably get around 300% before you could start to see it in the 4K. Then, when we do digital effects shots, we go back to 4K. Although we have done some ProRes, and they look fine, our feeling is we have the 4K files right there, it's one push of a button, why not work from the most amount of information when you're doing a digital effects shot?
When we finish the show, we broom off the 4K files, put them into storage and we keep the ProRes on the SAN until the show airs.
So how large is your storage?
With the 4K mirrored files and all our effects and ProRes, we're holding regularly somewhere between 70 and 90 terabytes for the series.
How has the overall process, the writing process or the development process, changed now that you're going into digital production?
We don't edit ourselves as much as we used to because we have greater creative possibilities. For instance, I did a TV series in 1997, called The Visitor, which we shot on film and while we had a lot of effects in it we had to be very careful which effects we included and how we did it. We took a lot of care in the writing to pick and choose what effects the episode would include. Now I tell the guys things you think are gonna be too difficult are probably going to be easy and the things you think are going to be easy are going to be insanely difficult! Just write it and we'll figure out how to do it later.
It has changed how the production works on set, though. I have to talk to all my directors and tell them it IS different with HD and embrace those differences. I encourage them to cut much less often and just keep the energy and go back to one. Unless they need to change something in the set or they don't like someone's hair or the costume, rather than say cut we just go back to one because there is this great energy in just going and doing it again and again and the actors get getter without that break. We also get interesting improvisations that come up. Before, when we were shooting with film, you didn't want to have an improv, you don't want to waste the films, now we're finding a lot of the great moments in the show are happening unexpectedly in takes that go on longer than you normally would or in the reset. Of course this drives our editors nuts cause they're like 'How many times did you do it on this take?' But it's been really great for us creatively, and it's helped us get more done in a day.
We're no longer worried about burning film. Film was a big cost. I had a script supervisor ask me which take was a circle take and I had to laugh. They're ALL printed takes. There's no non-printed takes anymore – everything ends up in the computer. I told her, you can mark that a preferred take, but we're printing them all.
In addition, we're able to do everything in house – and I mean everything. Our whole post post; we do the entire post process ourselves. We take the hard drives from production and they go straight to our office where we do the editing, the digital effects, the sound effects, the music editing, the ADR, the color correction; we do everything in our house and it's all through a combination of the Apple software and the Windows software, Shake and Maya. The editor will literally be cutting – in full resolution – he'll look at a shot and say, 'Oh that should be an effects shot,' then he'll right-click it and select 'send to Shake' and it shows up in the other room for the Shake artist. They do the work, hit save and it changes automatically in the editor's timeline. No longer do you need that special effects editor to go get the shot, pull the shot, take it to the place to have them work on it... Now it happens instantaneously. I'm literally sitting with the editor saying let's add some fire into that shot and by the time I come back from lunch its in the cut. That would never happen before. That's all this advantage of working digitally.
We understand that you guys started testing the RED lenses, but eventually rejected them?
That's not entirely true. We are currently shooting with the RED 18-50 and we're just getting in today, to experiment with, the new 18-85mm lens which they says is more rock solid. Our feeling on the 18-50mm had some breathing when we were doing rack focusing, but what we did realize is it's an excellent lens for us for Steadicam. If you think of it more as a variable prime than a zoom it's actually very good and we're using it on the Steadicam all the time. When the camera is on the dollies, we're using the big Angenieux Optimo zoom lenses, you can't beat those Optimos. We've got the 24-290mm, and it's unbelievably rock solid.
David Connell was your DP for the pilot, will he also be working on the series?
Dave is the DP for the whole series, absolutely. I originally met Dave on The Triangle, our six-hour miniseries for TNT. The show's director, Craig Baxley, fought hard for Dave, who he had worked with many times before. I'm very particular about my DPs and I was trying hard to cram another DP down Craig's throat, but he said 'Trust me, you're going to fall in love with Dave,' and I very begrudgingly went with Dave, and Craig was absolutely right – I completely fell madly in love with Dave. He's now my first choice for everything, he's really just amazing. He did The Triangle, for me, then Librarian 3 and then the pilot for Leverage and now he's shooting the series. He is just a lovely guy, insanely talented. When he was 24 years old he was the DP of Never Ending Story and he's had this amazing career ever since. He's so gutsy and fearless. When we did The Triangle, he had never shot with HD before, but he had absolutely no hesitation whatsoever. Unlike so many other DPs that I've worked with, he said 'You wanna shoot digital? Let's shoot digital, mate!' and he just jumped right in.
You are a very visual producer/director and place a lot of importance on the image – has it always been that way for you?
I have to give all the credit for to Roland Emmerich for that. Roland is so visual, it's ridiculous. When we would write a script together, I would sit at the laptop and he would sit at a drawing board. I would work on the scene on the page, he would work on it in storyboards and at the end we'd show each other what we did and then I'd say, 'Oh I like what you did better there, let's do that,' and he'd say 'Oh I like what you wrote there better than what I drew, let's do that' and we'd combine the two. By the time we finished up the script, we'd have a full set of storyboards! So Ronald was the one who taught me, literally, everything I know about camera and visual and to this day, I hear his voice in my head when I'm shooting a scene. I'll literally hear him screaming at me 'ACK! Dean! Nobody would shoot like that! What are you thinking?!'
When the RED was initially unveiled, a lot of people criticized it – most without having used it – for its' obvious lack of ergonomics. Are there special tools that you're using to make the camera more useable?
We're actually not adverse to the way that they designed the camera. Sometimes we'll bring in another tool like an Arri handheld bracket, but really we don't have any problems with the design at all. It's such a lighter camera that for Steadicam, for instance, we're actually able to do a lot more with this than we were with previous digital cameras. There were little things, like some of the early little handles, that would break off easily because they were initially made from wrong steel, but, again, RED has been so receptive that everytime we say 'That's a weak point,' they show up with a better version. The fact that they came up with a camera this good this fast is kind of incredible. They're putting out a camera that is arguably up there with the best digital camera you can buy at a fraction of the price. Until you buy the lenses!!! (Devlin laughs heartily)
Are there other cameras or gear that you have your eye on for the future?
Right now I'm kinda looking at unusual equipment. When we did Blank Slate, I got very excited about all the MicroDolly equipment. I remember we busted it out for the crew in Utah and my grip was like 'Where'd you get that, Walmart?' and I said 'Laugh now, you're gonna love it!'
The reality is you can move very quickly with it you can get really good camera movements and it's become pretty much our secondary grip package on this show for second unit, especially when using the EX1s. We've got the MicroDolly Jib arm, we've got the track and the suction cup mount – that's the best camera mount I've ever seen! So it's not just cameras, now it's all the equipment that has been designed because of the weight load of these cameras. That's where my head has been at lately. There's a whole new world of toys out there and I'm just dying to try them out!
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