blade runner - the deep cut

i've completed my addi-compliant edit of blade runner. given that it shortens the film to 1 hour and 8 minutes (without credits), that my moniker is 'deepstructure,' and that we've already had the 'director's cut' and the 'final cut,' i'm calling it the 'deep cut'. tricksy, i know.

for quite some time now i've been coming out of watching a film thinking to myself, "that could have been at least 1/2 hour shorter and i wouldn't have noticed," as so many films seem to have a lot of padding. i've long wanted to take one of these feature films and re-edit it to remove the scenes or shots i felt were superfluous.

since being laid off in june, i've had some time on my hands so i began looking around for a good candidate. once i decided to do this i suddenly couldn't remember any of the films i'd thought that about. but then it hit me - blade runner. my biggest complaint with the film has always been it's pacing. i've always thought the director, ridley scott, seemed far more focused on the background and the environment than the story or the characters. and given that's it's a futuristic version of the 40's noir films, i felt it should be a bit tighter and more story driven (then again i think that about most films).

i don't believe im the only one who feels this. many folks i've talked to about the film have tried to watch it more than once, only to fall asleep during it. and according to it's wikipedia entry:

"Blade Runner initially polarized critics. some were displeased with the pacing, while others enjoyed its thematic complexity. The film performed poorly in North American theaters."

this isn't a simple chopping out of a few scenes (the 'final cut' version which i used clocks in at 1 hour and 50 minutes without credits). i rearranged scenes to make more narrative sense, replaced and added score material and did some rebuild sound-design. however, aside from one brief cross-dissolve i didn't alter the shots visually or do any color or vfx work on the film. i tried as much as possible to only use the source material of the 'final cut' version.

obviously maintaining continuity with the sound is much more difficult than with picture. if i remove a shot or two, you've no reference other than your memory if the new sequence works. but the associated audio may not line up at all. the soundtrack is syncronized with the current sequence of images and it can be hard to separate out the sound elements associated with the visuals you've eliminated. but fortunately the ear can be more easily fooled than the eye most of the time. i had two allies here: the score and the cross-fade audio function in final cut. it's amazing how powerful a simple cross-fade is in bridging two shots and the blade runner score is more atmospheric and abstract than melodic, making for seamless cross-fade merging when i lift out a shot or scene.

unfortunately i had no way of ripping a blu-ray dvd of the film, so i worked with standard def material. however, having made a dvd of my edit and played it back on my 50" hd plamsa tv, i can assure you it still looks amazing. the encoding on the 'final cut' dvd is very good.

i'm planning on having a screening or two of the film. if you live in the los angeles area and are interested in seeing it, drop me an email or leave a comment here. if you're not in the area and interested in seeing it, let me know and i can either send you a dvd or a link to a quicktime download. at 1 hour and 8 minutes what do you have to lose? it's not a huge time investment. anymore. :)

check out a clip of the new beginning of the film below or watch the full-sized version on youtube:



some changes you may notice:
1) removed "main titles" score and replaced it with "end titles" score.
2) removed opening credits (they've been moved to the end of the film)
3) removed opening scrawl and date card
4) shortened city-scape sequence
5) quicker intro into the leon VK sequence.

**update: i've created a torrent for the full film. it's 1.7gb.

faking depth of field

i recently listened to this fxguide podcast of an interview with peter doyle, chief color scientist for the lord of the rings and harry potter films, where he discusses the grading techniques for the latest harry potter film, 'harry and the half blood prince'. i found this section quite fascinating. i've transcribed it here as the audio can be a bit difficult to listen to. it occurs at the 10:30 mark.

fxguide: this film has a reduced color palette with a lovely tonality to it. what was your approach in that reduced color palette? was that the intent from the outset with wardrobe and set design?

peter doyle: well bruno, the dp, was very keen to investigate some very specific color motifs. and the sort of general principle was to shoot with wide lenses typically from about 16-20mm. so basically have the angle of view of a wide lens but the depth of field of a long lens. so in fact, in all shots of the film we rebuilt the depth of focus.

fxguide: oh really?

peter doyle: it's probably not that apparent. it's not something necessarily you'd react to instantly. but if you look at the film you'll see that the foreground to background focus ratios is completely different and that most of the background is softened as opposed to blurred. in the process that will change the color and the saturation because as we all know as you blur an image you kind of reduce the dynamic range.

so by going into the film that way, in terms of just saying, well lets kinda mix the lenses that we're used to. because the grammar of cinema that we're kinda used to, if we see a wide shot we're kinda used to it being completely in focus, and if we see a long shot we're used to seeing the background out of focus and you could say that's almost a cue of what the shots are, because particularly now with modern lenses (bruno went with the torque s4's), their distortion is quite minimal between the short and the long. but the depth of focus is mathematically how the lenses are, you can't change that.

so mixing that around we ended up with a very interesting concept: and that's rather than changing the color and density of the film by in fact changing the density, we thought it would be far more attractive to let the contrast and the density and the color be changed based on the depth of focus.

because the thing is this is a cast driven film in terms of there's an ensemble. they almost always have three kids on screen and it's widescreen. that tends to dictate shooting things reasonably in focus. but if you look any of the shots you find the background typically far more difused and out of focus than in fact they are as captured by the lens. so that made for a very interesting concept because it meant we could grade for the foreground knowing that the background would in fact have a significantly reduced contrast.

fxguide: on a shot that had a virtual background - where you couldn't get mattes, did you have team of roto supporting you? how did you manage so well to define the foreground from the midground and the background?

peter doyle: we basically rotoscoped it. it's no secret these films take their time to grade. but no, its just myself and second colorist. we basically sit there and rotoscope it. you don't necessarily need the articulated mattes that you need to separate and do a true comp. we're talking far more generic kinds of shapes. it'd be more like the old days of working in a darkroom where you're dodging and burning. because the thing is, if you actually did a super-tight articulated matte it would actually draw attention to itself. the depth of focus we were doing was based far more on a plane of focus if you will.

it wasn't necessarily just drawing around the actor, it would be finding a vanishing point in the shot or finding some piece of set construction and drawing that. if you walk on set or walk around with the set painters they are in fact doing the same thing. if you ever walk on a set and look at a backdrop obviously it's completely shocking to see how little detail there actually is in there. but that's the whole trick of set painting and set design. in a bizarre way we're just taking that a little further. stuart our production designer and bruno would sit here and we'd define what should or should not be out of focus.

they rebuilt the focus in *every* shot?? holy shit.

i didn't notice this effect when watching the film, so im interested in viewing it again. on the one hand this sounds like a bunch of creative tinkering designed to be interesting but ultimately not terribly useful or impactful. or it could be a practical way to overcome the limitations of lens technology and allow for a storytelling technique that hasn't previously been practical. since i was bored out of my mind for much of the film im not sure it's the latter, but i'll reserve judgement until i view it again.

if nothing else, this may be a technique that, although not necessary for an entire film, could be useful in certain situations - specifically when you want a wide-angle view but don't want deep depth of field. im interested to see if there's an emotional tie-in to violating that aspect of the visual language we've come to understand.

i'd wanted to do something similar with 'an exercise in vigilance,' but determined that it would be way to much work. however i didn't take the approach peter details here with finding a vanishing point. im not exactly sure how defining a plane works, especially when the plane only encompasses your actor(s). but perhaps the difference is simply working on a baselight with a 2k image in a viewing theater and having the luxury of taking six months to do your grading.

7D

there's been a lot of talk about the canon 7d and how it's a game changer at $1700. especially when married with something like magic bullet looks for color-correction. but we've been waiting for some good footage to evaluate it. here's one good example that shows you certainly can shoot most indie films with it:

the raw footage:

Dublin's People: Canon 7d 24p from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

a corrected version:

"Dublin People" by Philip Bloom. Colored by Me from PrepShootPost on Vimeo.

another example from prepshootpost using a 7d + magic bullet mojo:

Perya Colored from PrepShootPost on Vimeo.

game on.

**update via stu maschwitz: pics of a decked out 7d