Richard Linklater's Boyhood Takes Home Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture DramaSanta Clara, CA, January 12, 2015- At the 72nd Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 11 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, director Richard Linklater's Boyhood won the Best Motion Picture Drama award. ASSIMILATE congratulates Parke Gregg, and his team at post house Stuck On On in Austin Texas, for the full post production of the film using ASSIMILATE's SCRATCH Digital Workflow Tools.
Filmed over 12 years with the same cast, Boyhood is a groundbreaking story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a child named Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who literally grows up on screen before our eyes. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette star as Mason's parents. The following is an interview with Parke Gregg just after the August 15 (2014) USA premiere of Boyhood. Greg discusses his work for Boyhood and his digital workflow and tools.
Q: What made the post-production and DI for Boyhood so challenging?
A: The simple answer is everything. But I think it's pretty clear that when you have a long film (ten reels), shot on 35mm film for a few days every year over a span of twelve years -- shot by two different DPs (Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly) using different film stocks and an off-line edit in SD at 29.97 -- there are going to be multiple challenges.
For example, framing is typically something that is locked at the onset of a project, aside from a few re-frames for creative purposes. However, when a project has ever-changing gear and crew, things you take for granted tend to change as well. For each year of footage the framing was different and framing charts were only occasionally available. I had the telecine off-line footage to go by, but again, different operators/gear eliminated any hope of a standard framing for the project. Often the offline didn't even match the framing charts when available, so it became a subjective matter. Some were shot at 4 perf and some at 3 perf as well. Some framed for an optical track, some not. This, like many other aspects of the DI, became a manual and tedious process.
We had the full frames scanned at 2.5K so we would have plenty of resolution for cropping and framing and still make a 2K delivery. Fortunately, SCRATCH has great tools for handling this, whether the task is mostly automated or significantly manual. Another issue was matching back the time code to the film negatives. Fortunately, assistant editor Mike Saenz did an amazing job of working with Cinelicious to get the film scans completed correctly. Cinelicious needed an EDL, not a keycode cut list, for their scanning process. The problem was that because tape dailies were used, with multiple lab rolls on each tape, the EDLs would have no intrinsic relation between keycode and time code, or between lab rolls and tape numbers. To correlate the two sets of information, Mike had to find the hole punch at the beginning of each lab roll or a significant frame and match it back to the dailies time code and tape number. Cinelicious would then assign this time code to each roll that ultimately matched the EDL. Again, it turned into a very manual and tedious process. Back at Stuck On On, we converted the EDLs to 24fps and then took on the challenge of conforming the scans and matching it back up to the offline. By the nature of a reverse pull-down at edits, you lose or gain a frame here and there. This usually washes out in the end, but when working with this many reels we had to be very careful not to accumulate extra frames that would cause audio sync problems when all was compiled into a single timeline. It's funny how just a few years ago, working in a 29.97 offline environment was normal, but now it's totally archaic and we really had to dust off the cobwebs to remember how all this could work.
The schedule was another considerable challenge. The edit for the final year wasn't locked when we started the DI. Rick had just wrapped on the last two scenes when I began working on the conform in late August (2013). Also, the edit was malleable, so periodically updated edits or new scenes were coming in. In addition, the scans from Cinelicious were coming to us in batches as well as new scans for editorial updates. So throughout the first part of the project, we didn't have all the elements and we needed to stay flexible to incorporate new components, which all required a lot of organization. Allison Turrell is my business partner and also our DI Producer. Having her is absolutely key to successfully pulling off big projects like this for a small shop like us.
Q: How did you create a cohesive look with film shot over 12 years and by two different DPs?
A: Sandra Adair is the co-producer and has been Rick's editor since his second film, Dazed and Confused. He trusts her decisions and she puts her all into driving the process. She did a masterful job of editing all the film into a smooth and cohesive story. Once the edit was locked she moved into a creative-producer role and was very hands on during the conform and color grading process. Rick wanted to establish a very natural, real-life, human feel to the film - not over stylized in any way. Sandra, he, and I collaborated on defining that look and it naturally evolved over the course of the project. Most people who've seen the film comment on how smooth it feels, how the years just blend together.
This is largely due to the excellent editing, but two primary goals of mine were to ensure that the look of the film enhanced this seamlessness and to minimize visual distractions that were sometimes a result of this unique production. Rick's work style is very collaborative and he put a lot of trust in us. He gave global comments and relied on us to make it happen. During review sessions, he would correct us if we were on the wr
