VILNIUS, LITHUANIA – Director Brett Leonard and crew committed to tapeless acquisition using not one but four Viper FilmStream camera packages from MotionFX of London on the new fantasy/action feature Highlander: The Source. The cameras, developed by Thomson Grass Valley (www.thomson.net), have not seen as much action in heavy VFX movies such as this, but the filmmakers found Viper’s clean, uncompressed, RGB 4:4:4 and native 2.37:1 image quality well suited to the task.
MotionFX (www.motionfx.co.uk), which specializes in digital film production and post production, continues to expand its “scene-to-screen” digital cinematography operation by completing principal photography on the new Highlander, using the four Viper cameras to capture 80TB of image data during an eight-week shoot in Lithuania last fall.
MotionFX was given only three weeks prior to the commencement of principal photography, leaving little time for customary pre-production testing and set-up. “Due to lack of pre-production testing this was a very challenging project for us, with a high risk factor,” says MotionFX operations director John O’Quigley. “The fact that production completed the shoot with no major issues is testament not only to the equipment supplied by MotionFX, but to the whole of the production operation.”
Leonard and company originally intended to rent two Vipers. Director Leonard and DP Steve Arnold initially visited MotionFX to review the Viper camera and discuss workflow. Following this brief meeting - including trying out a few test shots with lead actor Adrian Paul – they agreed to have MotionFX supply the necessary camera equipment, offline dailies workflow, as well as later post production online data management.
After further discussion the job escalated to a four-camera shoot, with all that implies for support equipment. MotionFX had to increase its digital cinematography capability substantially, adding not only two additional Viper cameras but also two more digital film recorders, plus a large range of additional support equipment, from DigiPrime lenses to camera sticks.
The shoot finished with a final shooting ratio approaching 70:1 with over 100 hours of captured footage, and a total amount of data nearing 80TB.
“To put that into context, 80TB is over 10 million frames, equivalent to 625,000 feet of 35mm film,” says O’Quigley. “That's equivalent to about 1,560 rolls of 400-foot camera negative film, which would have cost roughly £200,000 in stock, plus a further £200,000 for processing and telecine dailies, not to mention transportation and insurance costs, plus the associated delay in seeing the actual shot footage as there isn't a film lab in Lithuania.”