“Copley:” The Making of an American Fairytale

By Alexander Pikas, Director, PikasFilm, LLC

For Heather, Alex, and their daughter, Alexandra, their home on Copley Lane is special. This is the place they’ve chosen to spend their lives. Lives can be misspent quickly when chronology fractures and the living attempt to decipher the dead. Time is the one construct that prevents everything from happening at once. Time is also the one construct no living thing can manipulate. When such a mis-event occurs in such a place as Copley, the origin of the phrase “All Hell Breaks Loose” becomes clear. Or does it?

“Copley” is a ghost story/supernatural mystery that relies on stunning imagery, depth of plot and exceptional visual storytelling rather than gore or profanity for impact. We’ve created a classic ghost story that plays like a fairytale while remaining accessible to almost all ages - from 12 to 80 plus. As with most independent films, we had a very tight budget to work with, which mandated spending quite a bit of time doing low resolution effects tests and pre-lighting the locations as much as possible, with countless practicals and hidden light sources. Since we were shooting on film we felt free to mix lighting types and let the color temperatures read what they will to heighten the atmosphere of any given space – the best example I can think of is the boiler room – painted a sort of 60’s cosmic neon green, the room was lit with compact fluorescent fixtures which heightened the green of the room to surreal levels.

Post production is where the real magic happened. We created a workflow using cutting edge technology to make shooting on Super 35mm (in our case on Panavision cameras and lenses) affordable for the indie filmmaker. Postworks, NYC did a 2K Digital Intermediate scan of our footage, and wrote software to convert the DPX files to uncompressed 10 bit 4:4:4 Blackmagic Design files. Working with Blackmagic Design’s affordable, high quality line of DeckLink capture cards, we were able to work in full resolution all the way through post, eliminating the need for an on-line conform.

Since our workflow is tapeless, the Decklink HD Pro Dual Link was chosen for three fundamental reasons.

Firstly, doing our final color correction in the edit requires superlative monitoring abilities. The quality of monitoring from the card is so high that the bottleneck soon becomes your display. Since we had to have a perfect picture on everything from consumer CRT TVs to Digital Cinema Projectors, the myriad of output options (i.e. HD SDI dual link, HD SDI single link, SD SDI, Analog Component HD, Analog Component SD and even lowly Composite) allowed us to preview on the fly on all sorts of displays; and the real time downconvert was invaluable here, too.

Secondly, the Blackmagic uncompressed 1080 24p 10 bit 4:4:4 codec is simply amazing - the massive color space, along with the uncompressed nature of the codec allowed us to do pretty hefty color correction without any perceivable artifacting.

Thirdly, put simply, price. Dollar for dollar, nothing can touch the sheer power and flexibility of these cards.

In short, “Copley” revolutionizes the typical indie workflow by melding cutting edge technology with the inherent beauty of film to deliver breathtaking visuals at an independent film-friendly cost.

www.copleymovie.com

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