So
here’s what all the big to-do was with Alanis Morissette this week. A little back story first, though.
We’re
trained audio professionals. David and
Craig have pieces of paper from snooty universities that say so. But in the tenure of our lives, we’ve
expanded our expertise into video. We grabbed
hold of it, learned it, developed it – until it became a staple of our business
model.
Over
the course of the past several years, we learned of a vast stockpile of film
assets in our clients’ libraries. You
see, when videos were first a thing, they were shot on film then transferred to
some inferior video format, like 1”, Beta SP or DigiBeta. The quality the MTV generation grew up with was
really crap. I mean, we didn’t much notice
or care because Oh my god Simon LeBon is SO cute! and My, that Eurythmics
video is strangely arousing and frightening at the same time. We were distracted.
Eventually
it came down to budget. Video Killed The
Radio Star, the first video aired on MTV at 12:01 AM on August 1, 1981
(dang – we share a birthday!), was shot on video. Heck, everything was then. Film is expensive, and producers and colorists
were experimenting with pushing tone and black levels to their limits –
something that came easy with the limited gamut of SD video. This was the age of Esprit clothing and parachute
pants, you’ll recall. We had little to
no shame.
But
when an artist really broke through, or a label really wanted to market the
hell out of a newcomer they were sure they could break overnight, film became
the medium. Burgeoning artists like
Madonna, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Notorious B.I.G. and Stone Temple Pilots
were given free reign to shoot all the film they wanted.
Bigger
budgets, better quality, let’s kill it by turning it into SD video. The conversion to SD video didn’t really kill
the efforts, but the returns were greatly diminished. HD didn’t arrive until 1998, but the record
industry – being the record industry – would not significantly adapt for another
decade or so. We (the record industry in
general) put out some real garbage in the meantime.
Fast
forward to the mid-2010s. We had firmly
established a video production process that serves the digital supply chain
from video post house to the labels’ Delivery Service Partners (DSPs). We had witnessed the growth from SD video
(720 x 540 in the US, 720 x 576 in most of the rest of the world) to HD, which
is generally 16:9 video at a height of either 720 or 1080 pixels. There were growing pains, as the ATSC took
about four years to define and produce 1080p, the higher quality, non-interlaced
version of HD video. I am not a fan of
interlaced video, though I understand why it exists.*
We
began to witness some video content coming across our supply feed that was shot
at 4K. And why not? Many manufacturers were starting to support
it (and 8K, for that matter), and some of the larger budget production
companies were happy to adapt to the RED Dragon and other such useful
cameras. Anyone worth their salt was
moving with the times.
But
then we started wondering about the provenance of excellent videos we had
already processed. We had already begun
developing some very successful and groundbreaking innovations around film and
video restoration. I then developed a
lust for film.
We
identified several videos in our clients’ libraries that were shot on film yet
released in SD. Snow by RHCP. Interstate Love Song by STP. Numb by Linkin Park. Hand In My Pocket by Alanis. Hmm.
We
then identified a number of film scanners, some affordable and some not so
much, that we could leverage against the budget of the music industry. Know this: the film and television industries’
budgets are about ten times that of the music industry. Put away all your delusions of fat cats named
Clive or David lighting cigars with $100 bills amongst a sunken shag rug
executive suite lousy with hookers and cocaine.
Those tales died with the 1970s.
We
were pretty keen on the Blackmagic Cintel 4K scanner. It was cute, compact, hung on a wall (!) and
the marketing campaign featured very pleasant looking ladies easily operating
the hardware in extremely unrealistic-looking production facilities that resembled
a 50th-floor Manhattan executive suite, rather than an actual production
facility. I actually like what the folks
at Blackmagic do – they are exceptional in many ways, but this one product
seemed that it was trying a little too hard to not quite reach the finish
line. We had to spend more.
I
asked my pal and former boss, Jim, for advice.
His team turned me toward the 4K Scan Station by Laser Graphics. Despite everything about them sounding like 1978
(Pew! Pew!), we gave them a visit. We
took with us a reel from the 1986 performance of The Cure from Orange, France. We transferred two songs from the show, had
the mag reels digitized sync’d them up, and touched up the dust and grit. All in HD.
From 1986. It’s amazing.
This
piqued the interest of many around us, but not everyone was willing to wade
into the water, until a friend from Rhino approached us one day. “How much would it cost to re-create Alanis’s
Hand In My Pocket from film?” Within
a month, and after a ten-second test run of Ironic, we, the label and management
agreed to re-create all five videos from Jagged Little Pill for
presentation at 4K.
They
are all available on YouTube now, and if you read the comment section, they’re
on fire. I wish there was a way to look
at the old versus the new, but the best I can suggest is to look up the Alanis
4K Trailer on YT. It’s got a pretty good
before and after visual summary.
Working
in film is an incredible thing. Conforming
these iconic videos to the standard definition versions is challenging, not
only because of the color balancing issues (film IS weird), but because you’re
battling the cadences of the 1995 transfers.
We no longer have to use 0.1% pulldowns and repeat frames for a 3:2 cadence. It’s just 24 frames per second. But the sync gets iffy, so you tend to lose a
frame or two here and there. NBD.
We
started with the lowest hanging fruit – Hand In My Pocket (16mm). Lowest hanging, because there was no real
color grading, just exposure, black level and white level controls. Easy, right?
No. Not easy. For one thing, there is a shit-ton of
footage. Six takes of Alanis driving the
car at the top of the video; eight takes of the dudes on bicycles; four of
those creepy monsters in the parade (who would do that to a crying baby) and probably
30,000 ft of footage that wound up on the cutting room floor.
Our
workflow is methodical: one of us
creates a spreadsheet from the original music video, calling out each cut
relative to the video’s timecode: 00:17:23 CT band OOF marching R>L
revealing dude in wifebeaters and shades holding a smoke; DT transvestites
waving at glittering float; out at 00:18:16.
Another
of us goes through each reel documenting what exactly is on that reel. Remember that this is MOS film (the industry adopted
the German acronym for mit-ohne sound – without sound in Englisch – and it
stuck): SYNC band performing in
church, crane camera to Chester’s right, eyes closed, occasional pivot R>L
to Mike on piano, Mr Hahn in BG, OOF.
Other
pitfalls occur during the editing process.
The girl during the line “I’m poor but I’m kind,” – she’s reversed horizontally. There’s a shot in the beginning with a car
that was edited out in ’95 with some clever masking. All of this takes a sharp eye to identify and
reproduce the right shot.
I’ve
seen several questions about this video, including “Why is this not 16:9 like Ironic?” I’d love to have produced this at 16:9, but it
wasn’t shot that way. We were asked to
reproduce the cuts as faithfully as possible to the original, and that’s what
we’ve tried to do. “Don’t break it,” is
our prime directive.
You
Learn
(16mm) is an experiment in color bloom and black level crushing. We really wanted to explore different color and
depth options, given the HDR opportunities available to us, but management’s
directive was clear: match as closely to the original as possible. Crush and bloom it is.
Ironic (16mm) was actually a lot
of fun. Because the cameras mount the
reels on the top, a lot of the shots were difficult to position inside the
car. The production crew’s solution was
to mount the camera in the car upside-down, then fix the orientation in
post. It worked, but it’s difficult to
identify shots when you’re working upside-down.
That was an interesting session. We
used the pattern of the snow on the windows to identify the shots that were
used – you learn to use the oddest cues when conforming to someone else’s
work. Oh, and we learned late in the
process that the actual original cut was at 25 fps, so that was fun. Our version is at 25 as well.
Head
Over Feet
(35mm) is a one-shot, non-edited version, though she did some eighteen takes,
and it took a lot more grading than one might think. That’s stamina. But You Oughta Know (8mm and 35mm) is
by far the most rigorous endeavor of the album.
Filmed at Badwater (and other locations) in Death Valley, California, the
video captures the anger, the desperation and the insanity of the song. The average length of each cut is 12 frames. They shot 29 reels of 8mm film and two reels
of 35mm film shot at 8 fps with a Nikon F motor drive. It was nearly impossible to resist abandoning
the original direction of the video and embrace the amazing quality of those
brief 35mm shots, but the mandate prevailed, and we filtered everything heavily
through a haze of orange.
Restoration
is necessary for nearly every film reel.
Dust specks, hairs, scratches, dirt and general schmutz are inevitable
by-products of film. A restoration effort
depends greatly on how the film was handled and stored over the years. Most of these reels were treated well. You Oughta Know was heavily warped,
and some reels were pretty dirty. Working
with 8mm is a challenge, especially at 4K, because every image is about the
size of a well-trimmed pinkie fingernail.
So
for this 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill, our friends
at Rhino Entertainment have come through and celebrated its release in the best
way possible. Re-imagining these
releases at 4K is the right way to honor this landmark record – the Tapestry
of the 1990s.
*We'll post more on interlaced video and its unfortunate history a bit later. Those of you who have seen my lectures will find the subject matter familiar.
*We'll post more on interlaced video and its unfortunate history a bit later. Those of you who have seen my lectures will find the subject matter familiar.