kagablog

jurgen meekel, graphics & special effects editor on sms sugar man

Q: How did you get involved in the project, Jurgen?

I met Aryan some years ago in Amsterdam when he was doing post on Shabondama Elegy. After I decided in 2004 to go and live in SA for a while I met him again. When he invited me to play some pool, he asked me if I was interested in participating on SMS Sugar Man. When the project became more definite I got involved in devising the technical workflow of the film.

Q: How did the shooting of the film on mobile phones affect your approach towards the Visual FX and Design of the film?

I believe that VFX are mainly useful in feature films when they are applied in a supporting way. The FX should amplify the narrative, be preferably subtle. When we saw the results of the cell phone footage it became clear to us that the film did not need any special grading, de-noising or de-artifacting (cleaning up) treatments. I did however experiment on this. Aryan and Eran did hours worth of camera testing, and I spent many hours testing optional treatments for the film. We found out that the darker the shot the better they look coming out of the phone, so little light on an evening set gave far better result than daytime shots. The reason for this is quite logical; Cell phones have limited processing power and storage so the compression is very high. Today’s communication technology has developed clever codec’s to make the picture look as good as possible with a minimum of storage.

This means that the intelligent codecs actually compress the footage very efficiently, that’s why a daylight shot will look full of blocks (pixelation) After testing it came clear that night shots look much better, due to the simple fact that the encoder looks at the black or dark areas in the frame and compresses without using much information or writing too much data.

For that reason the rest of the frame looks very good. Aryan promoted shooting without artificial lights throughout the film, which his sometimes made Eran and me if a scene would be visible at all. But this turned out to actually work well for the film.

Thinking about the concept of the film and where it plays out, 4 whores and their pimp on one Christmas night in Joburg. The chosen place and time were just right for the limitations of the technology. I had a really good feeling about how the gory and dark look was relating to the subject matter.

Q: What exchanges did you have with Kaganof – how did the two of you approach the project? How did you collaborate?

I was first classified as the IT consultant of the production, a title that made me laugh. My background is not at all coming from a technical environment; but I have never labeled my self as anyone specialized in any specific field, because I feel that one doesn’t have to. My background is fine arts, graphic design and film.

Working for years in sculpture and installation art made me flutter through a great variety of techniques.

If you want to do something you just have to try and solve problems as they occur. So I went into the deep trenches of cell phone video technology and how to handle this type of footage. Another task was to find the best suitable phone for the project, and this just meant a lot of research. After testing several phones the W900i came out with the best results, especially because its high 30 fps frame rate. It took the manufacturers 1.5 years to come up with a phone with higher specs; the Nokia N93 shoots 30fps at VGA resolution (640×480).

I knew that Aryan would edit the film so we worked closely in getting a manageable efficient workflow. Eran (DOP) was very involved in this process. He introduced me to a good friend of him Yoav Dagan, who is a compositor/editor who has experience in post processes and has been very helpful as an advisor. With him and Nico Louw (sound recordist) we did a sound- video synch test, which taught us that the cell phone footage remained in synch for at least an hour with the recorded sound from the Aaton 8 track recorder. This was very important to find out because without synch sound the editing process would become highly laborious.

Frank Meyburgh from Digital film was also involved in this early process to help with the camera options. One of the first ideas was to use a DV camera fitted with a wide-angle lens in the front of the car for total shots. We dropped the idea to keep the production fully mobile. Nothing was shot on a higher resolution.

This film is most likely the first film were the camera used to shoot a making of had the superior quality to the production camera.

After we gathered all this knowledge I wrote a 6-page workflow manual so everyone involved would understand the production process and would understand the onset protocol.

Looking back at how the production went I feel that we had a great cast and crew. All understood that this was not a regular project but we were pioneering. Shooting went smooth, and everyone had a professional attitude. And I gained new friends.

Q: What excited you by the rather unusual approach towards the film, shooting on mobile phone cameras?

The fact that this project was pioneering in the field of low-fi film making made the participation very exiting. It’s a challenge to be part of something like this.
On one hand you shoot with the smallest camera’s and on the other hand there is no difference whatsoever with traditional filmmaking. One has to be just as meticulous to get the right shots. Sometimes even more.

The freedom of dealing with such small equipment gives a lot of creative freedom.
We were thinking in terms of: if we would mount the camera on a long bamboo stick, which is possible due to its weight we can accomplish impossible crane-like shots. The camera in side the car side mirror was a result of this. Tink from ‘the Camera Platform’ fabricated a custom-made tripod plate for the cell phone, to allow steady shots.

Eran was very inventive in this respect, resulting in his idea to get underwater housing for the cell phones.

Q: How did you and Kaganof collaborate with Eran Tahor, the cinematographer?

Part of the success of shooting a film like this lies in testing the equipment and seeing where the possibilities and limitations lie. In this preproduction process we shot many hours of footage (with and without the actors), which I took to my studio and applied different grading and de-noising techniques to. We came together at either Aryan or my place in Melville and talked about it. And when I found new info on compression phone specs we were all part of the discussion. There was a healthy exchange of emails.
I found this whole process for me one of the most valuable parts of the production.

Q: The images are very emotional. What specific look did you and Eran try to achieve, what emotional counterpoint did you aim for?

When you shoot a feature film and you test your tools well, then that gives you the creative freedom on set to use that in an intuitive way. All the tests were a result of that.

As I mentioned before, we spent a lot of time experimenting with a look, but in the end we just felt that the film on its own with its specific low-fi quality was the best grade we could imagine. But not before we had seen the alternatives.
I felt the look that we are having now is the look that tells the story in the best way.
The look and feel reminds me of the paintings of the late 19th century post-impressionists who were also trying to depict reality in an unconventional way by representing just the light and movement of their subjects.

Conceptually I see similarities with Toulouse-Lautrec whose favorite subject matter were provocative scenes in the Paris nightlife. Due to the quality the nudity scenes in SMS Sugar Man are pretty ambiguous, great. . . I feel that watching scrambled porn is far more exciting than a HighDef version. Our human imagination makes it more be beautiful. In this way I feel we used the limitations of the captured material to our advantage.

Q: What was your starting point – what did you and Kaganof try to achieve with your design?

When we started the project we just knew it was very important to go for a workflow process that would look good on print to 35mm. So I tested all the possible enhancing techniques, but after our first test by Rekorder in Denmark with different kinds of grades and enhancements we felt that the raw quality of material was the best way to get the right look and feel. The black regions (shadows) in the 3GP material came out beautifully on the film out test. We were extremely exited. Another person who got involved as an advisor at this stage was Søren Kloch from Molinare in London. He used to do the film outs for Lars von Trier and founded Zentropa in Denmark. Up to now we have done five 3 minute film out tests in Switserland, London, South Africa and Denmark.

I made various design lay out concepts how to tile the film on the screen, this had the obvious advantage that when you make your footage smaller on screen, the quality becomes better. This is used in many parts of the film to show the amazing side effects of shooting on mobiles. One can without great expense shoot with 2,3 or 4 camera’s at the same time and then sync them on screen in small frames.
Due to the fairly easy way to use mobiles suddenly actors and actresses can operate the camera, which is completely new approach of shooting feature film.
This allows the cast to interact with each other without the crew being there which results in a lot of freedom. I also did many title tests where I applied the same compression on high quality text to get a similar artifacting. Usually one tries to make things look better. Here my objective was to make it look worse.

Q: How did you work with the onset camera team?
During the shooting cycle I was mainly synching up the sound to the 70 hrs of footage and dump the synched up rushes to a DVD. So after every day Aryan had an idea if we had the material to tell the story. In my workflow document I wrote a whole section on how the footage coming from the flash cards had to be renamed. Mobile phones shoot footage with names like MOV00001, MOV00002 etc. So when you have up to six cameras you need to rename everything. These names have to then correspond with the sound takes.
I feel that part of the success of shooting the film lies in the work of both Nico Louw and Greg van Niekerk who maintained focussed on doing all this administrative work.
A shot not named is a shot lost, and of the 70 hrs of material we only could not retrieve less than 5 shots. This is a great accomplishment from both the sound recordist and onset logger. The high-end Aaton 8 track sound recording devise (at the time the only one in Africa) was an important tool in this process. Proving that good sound is worth half of the success of your film. After shooting through the night Nico would name his recordings and give me a DVD with the sound plus a detailed logging sheet.

Q: You were, together with Eran, instrumental in designing the technical route for the team. Can you explain the technical route you used?

The shoot
Phones are numbered A-B-C-D-E-F with permanent white marker.
1GB Flash disks: 2 per camera are numbered 1 and 2 with permanent white marker. Actresses keep the same phone all the time. So Camera ID can be affiliated to the actress or actor. Until now the rehearsals have shown however that Eran and Aryan will mainly shoot the footage.

MOST IMPORTANT: before Nico does a slate clap ALL CAMERAS are running and shooting the smart slate as visible as possible to capture time code and user bit. From then on cameras will keep continuously running until Aryan says CUT.
If not we will have a huge problem with these takes to synch them to sound.
Since the mobiles don’t record time code the Aaton is used as the time code generator.

• Nico opens smart slate. All camera’s record slate (digital time code Aaton recorder before the clap and handwritten scene/slate/take nr, and flash disk nr on the smart slate) see fig 1.
Nico closes the smart slate. NICO records 25fps.

• All camera’s record slate (digital user bit date and handwritten scene/slate/take nr, and flash disk nr on the smart slate) see fig 2.
Every camera has got 2 Flash disks named either F1 or F2 (the remaining flash disks are with Greg in the production car)

NO ONE PAUSES OR STOPS THE CAMERA UNLESS THE ARYAN OR ERAN SAYS SO. We need to keep the phones in synch

• Footage comes in on Powerbook from all flash disks at once.
(We will change all the flash disks in one go, so the files and their lengths will not differ too much)Greg will, if possible, keep track of the hourly time of recording and insert this into the log sheet as a safety to track footage.

Nico will provide us with a sound report which holds all the time code and user bit info and description of Scene an Take info created by the MAJAX software that comes with the Aaton

The dumping of the footage onto the Powerbook

• Greg dumps footage in similar to the smart slate named folders on Powerbook Laptop

• The other flash disks (F2) go into the cameras,

• We will change flash disks preferably 2 or 3 times per day simultaneously so Greg has the time to rename the camera files into a file name that relates to the sound files to save time in post.

• The naming will be as followed: ER 14/12/05/00 20-55-16-24 ER1 (example)
ER = Eran
14/12/05/00 = user bit (day/month/year)
20-55-16-24 = time code from smart slate (hrs/min/sec/frames)
ER1 = Eran flash disk nr 1
Once we will get the sound files we can add the file tag nr (e.g. CG6612) to the name to have an extra reference. The tag is a unique name for every take recorded on the Aaton.
The actresses will have a letter assigned to their name e.g. Grace A - Ulissa B - Sam C etc.
They will keep their phone

An example of a sound file coming from the Aaton is
CG6612==SLATE 6 t 1 ==_8
CG6612== = file tag CG6612
SLATE 6 = slate nr 6
t 1 == take nr 1
8 = track 8 (which is in this case a mix down from the tracks)
The actresses/actor will have radio mics and in some cases we will boom the sound.
Track 1=radio 1
Track 2=radio 2
Track 3=radio 3
Track 4=radio 4
Track 5=radio 5
Track 6=radio 6
Track 7=boom mix
Track 8=stereo mix

Nico will supply Greg with a DVD/CD with all the sound files from the previous day of shooting. Greg will copy and store both sound file DVD’s and Movie file DVD’s in a safe place like DV8 production office. One copy of each will go to Jurgen for synching sound to video

Aryan will be able to view the previous days rushes from the Movie file DVD given by Greg. The rushes have to be in at Aryan’s place in time for him to watch them. (We have to set a time for this to arrive to him)
Aryan agreed to watch the rushes in QuickTime 3GPP format. This solves the time consuming problem of converting to DV PAL up to this point.

Handling the footage in POST

Once the footage is in the conversion process starts:

All the footage will undergo a save as conversion in QuickTime

• Open footage in QuickTime

• Perform a save as self contained movie command meaning the file extension will change from .3Gpp to .mov

This action is necessary because Apple CinemaTools and Apple Compressor do not open 3GPP files, the footage will not recompress by this action and it is very quick.

• The 30fps footage will be converted in CinemaTools from 30fps to 25fps (again a very quick process) Up to this point the quality is exactly the same as the Master footage.

• We will batch convert the footage with Apple Compressor to DV PAL 25fps 3:4 for the offline edit.

This process will take some time but is necessary because we experienced synch problems over a longer period in tests. DV PAL seemed to keep synch

• At this point we can start importing the footage in FCP5

We will import the sound files and the movie files per shooting day and create Bins per day per camera in the file browser.
The organizing process is obviously very important.
All the footage has to get synched to sound, if we maintain to shoot the smart slate on set this is a time consuming but doable process. If there will be takes without this information the process becomes very time consuming.

The Aaton sound report, logging sheets and the movie file names will have to be put together to organize the browser bins.

Once a movie file is synched to all the tracks of sound by the smart clap we will address the sound time code to the movie file and link them and return the synched clips to a newly named bin.
We will synch all 8 tracks of sound and keep them in one bin and for off line editing we will duplicate this file but will only use the stereo mix (track to keep the timeline easy to use.

Offline edit

Once the offline edit has finished we will media manage the final sequence and replace the previous DV PAL files with a batch-converted version in Targa 2K format. We will replace the offline stereo mix for the separate mono tracks in the timeline.

The scenes that involve VFX can be exported separately as 2K files and manipulated in e.g. After effects, including titles graphics.
The sound will be exported as an OMF and send to Sweden accompanied with the DV PAL off line version.

Once the sound will come back from the mix we will online the sound to a Targa image sequence and separate the film in max 19 min segments according to the Delivery standards from Zentropa/Rekorder in Denmark.

The footage will be delivered on Hard disk as Targa image sequences.
The sound on DVD

Q: What planning did you undertake?

As I said before we did lot of testing to get the workflow as efficient as possible.
Before we started all the steps were tested until we had a workable protocol.
One of the most laborious jobs was organizing the video bins in Final Cut so when Kaganof would start editing he could easily find the shots.

There was synch to sound footage and footage without synch like the in side car mirror shots. Every shot had to labeled (color coded) according to this and who took the shot.

I added the Aaton time code to every shot, in this stage of the production I was still thinking that we were in an off-line stage and that the footage would be reconnected to a high (2K) online version and to do this you need time code. In the end this extra process became superfluous, the film- out to 35mm from the 3GP to DV PAL had an unexpected good result. Leaving the footage without time code would have saved me many hours of typing in the time code.

Q: How did you get the data out of the camera into the computer?

Greg would take the flash cards out of the phones after a certain time (the max recording time on a 1GB card would be 8hrs) and replace them with empty ones; he was also in control in charging all the camera batteries. Nico Louw made a customized suitcase in which all the phones were collected and charged.

Q: What size crew did you have working with you?

Just me and Greg to perform all the logging, charging and synching. So a technical crew of two.

Q: What was the extent of your equipment, in terms of FX and editing equipment?

For dumping on set we used an Apple Powerbook with a DVD writer and a flashcard reader. For the synching of the sound to video we used a PowerMac Quad 4 x 2Ghz with 6.5 GB RAM and two 20” CinemaDisplays LCD screens, a broadcast monitor, JBL speaker system and a DVD Recorder. For the conversion I used QuickTime / CinemaTools / Compressor.
For the edit Final Cut Pro 5. And for the FX mainly After Effects 6.5, Motion and Shake.

Q: What films did you reference?

I felt the film could be referenced to Dr Who, Blake’s 7, Twin Peaks. All of these film/series have this strange discomforting and alienating feel to them. I felt the same with SMS Sugar Man.

Q: Which VFX people do you like, whose work do you admire?

Luc Besson, Rodriguez, Mark Stetson and Saul Bass for titles sequences, but there are so many more unknown FX artists these days who aren’t famous and come passed in credit rolls with amazing ingenious contributions to films.
I enjoy the simple narrative enhancing effects, which you see more of these days, where just a simple glint or flare or a tuft of smoke can make a sequence highly intriguing. Every feature, even dramas, has in some way or another an FX artist attached to it. They are the suggestive invisible cherries on top that make films more engaging for an audience.

Q: How different is this approach to previous films you have worked on?

Completely different in style, work process and in the final objective to what the film should look like. Normally one would be able to reference films as in style or in work process. In the event of making a feature on cell phones nothing had been done before. So all the processes have to be invented or custom made to fit the production.

Q: Do you think this will revolutionize the future of filmmaking, and if so, in what way?

I think so. It will hopefully democratize filmmaking. Filmmaking should be freely accessible and spontaneous for anyone interested.

After this film no one can say I cannot make a film because I don’t have the equipment. With a cell phone and some hard and software anyone can make a film. The quality in this case is different maybe lower, but that is not important, the ability to creatively communicate your story is.

It’s a pity that so much talent will never make a film because they are not ‘clever’ enough to arrange a budget. The effectiveness on how you engage your audience is the same from Imax to Sony Ericsson. Just the format differs.
While working on the film I had visions of people sitting at bus stops shooting and directly editing their film. These new technologies enable us to be creative anytime anywhere. If you have an idea you can instantly produce and even broadcast by sending it to your friends or YouTube. And after doing that you will hopefully get an understanding of filming techniques and make a creative headspace for new films.

I think it is already happening also thanks to inspiring platforms like YouTube.
The existence of these platforms give us even more reason to create.
Sms Sugar Man is a milestone in cinematography, new devises like the Nokia N93 already shoot 640×480 / 30 fps, our camera shot 320x 240 / 30fps. So the higher the specs of the phones the more the footage will look like standard consumer quality, what defeats the point in shooting on mobile, if you go for a look that defines the status quo of technology. In that respect SMS Sugar Man is a milestone and is unique.

Q: Will you be making further films in this manner, and what would you do differently?

Apart from the attachment of time code which appeared not to be necessary in the end, I would do it the exactly same for now, for me it all worked well. But when you work with new media tomorrow’s news is yesterday’s news.
I think that we haven’t explored a 10th of the possibilities of shooting feature film on mobile yet.

jurgen meekel
visual/special effects
date of birth 1-7-1963
place of birth Amsterdam, the Netherlands

compositor-editor-animator-motion graphics artist-cameraman-sound
engineer-graphic and web designer-sculpture and installation
artist-painter-photographer-draughtsman-father-immigrant-son-special/visual
effects teacher-gardener-video workshop-leader-production designer-
italian translator-sailor-cyclist-air traveller-video artist-bass
guitarist-buider-composer-writer-poet-cook-student- and never
experienced a boring moment- born and bred in amsterdam and now living
in johannesburg since january 2005.

Jurgen Meekel
Rietveld Academy of Fine-Arts Amsterdam, audio-visual design (cum laude)

work
Producing autonome art installations and sculptures.
Free lance graphic design filming, sound-engineering, compositing,
post production, website productions and video-editing.
TV commercial, -leaders and bumpers, music-videos
Guest Lecturer on Rietveld Academy of Fine-Arts.
Leading video and animation workshops in the Netherlands
Teaching Special and Visual effects at AFDA Johannesburg since January 2005