High-definition and the Digital World of Spartacus

Margo White investigates how embracing HD and associated technologies has affected the creation of high-end television.

Spartacus evokes the aesthetic of a graphic novel, in which blood, limbs and people’s heads are thrown around with wild abandon, and the sex and sunsets are of another television order. Call it gladiators on green-screen; it looks like 300 and Sin City, but as fast turnaround television rather than a big-budget feature film.

Central to these series are high-definition (HD) digital cameras, which finally seem primed to displace 35mm film. Spartacus is New Zealand’s first full-HD television production and shows just what is possible: the scenes can be shot in high-definition glory, the locations can be dispensed with, the directors can let the cameras roll on, and all parts of the process begin and end in the digital realm.

All this is changing the way production crews work, both within their own departments and alongside others.

The director’s experience

Michael Hurst, producer/director

We’re working in fast turnaround, but we’re working on an epic – it’s like you’re making a feature film every 12 working days, so you’re constantly trying to optimise your time.

From a directing point of view, the moment you call ‘cut’ [using film], everything needs to be reset. You want to pull your hair out. Because we’re not using film I no longer have to call ‘cut’, we can just keep going.

The almost cavalier way that we use green screens is incredible. The technology that allows us to key things from a bluescreen and greenscreen is so advanced, along with all the software and computing systems. Say we’re doing a fight and someone gets a wound. We might stick a gaping wound on an actor, and they’ll do the fight and at a certain point the actor will get stabbed and the wound will supposedly appear. In every shot prior to that you can, in the computer world, just cover that up. You’re thinking about this sort of thing all the time, because no matter what you do, we’re trying to find the quickest way of getting the results we want.

The actors are now in the greenscreen environment most of the time, pretending they are on the slopes of a mountainside, but are out on a stage out by the airport... That’s been the reality in cinema for a long time, but it’s really coming into its own now. We never have any weather problems.

It’s not just about the blood; some of the more amazing work that we’re doing is in the skies. I can go through the episode, and we choose what the skies are going to be like which reflects the mood of the scene, and that informs how we light the scene.

There is an argument that all this lets you make decisions a little bit too easily. When it took hours and hours to unravel film and re-cut it, on old-fashioned technology, you had to be really sure about your decisions. Now you can keep all these different versions of your cuts… so in some ways you could say that it is diluting that creative process. I’m not sure if I agree with that. [But] to be honest, I’m a real fan of this digital thing.

Stunts

Allan Poppleton, key stunt fight coordinator

We have this Phantom camera (see box page 16), which can shoot up to 1000 frames/second, as opposed to film, which is runs up to 300/second. It picks up everything.

You might have a fight within a fight, where someone gets punched in the face and we might want to isolate that section and film it on the Phantom. Normally there’s no contact, things are stacked up so it looks like a hit. Now we’ll have to physically punch a person in the face.

When you’re seeing a person who is being hit in the face [at that speed] then you’re seeing his face ripple, his skin move… you’re seeing everything, so the only way you film a punch is to make some sort of contact. Obviously it’s not a full power punch, and maybe we will hide a mouth guard in the guy’s face or we might get wardrobe to make a costume with knuckle dusters or something, that are spongier, so there’s less impact.

But say we have a scene where the lead actor is getting a hit on the head with a war hammer. Obviously you can’t hit them with a war hammer, so we’ll do it in layers to get the final result. We might use a greened out sponge, to tap him in the face, so that you see the face move on the high-speed camera. Then we’ll take the actor out, have a greenscreen background where his head would have been, and then we bring in the stunt guy and he hits the greenscreen wall, giving you the illusion that the actor got smashed in the head with the hammer. And with high-definition it all has to be spot on; the home viewers are getting so intelligent with the equipment they have in their own house.

Camera department

John Cavill, director of photography

We’re mostly using the Genesis camera, which isn’t that old, but the way technology is moving it’s almost old. But it’s a fantastic high-definition camera. The landscape of technology has changed a lot; when that technology first came out it didn’t have the same dynamic range… but with more recent HD cameras they’ve addressed that and they’re starting to perform in a similar way to film.

The size of people’s television probably affects all departments. In my case, attention to detail is really important. It’s much more difficult to focus pull… in ‘the old days’ you had a little bit of grace, things could be slightly soft. With HD cameras and television, there’s no such thing as being a little bit out of focus. That makes it difficult for art department, for makeup, for everyone; you have to be so vigilant.

What is certainly great about Spartacus is that you’re starting the process in a digital medium, rather than starting in a chemical medium, and transporting that into the digital realm. This streamlines the process.

The technology is having an impact, but in a cool way. The landscape is changing so quickly, I would say, facetiously, in a couple of years time you might be able to do what I’m doing with a Genesis camera on your cell phone.

Art and sets

Iain Aitken, production designer

Film has a certain softness… you’ll notice on a HD television, where things are broadcast in HD, the whole frame is digitally bright and sharp. The eye doesn’t see like that. The eye is quite selective, and I’d think that film is more akin to the eye.

I love the look of film, but whether that’s nostalgia… I can’t see it lasting much longer really. The fact is that if you shoot with [400 or a 1000 feet of film] it runs out. With a digital camera you just keep shooting and shooting and shooting.

It does affect how we do things. A lot of sets made for television shows and film really didn’t stand up to scrutiny once things went to HD, and had to be redone. But Spartacus is set in 72 BC, so our sets have a lot of texture in them anyway, and the camera reads them fantastically well.

You can’t get away with expecting something in the background to soften off, as you could in film. So even a wall that is ten metres away still has to be finished to a very high standard.

One of our big challenges, is extending what we do into the visual effects world… as time goes on there will be more and more crossover. We learned a lot from our first season about what did and didn’t work; getting unity between visual effects and the art department is something that we will learn about and develop as we go.

Make-up department,

Jane O’Kane make-up, hair and prosthetic design & HoD

Film, if you think about it, almost has a grain to it. So that’s effectively giving you a fine net over things, a bit of diffusion. Obviously you see very clearly, but HD shows you every pimple, every hair – you can even see the makeup sitting on the skin.

We film on HD and if we were to watch the rushes you would see all those flaws, but in Spartacus they do a grade. They basically twist the image a little bit, change the contrast, the colour hue. It’s as if they put a grain over it, so it looks more filmic. They also tweak things in post-production, so if pimples or hairs are showing they will deal with those; we have the luxury of a fine post production team.

I’ve done a lot of horror stuff, a lot of gore, but because this is R18 we see a lot more than we would normally see. So we’re doing more effects that will be seen, and paying more attention to our prosthetics – you know, so we can film the throat getting sliced and seeing inside the neck.

Visual effects department

Charlie McClellan, VFX supervisor

Originally, when Rob Tapert said he wanted to do a 300-style television show, I thought, hell, that’s going to be challenging on a fast turnaround budget. But as soon as I actually saw 300 I realised a couple of things. Firstly, all bets were off with regards to the level of finishing that you had to put into the background. When you’re using a graphic style approach, the virtual world in the background, can be much more stylised so you can cut quite a few corners that you would have to finesse for feature film quality visual effects.

The great thing about the series is that you have total control... If we weren’t doing it all with bluescreens and greenscreens, we’d be at the mercy of the elements. The sun might be bright on one day and not the next, so we never have continuity issues of that sort. Everything can be ‘magic hour’, everything can have a heightened reality, be a stylised world. We have no rainy days, so in an environment that we can control most of the variables that go into a shooting day.

When we used to shoot all our VFX elements on film you had to do it frame by frame, and it was a pretty expensive thing, and you’d have to wait until they locked the picture which could take weeks or even months. Now that we’re shooting everything [digitally], we can extract the images and get started five minutes after the shot. We can set up all our formulas in advance… what does this scene look like, whether the producer likes it, whether we need changes… so we have a chance to pre-visualise what our scenes are going to look like, from the front-end, as we’re going.

It has required us to work more closely with the art department than ever before. We’re dancing the same dance from the beginning of pre-production, trying to create a world together and identify what is possible within the budget.

Special effects

Brendon Durey, SPFX supervisor

The biggest hurdle the technology has thrown at us is the extended time that the directors can film. Under the old film format, a take wouldn’t take any longer than two minutes. So you’d have burning torches that would last a minute-and-a-half. Under film, the director would cut and you’d reset the torch. So there was this whole methodology of doing these things under film, such as how long they needed to burn for, or smoke for, that we’ve had to change.

It’s set in Roman times so we’ve got flames everywhere, so we had to develop all these clever systems for flames that can burn for ten minutes, otherwise you’d have all these multiple takes with the flame rapidly extinguishing itself in the background.

We use haze a lot too. The problem we’re having now is that by the end of these ten-minute shots there’s no haze left. You can’t roll it during the take, because the sound guy can hear it. So we’ve developed this sound proof box, and we can put this quiet haze machine that we imported from Germany in it. We’re still R&D-ing quieter fans, so we can run these haze machines throughout the takes.

The heavy use of the Phantom has also affected things. Once you slow something down to 800 frames, you can see things that we always relied on being hidden by motion blur; on Phantom you can see everything [in the resulting slow motion footage] very clearly. So that changes the way we do gags. Say we’d put some explosives in a wall and a guy hits the wall and the wall crumbles and explodes. We can’t do that on a Phantom shot, because we aren’t capable of timing it well enough. When you slow it down you’ll see the axe hit the wall, and there will be “1001, 1002” and then it will explode. So we’ve had to design a lot of gags in ways that we can trigger things in real-time, as opposed to getting by on what the eye would see.