Guest Blog - Behind the Scenes of Fireproof -  272 days ago

 


Part one of a guest blog written by Rob Whitehurst of
sounddude.com.

I’ve been asked to give a run down on the making of the movie Fireproof from a production point of view.


Principal photography ended December 15th in Albany, Georgia. This was quite different than the production of the movie Facing The Giants, which is from the same producers. On Giants, we worked much of the time as Director of Photography Bob Scott and I would work for NFL Films, a two man camera and sound crew in documentary mode.


Fireproof was shot like a “real” film would be, though again, with
a minimal crew. This time around we had a few more folks, including a gaffer, a key grip, a dolly grip, several swing guys (grip/electric) , and an A/C – Steadicam operator, and I had a real boom operator. My sound designer also visited the set twice for the big special effects scenes to record surround sound using a stereo shotgun mic and a Holophone mic:


http://www.holophone.com/products.html


which is a 7.1 mic with 8 elements in it recorded directly to laptop
computer. This sound will be used to build the 5.1 theater sound for thelarge scenes involving a car wreck/train scene and the burning house scenes. I also used two 416 shotguns in x/y pattern to walk through a real hospital emergency room to get stereo ambience for an emergency room scene, which I recorded to a Sound Devices 744T hard drive recorder.


The movie was shot over a six week schedule, once again on the Panasonic Varicam, with Panavision prime lenses. The Pro35 Digital Image converter was again used which gives the look and depth of field of film to the images:


http://www.pstechnik.de/en/digitalfilm-pro35.php


No zooms were used except for some b roll shots of the burning house. But this movie was recorded in a fashion we are being told that has never been done before for any picture. On location, we had a video capture engineer, who took an uncompressed SDI digital feed from the Varicam, complete with embedded stereo audio, and captured it directly to an Apple G5 Pro computer and OWC hard drives. The whole movie took 8 TBs of storage including backups. The capture software was a new program
from Apple called ProRes 422, which lives in the Final Cut Pro6 editing suite. We were being told by Apple that we were the first motion picture to capture SDI video and audio directly from the camera to a computer for storage for a movie. They called us their guinea pigs. We also ran DV tapes in the Varicam as a backup just in case. ProRes records HD video, uncompressed, including uncompressed audio. Here’s some information on it:


http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/finalcutpro/whatsnew.html


http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/04/18/a_closer_
look_at_apples_new_prores_422_video_format.html


http://www.digitalpictures.com/images/ProRes_422_WhitePaper.pdf


We were all very impressed by this in that none of us have ever done a movie this way before. And we kept hearing from Sony Pictures that no one else has carted a G5 out into the field and recorded uncompressed video and audio through it to hard drives. On top of that, I did not record any principle sound to separate media. It was very scary. Either it was on the hard drive, the dv tape or it wasn’t. I was constantly running to video village between set ups to make sure “it was there”. When playing back a scene, we used JBL reference speakers to listen and the engineer could pull up the waveform to look at it and make sure we weren’t clipping.


Stay tuned for more…

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