2010 Woods Hole Film Festival

Rockhopper Post Production is proud to sponsor this year’s Woods Hole Film Festival, going on now. The WHFF specializes in discovering real gems of truly independent, local film-making, the type of projects Rockhopper was founded to support. Congratulations to all the selected films!

Some of the projects finished by Rockhopper Post in the past year are finally emerging into the public light. One of these is Vapor Trail (Clark), a documentary by the filmmaker John Gianvito. Gianvito, whose “The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein” was picked by Time Out New York as the 20th best film of the 2000s and whose “profit motive and the whispering wind” won Best Experimental Film from the National Society of Film Critics, tackles the disastrous environmental fallout caused by the US base presence in the Philippines.

Vapor Trail (Clark) has already been accepted to the Rotterdam Film Festival, and other festival presentations are forthcoming. Says the Rotterdam page:

John Gianvito’s epic Vapor Trail investigates what the US does to that land. Take Clark Air Base, once the biggest US military facilities on foreign territory. When the Philippine Senate voted out the presence of US military bases on its land in 1991, the former self-appointed ally forgot to properly clean up the mess it had made, turning huge parts of the island of Luzon into an eco-disaster of monstrous proportions. Vapor Trail (Clark) is a humble act of solidarity, a defiant work of remembrance, a rallying cry to rise and resist: a cinematic prose poem.

Vapor Trail is an SD production, encompassing 4.5 hours of finished material that had to be broken up into three reels for output to digibeta. John’s documentary filmmaking is very naturalistic and verité-style, so the color grading had to maintain that natural quality and not veer into the realm of establishing a “look.” These goals are very different from the typical television style of doing everything possible to make a shot look “good,” saturated, and “contrasty.”

The opening shots of the documentary, depicting sunrise in the Philippines, were very carefully styled to depict the sunrise accurately but also cover up some of the encoding artifacts of the DV source material. While we experimented with some image processing methods of noise reduction, we determined that careful manipulation of basic color curves was the best choice.

Another shot, much later in the film, is beautiful to watch. It’s a single 20-minute interview take that stretches from late evening to sunset. The shot actually consists of two color corrections, fading from one to the other as night sets in.

Filmmaker John Gianvito says of Rockhopper:

“My experience with Rockhopper Post Production has been nothing but positive. Doing post-production on a 4 and a half hour documentary can be a wearying proposition, financially and creatively. Rockhopper accomplished stellar results with efficiency and utmost professionalism. In the critical last stages of completion I knew that they would be not only close listeners and responders to my subtlest or most complicated directions but that they would bring welcome suggestions to the table. I’ve done my last two films with them¹ and I hope to do many more under their care.”

1. to be precise, Owen Williams worked with John on his last film at another company [↩]

Japan's I-400 Submarine

Rockhopper Post Production had the privilege of working with Boston-based Spy Pond Productions on their co-produced, multiformat documentary “Japan’s Secret Weapon”.

From National Geographic Channel’s description:

One of the best-kept secrets of the Second World War was a huge aircraft-carrying submarine designed to deliver Japanese bombers to within a few hundred kilometres of American cities.

Engineers and historians conduct experiments and demonstrations to reveal the secrets behind a technological marvel that could have changed the course of the war.

Plus, archive footage shows what made the I-400 subs so deadly: the three state-of-the-art attack bombers it could carry anywhere in the world. But why was the technology never used in an attack on the US?

The doc, a co-production for Nat Geo and WNET, had a complex and challenging workflow, requiring two distinct cuts of the material at different framerates, one for NTSC systems and one for PAL. Rockhopper Post was charged with maintaining a consistent, high-quality look across the various HD camera footage, PAL / NTSC stock footage, animation, and still-image media.

Executive Producer Eric Stange: “We worked with Rockhopper on a film that was full of challenges, but Owen helped us meet them all. His calm professionalism, organizational skills, and great technical savvy were reassuring, and he was always very responsive to our needs. We would definitely return to Rockhopper for our post work!”

The show will air in the US with the title “Japan’s Secret Super Sub” as an episode of the PBS show Secrets of the Dead.