Originally posted by Jackskeleton
ColLAteral

With it's shaky digital camera look and gritty feel Collateral comes off as one of the years best films to me. Michael Mann's addiction to Los angeles comes out strong. You might only be seeing Jaime Foxx, Tom Cruise and Jade Smiths name on the tag line but you are missing Mann's other big star which comes out beautifully in this film. The City of Los Angeles. Much of what you saw in HEAT but only 10x's stronger comes out here. In heat you got a small sample of the greater los angeles area. This time Mann takes you for a tour ride in a cab along the streets of this beautiful city.

Thanks to Catch21, I got to see it tonight and I loved it. Perhaps a bit to much. Growing up in Los Angeles has left an imprint on me. I'm about 5 minutes away from Downtown Los Angeles so the beautiful city of angels has left it's mark on me. I love it. Every inch of it. From it's dirty gritty look to it's beautiful areas. I tried once to leave it and came back to it missing it.

Michael Mann uses all of what I love of Los Angeles into this film and brings Tom Cruises' "cool guy" hitman to play around in it. Between having that calm, cool and collective attitude while carrying out his hits Cruise brings out a villian you want to hate, but just end up wanting to be like. He carries himself well throughout the picture. When something goes wrong he rolls with the punches and expresses that in a cool manner that you just have to respect.

Jaime Foxx comes into the picture as the average joe taxi driver. You care about the guy because you can relate. Looking for that next big thing but just going along with the program waiting around. You feel for him and the situation he has been put in. You don't at anytime feel like he could get out of it. The best thing you can do is just watch him react and realize that he never really had a choice.

The films look is what shines. Mann's use of Los Angeles in almost every shot of this reflects the mood of the picture. The situation and the action in it is very believable. I usually find myself nitpicking films. Not at all in this one. The events of the night unfold almost to natural. Nothing to question and everything to enjoy. I found myself loving every minute of this film and loving the cinematography so much that I'm going to see it again just to take it all in.

If there is one reason alone to watch this film is to view Los Angeles from a lot of different angles and get the feel of what Mann does best.. Brings out the city of Los Angeles like no one else does.

I loved it.

• Frank TJ Mackey •

Unfortunately the film only made about $8 million on opening Friday. That translates into about $25 million for the weekend.

• PopcornTreeCt •

What are some of the hard to believe moments everyone is talking about? I still can't think of any. Someone want to shed some light?

How the hell does he find the DA in the building? By looking at the phone lines?!

Revving up digital cinematography
Michael Mann road-tests the Viper camera on his mixed-media opus


By Carolyn Giardina

Leave it to Michael Mann to shake up the system. The Oscar-nominated director famous for gritty yet visually dazzling depictions of urban life and an uncompromising attitude toward his craft is now ushering digital filmmaking from the extreme reaches of science fiction and low-budget indie into the realm of high-profile studio thriller. The director has elected to use Thomson Grass Valley's Viper FilmStream camera for his upcoming "Collateral," the Tom Cruise-starrer financed by DreamWorks and Paramount, scheduled for an Aug. 6 release.

As the first director to road-test the Viper -- much anticipated as the first cinema camera capable of storing images as data, directly to a hard drive -- Mann's choices are worth noting in a creative community coming to grips with the practicalities and pitfalls of digital imaging.

The Viper isn't the only camera Mann is using to shoot the movie, which he describes as a "multimedia" effort. He's using the Sony CineAlta high-definition camera, as well as shooting film, but of the roughly 80% of the finished film Mann estimates he's captured digitally, about 80% originated from the Viper.

Mann says his choice was driven by the film's creative needs. The story -- of a veteran hit man (Cruise) who hijacks a cab and forces the driver (Jamie Foxx) to traverse the streets of Los Angeles, transporting him from job to job until the LAPD and the FBI begin to pursue the vehicle -- seems well-suited to electronic cameras.

"Everything is pretty much driven by story, and this whole picture takes place at night," the director says. "I wanted to see into the night. I wanted the night to be alive so that it becomes very three-dimensional. That's what I was trying to get," says Mann, kicking back at the Santa Monica offices that house his production company, Forward Pass.

"There was a quality to the Viper cam that I responded to," says Mann, who is no stranger to digital cameras, having employed high-definition video for the opening sequences of his 2001 biopic "Ali." In particular, he says, the Viper's color imaging worked well for this particular film. "It had to do with the sensitivity of reds and yellows and oranges. This was not only seeing deeply into the night, seeing what you see with the naked eye and something more than you can see with the naked eye, but also the color information. It had an aesthetic that I wanted."

The Viper operates in several modes. At the high end is FilmStream, which captures unprocessed imagery -- no color correction, no compression -- in the 4:4:4 RGB color space, the full color range of an electronic image signal. (While analog film still offers significantly greater color sensitivity than any electronic medium, 4:4:4 RGB is the highest level currently offered in the electronic realm. Film scanned into the digital domain for effects manipulation or what have you is scanned at 4:4:4 RGB. By way of comparison, broadcast HD operates in a 4:2:2 YUV environment, subsampling in blue and red. The Viper also offers 4:2:2 options.)

Though other high-end digital cameras, including the CineAlta, also shoot in 4:4:4 RGB, Thomson vp strategic marketing and business development Jeff Rosica says that what sets the Viper apart is the proprietary CCDs that capture the image as well as the way the data, once acquired, is distributed. The CCDs capture 12-bit linear image, which is then transmitted and stored at 10-bit log space. "Because it's logarithmic, it actually emulates the most important properties of a 12-bit linear signal," says Rosica. The signal is then transferred to a recording device via a dual-link serial HD connection.

Mann and his team began an extensive testing phase by recording material in FilmStream onto a DVS digital disk recorder. "The total capacity was 55 minutes, and it took 35 hours to download (to videotape for dailies)," Mann says. "So obviously that wasn't ready for feature film production."

Next, they tested S.two digital mags to store the uncompressed raw data. "So our storage went down to something that was physically manageable in a much more compact hard drive," Mann says. "But what it posed upon us was a long-term storage capacity of 330 terabytes, which is economically unfeasible with the current limits of the drive technology." (A terabyte of storage costs about $50,000.)

Mann then decided "to see what would happen if we put a mild compression on (the images)" and switched to Viper's VideoStream mode, which offers a 10-bit 4:4:4 RGB video, as opposed to data, signal and provides light image processing allowing for truer color reproduction in the field. "With FilmStream you're getting raw data. VideoStream functions more like a normal high-def camera, which allowed him to control the ASA," says "Collateral" associate producer Bryan Carroll.

Both modes lens in 2.37:1 widescreen without any loss of vertical resolution.

"We took it all the way to the equivalent of a release print, so it's not like we were looking at something on a monitor and taking it on faith," Mann says.

While employing the latest in digital imaging technologies, Mann took care to note that his storytelling fundamentals are essentially unchanged. "In our system, we impose on everybody the grammar and syntax that we are shooting film. All the disciplines apply, and that's very important on the floor during production. We are mixing a digital culture with a film culture, and it has to be film grammar."

That approach drove the design of a massive workflow system that brought together the material from the film camera, Viper, and the other camera system Mann employed, Sony's CineAlta F900 HD. The HDCAM footage essentially had to be handled as camera negative. Everything that was shot -- film and digital -- was digitized into Avids for postproduction, during which a digital color grading session will take place.

Mann cites Carroll as well as Thomson's Mark Chiolis, Laser Pacific's Leon Silverman and Terry Brown and Panavision's Nolan Murdock as integral to working out the bugs in the system.

Prior to filming, a team including Mann and A-camera operator Gary Jay, (who has worked with Mann since 1992's "The Last of the Mohicans") guided modifications to the Viper.

"The camera body itself wasn't ergonomic for use on a production," Mann says. "We wanted weights added to the rear of the camera to increase the mass and balance back there. We needed rods for the matte box and focus-bracket system because we do a lot of hand-holding. The control buttons needed covers because you could unbalance the camera and not know you did it. This is small stuff, but it's major when you just got done having a take that's brilliant, or you think that the actors were brilliant and it looks perfect, and you find out you switched it to FilmStream."

With his arsenal of camera technology, production began and Mann focused his attention on directing. Dion Beebe ("Chicago") came on board as director of photography.

As 27 pages of the "Collateral" screenplay take place in a car, mobility was a priority. There were some limitations as the Viper was cabled to its recording deck. Mann says that when he wanted complete mobility for handheld work, the crew used the CineAlta F900 (which is configured more like a camcorder, recording to either standard Sony HDCAM or SW tapes).

"The benefit is that there is a 55-minute tape, so in that sense there are fewer interruptions," Mann says. "(With film) if you are hand holding and you have a 400-foot mag in there, every three minutes and 45 seconds you are having to stop." (There are third-party developers working on Viper recording options, including a portable drive to enable cinematographers to work untethered.)

Creatively, he says, "there's no silver bullet in all of this. ... You have to know what you want, more so than film. In film, you can rely on certain conventional looks, almost like a perceptual preset about what you're used to having. Not so in video, it's a much broader spectrum so you have to know what you want.

"What I like about the Viper is it sees colors, it sees things, in a different way," Mann says. "People are reaching for more expressive ways to visualize and have emotional impact. That's what it all comes down to, the emotional impact to tell a story."

Originally posted by PopcornTreeCt
What are some of the hard to believe moments everyone is talking about? I still can't think of any. Someone want to shed some light?

Originally posted by Flave
I liked the movie...as long as you didn't think about it too much. For instance:
...
Like I said, don't think about it too much and you'll enjoy it.