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Videography Magazine
October 2007
Planes, Trains and Editing on the Go:
The Darjeeling Limited on Location
by Joy Zaccaria
A film editor knows to be prepared while on location, but the pressure was on Andy Weisblum, editor of The Darjeeling Limited, to stay on track. Working in foreign lands of Jodhpur and Udaipur, India, with overnight trips to locations along the train's route, he would keep pace with the crew and cut with Director Wes Anderson throughout production.
The Darjeeling Limited story is of Whitman brothers Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Peter (Adrian Brody), who are brought to India by a third brother, Francis (Owen Wilson). Francis is earnestly trying to re-forge their family bonds while looking for a life-changing experience. They find it on a train trip across the palace-lined, desert region of Rajasthan in the northwest corner of the sub-continent.
"Wes and I assembled as we were shooting," says Weisblum. "We had well over half the movie fully assembled before we left India." As a director who likes to work collaboratively, they would work together almost every night during the shoot for at least an hour or two.
It was Weisblum's first time working with Anderson. "When I first talked to Wes about the job, he wanted me to join them on set if need be," says Weisblum. He packed accordingly. "For every drive, I brought a backup. For every piece of equipment, I brought a second one and stuck it in the back just to make sure I was covered. That saved me a couple of times." The editor arrived in India just as shooting was beginning in early December 2006 and stayed until the end of January 2007.
Typically, a film with a train as a primary venue would shoot on a set. Anderson was determined to keep the look and feel genuine, so he co-opted ten coaches and an engine from India's Northwestern Railways for three months. The Darjeeling Limited, a train made especially for the film, is a hybrid of the old U.S. 20th Century Limited and the Orient Express. During filming, it ran on live tracks from the city of Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, in the Thar Desert near the Pakistani border.
"A lot of the shooting and production methods were loose and more run-and-gun than what you're used to seeing in a U.S. production of this scale, particularly from a filmmaker like Wes," says Weisblum. Anderson would reference a lot of films from Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray that weren't overly produced or polished.
EDITING IN INDIA
Weisblum brought two editing systems with him to India. The main Mac G5 tower was running Avid's Media Composer 2.67 software. In a road case ordered and organized through Orbit Digital, the system could be set up on a table within an hour or two. The G5 featured FireWire storage (LaCie and G-Tech G-RAID drives), mixer and speakers, and Avid Mojo. Weisblum describes Mojo as an affordable and more portable alternative to a full Avid breakout box. "It's like a video and sound card that allows you to watch the Avid through a viewing monitor and mixer."
"In case I needed to stay at another hotel overnight where it wouldn't have been convenient for my regular system, I used Xpress Pro on a Mac G4 laptop for mobile editing," says Weisblum. He also brought Avid Mojo hardware and a 300GB bus-powered FireWire drive that could hold most of the media. A small Sony LCD TV was hooked up to the Mojo and laptop.
LONDON
While on location and traveling with the Darjeeling crew, Weisblum did have the reassurance of a base in London with an assistant, Alison Carter, overseeing the processing of the dailies. "There was a third full Avid Adrenaline with Unity storage in London with my assistant," says Weisblum.
The turnaround time for dailies was about six or seven days. The bulk of that time was in getting the 35mm film negative safely to London by courier. It would first have to get from Jodhpur or Udaipur, depending on where they were shooting at the time, to either Delhi or Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), and from there it would be flown to London.
Once in London, the film was developed at Deluxe. The developed film was then sent to Midnight Transfer, also in London, where it was transferred to HDCAM, having been scanned on a Thomson Grass Valley Spirit DataCine at 2K resolution. The footage was digitized both as SD 14:1 media and HD DNx36 media. Avid's DNx36 codec has an equivalent file size of about 3:1, which is about three minutes per 1GB.
THE NETWORK
"The best Internet connection we could get in Jodhpur was 2MB per second," says Weisblum. "That wasn't going to help us. The footage digitized in London was posted to a site, encoded, and downloaded at a data center in Mumbai. It was then copied onto a FireWire drive and passed to me." There was a regular shuttle already arranged for equipment transfers between Mumbai and wherever they were shooting.
It wasn't a private Internet network between London and Mumbai, but there were layers of protection. The bins were sent separately through e-mail on a daily basis for log and clip information for corresponding media. Weisblum explains that in order to retrieve the media files, "they were put in folders based on bins. The folder was then Zipped with pass-phrase protection and partitioned. For instance, a folder with 1GB of material would be one file, and that file was split into 10 parts. Nine of the parts would be sent by FTP. The last part would be sent by e-mail or other means. You can't open the file and folder without having all 10 parts and the pass-phrase."
DAILIES
On location, Weisblum and Anderson would look at dailies together on the Avid, usually watching SD-resolution footage on a Sony Broadcast PVM monitor. If there was a concern, they would have the particular files e-mailed or posted over at 2K resolution so they could look at the footage on an Apple HD Cinema Display to determine if the focus was right or to settle any technical questions. "What we were looking at when we were cutting was a downconverted copy of the DI," says Weisblum, so there were no surprises."
Using the DNxHD 36 codec, the file size was small enough that on a unit they could keep both the full SD media and the full HD media--all the dailies online. "We worked in SD because it was faster and there were fewer bugs to deal with. Then I would just move it to HD for a screening," he explains.
Weisblum started cutting in HD with the DNxHD 36 codec, although he never fully switched over. "We were still cutting in SD, but for screenings we had HD media online for everything," says Weisblum. "We could take a sequence we were working on in SD and move it to an HD project, relink it to the HD media, and we had an HD up-res within 20 minutes or so."
POSTING IN NEW YORK
The Avid Adrenaline with Unity storage used by Carter in London was moved to a hotel room in downtown New York City for the posting with assistant Abbi Jutkowitz. Weisblum expanded his India system to a full Adrenaline using Media Composer 2.7 for him and Anderson to work on in New York.
"We technically started post the first week of February, and we were already turning over reels to the DI by the end of April," says Weisblum. "We were mixing a few weeks later." Grading was done at Technicolor in New York. Scanning, conform and film-out were completed at Technicolor in Los Angeles.
"We brought a sound designer on fairly early in the process who both recorded stuff for us and would come by [the New York City posting room] from time to time and feed us different sound effects. This way we could play with them in the Avid and it wasn't totally new when we got to the mix," says Weisblum.
Regarding sound posting, it was kept in the same aesthetic as the rest of this movie and was not over-designed. "Certainly, plenty of environment and sounds we recorded in the location were used because they were so distinctive," says Weisblum. "In terms of design, it was never aggressive, and that was very intentional, to keep it as naturalistic and real as possible."