The production of Life of Pi spanned four years and more than half the globe. Shooting locations included Montreal, Canada; Pondicherry and Munar, India, and a giant, custom-built water tank in Taiwan, where open water scenes were staged. All of the live action was shot natively in 3D.
3D specialist Cameron Pace Group supported Lee through the creative process by supplying expertise, equipment and an on set workflow for screening dailies. A number of different camera systems were considered for use with the rigs with cinematographer Claudio Miranda ultimately selecting the ARRI Alexa camera for its sensitivity to details such as light reflecting off of water.
Cameron Pace Group co-chairman and CEO, Vince Pace, noted that Codex recorders were the obvious choice to capture data from the Alexa cameras. “Life of Pi was not an easy film,” he said. “You had a production crew traveling to India. There was a set up at a defunct airport in Taiwan. As a result, we made a choice to throw the best technology at it in order to support the creative portion throughout the filmmaking process… and that’s where Codex shined.”
Codex recorders provided a way to record data without compression and with 100 percent reliability. Additionally, they greatly simplified the process of recording 3D through their unique ability to record dual streams from paired cameras in perfect synchronicity. “Codex treats dual streams as if they are one negative,” Pace explained. “That really benefits you when you want to playback scenes in 3D. It is far superior to using two recorders as that would require external equipment to play them in sync.”
“Codex provided critical links in a chain that allowed us to present results to the director,” Pace added. “It is a powerful tool that was transparent to production.”
During the production, individual Codex recorders were used with each of three camera pairs. When the recorders were full, they were taken to a near-set laboratory and off-loaded to Codex Digital Labs. The Digital Labs were employed to make LTO back-up media and to load media onto a DVS Clipster system that was used to prepare 3D dailies media for review, editorial, visual effects and postproduction purposes.
The off-loading process was overseen by CPG’s Derek Schweickart, the production’s 3D workflow supervisor. Schweickart noted that Codex’s system for managing 3D data also simplified his task. “Codex’s ability to record clips that are the same length is really important,” he said. “It made it very easy to manage the left eye and right eye. When I offloaded the data to the Digital Lab and then onto the Clipster, there was very little data management to do. I simply dropped in the left eye and right eye timelines. That allowed us to focus on other tasks such as color correction and matching the footage to script notes. That was a huge advantage.”
“Codex also allowed scene and take information entered on set to be used in the file naming for post,” Schweickart added. “That meant that the footage didn’t need to be logged in a traditional manner. Clips were the same length and properly named when delivered to the lab. That saved us time with syncing and naming.”
Pace pointed out that the Codex technology was part of a network of cutting edge technologies extending from the camera systems through postproduction, all of which had to be carefully calibrated and maintained by a team of talented professionals. He credited 20th Century Fox vice president of postproduction, Steve Barnett, with assembling an exceptional team. “If you look at this from a business perspective and see how daunting it was, you would have thought that something had to give… but nothing gave,” he said. “When you take on a project like this, you don’t think about ‘vendors,’ rather you assemble a team of professionals who are all going after a creative result.”
