Blackmagic Design, a Melbourne-based digital film-tech company, has assisted with the production of HBO Max’s upcoming “Our Flag Means Death”.
The pirate comedy starring Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby required extensive visual storytelling on the high seas. Stargate Studios was tasked with using virtual production to make principal photography manageable and cost effective.
Sam Nicholson, virtual production designer, decided to capture ultra high resolution imagery of actual oceans off Puerto Rico, stitching together the multiple plates, then displaying them on a 30-foot by 160-foot LED wall that would surround the practical pirate ship built on set.
“We tend to take impossible tasks and make them possible,” he said of the decision. “How to shoot stable 48K 360 degree plates from a boat off of Puerto Rico is complex problem solving in the extreme.”
In order to acquire the footage, manage and process the large amounts of data and deliver the imagery to set, Nicholson relied on a single pipeline solution from Blackmagic Design.
And as the process evolved through testing, the final plate shoot in Puerto Rico brought a refined approach, using a 270-degree multi-camera array with five Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K digital film camera mounted on a stabilising head. The Stargate Studios plate shooting team synchronised the five cameras for a total horizontal resolution of 60K.
“The Blackmagic 12K cameras gave us very high overall resolution with very efficient data output,” Nicholson explained. “Each take was five minutes, times five cameras at 12K resolution. So, the daily data transfer of camera originals from high speed SSDs to mass storage on location was a great solution.”
He added: “With any imaging system, it’s critical to pick the right workflow, the right gear and the right approach to data management. Recording in camera is easy. But then you have to offload it, transfer it, transcode it, distribute it, colour time and process it to make it usable on set. Blackmagic Raw was very efficient in addition to looking great.”
Nicholson noted that even for a pirate comedy such as “Our Flag Means Death”, convincing visual storytelling was important.
“Virtual production comes in all sizes and shapes,” he said. “It can be one OLED monitor all the way up to an LED wall the size of a football field. And ultimately, if it feels real, it’s better for everybody, from the actors to the director and, of course, the viewer.
“But at any level, if you look at it and say to yourself ‘This looks real’, then we’ve done a good job.”
“Our Flag Means Death” was created by David Jenkins. In addition to starring in the show, Waititi is executive producer and also directed the pilot.