Editors Net Feature

Going Behind the Lines for The War Tapes
By Oliver Peters
Aug 28, 2006, 10:54

Thanks to recent advances in tools and technologies, we are living in a great era for documentary films and television. The War Tapes, this year's Tribeca Film Festival winner for best documentary feature, is an excellent example of the current state of documentary film production. The War Tapes is the first movie to document the experience of war through lenses carried by the soldiers themselves. This documentary was filmed by soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard deployed in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.

The concept started with Director Deborah Scranton, an experienced journalist and New Hampshire native. In February 2004, Major Greg Heilshorn, the public affairs officer of the New Hampshire National Guard and former journalist, invited Scranton to go to Iraq as an embedded filmmaker. Scranton replied by asking if she could give cameras to the soldiers instead. With permission, Scranton traveled to Fort Dix in New Jersey to propose the idea to the 180 soldiers of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Regiment (Mountain), Vermont Army National Guard. Ten accepted and five of those volunteers filmed throughout their one-year tour of duty. Based at LSA Anaconda in the Sunni Triangle, Charlie Company's tour in Iraq included 1,200 combat operations and 250 direct enemy engagements.

In the end, The War Tapes is told through the eyes of three soldiers: Sergeant Zack Bazzi (a Lebanese-American college student), Sergeant Steve Pink (a carpenter) and Specialist Mike Moriarty (a father of two). Additional filming by Sergeant Duncan Domey and Specialist Brandon Wilkins rounded out the coverage.

The Filmmaking Team
Scranton and Executive Producer Chuck Lacy brought the idea to Robert May (The Fog of War) at the Sundance Producers Conference. May was excited by the idea of the soldiers filming the story and agreed to produce the film under his SenArt Films banner. May had worked with Steve James (producer, director and editor of Hoop Dreams) on James' film Stevie and convinced him to co-produce and edit The War Tapes. James quickly realized that no single editor could adequately tackle this project, so he brought Leslie Simmer from Chicago's Kartemquin Films into the mix as the second editor. Kartemquin also loaned space for one of The The War Tapes' two Avid edit suites. Rounding out the core post team were Aaron Wickenden, who served as associate editor and postproduction supervisor, and co-producer Adam Singer.

Scranton equipped each of her volunteers with a one-chip Sony Mini DV camcorder, tripod, microphone, various lenses and piles of blank videotape, as well as her Instant Messenger screen name. Directing from afar, Scranton was also in communication with her "crew" in Iraq through e-mail. It took about two weeks for the soldier's tapes to reach New Hampshire from Iraq. "In the meantime, the soldiers uploaded QuickTime files of scenes, explosions and ambushes. We chatted on IM about what happened, together refining how best to tell the story. The experience was a mesh of interplays of present, future, perspective and reverberating memories. We filmed events in real time. We conducted interviews 24 hours later. These interviews were followed by more interviews months after incidents. This became a mutual journey," Scranton explains.

Throughout the year of production (March 2004 to February 2005), the troops filmed 800 hours of DV footage. The cameras were mounted on dashboards, gun turrets and even helmets to capture footage of the unit's 1,200 combat operations and 250 direct enemy engagements. Back home, the filmmaking team shot an additional 200 hours of tape documenting the impact on the families during the deployment, as well as after the soldiers' return home. Since the filmmakers wanted the footage to look consistent, stateside coverage was shot with Sony DVCAM and Panasonic DV camcorders rather than HD or Digital Betacam.

The Challenge of Abundance
How do you turn more than 1,000 hours of footage into a 97-minute film? I discussed The War Tapes with Steve James, Leslie Simmer and Aaron Wickenden, three members of the film's Chicago-based editorial team.

Steve James served as lead editor, sharing duties with Leslie Simmer. "We had to figure out how to preserve the complexity and rawness of their experience in the course of telling their story-a story we truly believe has not been told before," says James. "This wouldn't have been possible without a group of really smart loggers. It's totally impractical for a single person to scrutinize this much footage, so the first round of viewing was Deborah and then our team of loggers. Much of the footage was taped through the windshields of Humvees, which wouldn't be very interesting [by itself]. Then someone would have an off-camera comment that was pretty good. Our loggers would be looking for such discoveries and would make a note of the timecode so we could take a closer look."

The logs and transcripts were posted online on an Apple .Mac account so that everyone on the team, including the director and producers, could access the information and see if something warranted additional attention. Wickenden and Singer provided the next line of review as footage was loaded to the hard drives.

Wickenden explains, "When it came time to digitize, I would capture all the selected footage onto several FireWire drives at Avid's 15:1 compressed resolution. I was able to get all of the raw footage [about 190 hours] on one 500GB and one 250GB FireWire drive. I would clone these and 'sneakernet' the drives to Steve and Leslie. We had one Avid at Kartemquin for Leslie and one at Steve's house in Oak Park [Illinois]."

"We took the divide-and-conquer approach, splitting up scenes according to what best matched our personal approaches-action, narrative, etc. When we began, I didn't think this would take a year, but with new footage coming in constantly, we always had to be willing to go back and revisit scenes to improve the story," adds James.

After six months, they had a first cut that was about three hours long. The film went through 12 "official" rough cuts and six fine cuts during the yearlong postproduction process.

I was curious how the military reacted to this film. The company commander in Iraq, Major Ray Valas, and New Hampshire National Guard Public Affairs Officer Major Greg Heilshorn (an ex-journalist himself), had an opportunity to review the footage. Simmer notes, "We owe Major Heilshorn a debt of gratitude because he was brave enough to trust the filmmakers' judgment to make a film that was fair and honest to the soldiers. Regardless of personal political beliefs about the war, we all wanted this to be the soldiers' story, and we had to be true to that goal. In the end, making the film was unquestionably a group effort. Everyone involved in postproduction had creative input that made a significant impact on the final cut.

The Film Approach to DV
The War Tapes was edited entirely on two Avid Xpress DV systems, but the film followed some rather unique steps to get into its final form. Online editing was handled at i-cubed, a Chicago post facility. Rather than a standard online edit system, i-cubed used a Digital Vision Nucoda Film Master workstation, which they use for digital intermediate film finishing.

Colorist Mike Matusek explains, "We captured the tapes into Film Master based on the Avid EDL. Film Master stores video as uncompressed DPX files in RGB color space. The output of this conformed sequence was recorded to DigiBeta and deinterlaced in real time using a Teranex imageConvert system. We brought that video back into Film Master for color correction and to reformat the 4:3 video into anamorphic 16:9. Most of the footage was natively 4:3, so we reformatted by changing the aspect and framing and cropping shots to fit the 16:9 aspect ratio. This is best done if you deinterlace the image first. For the deliverables, we produced an NTSC anamorphic 16:9 master and, after an upconvert with Film Master, a 1080i D5-HD master.

"We are now in the process of getting the HD master ready for a film-out for theatrical distribution, which means we will further convert the 30fps frame rate to 24fps for film. The frame rate conversion is done with different software filters that are chosen based on a scene's motion. Some shots, like fast camera pans, will have to be tweaked to minimize the strobing inherent in these conversions to 24fps."

SenArt Films chose an experienced film mixing facility for the audio work. Wickenden continues, "We chose Dig It in New York for the mix, which has a Dolby-certified mix stage. Since a lot of the audio came from the on-camera mics, the obvious concern was the noise from generators, wind in the gun turrets and the Humvee engines. Dig It struck the right balance, cleaning up the audio without making it sound too sterile. We sent them 12 to 15 tracks from the rough cut, plus about eight additional tracks of wild sound using Avid's OMF output. Minimal foley was required for the final mix, so nearly everything you hear is the audio recorded in the field."

James, who has a film background, made the switch to Avid years ago. "I'm not computer savvy. In fact, I cut Hoop Dreams on a VHS cuts-only system. When I transitioned to Avid, I was a bit nervous. I took to it easily, though, because it works the way an editor thinks."

Simmer adds, "Avids were designed by editors for editors. I can't think of a better system for managing such a large amount of footage."

Wickenden expresses a different point of view. "I actually learned editing on Apple's Final Cut Pro, so I had to teach myself the Avid interface when I started working with Kartemquin. I was really impressed with how well everything worked on the two systems we had set up. Running on Apple Power Mac G5s, the Avid Xpress DV software was very stable. We never had a major crash. When it came time to add travel to the mix, I took the FireWire drives with the media and my Apple iBook, on which I'd installed Xpress DV. This way, if I had to check anything, I had the material right at my fingertips."

The War Tapes is a brilliant example of how modern low-cost hardware, software-based editorial tools and the Internet can be a means of bringing very personal stories to the screen. Director Scranton adds, "I believe the power of film, image and sound lies in its ability to evoke empathy. If war negates humanity, them film-maybe especially film that shows war from the inside-can ensure that even when we fight, we hold on to and bear witness to our humanity. We found a way in this film to smash through that wall. We found the possibility of empathy in the middle of war."


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