Fremont, CA – March 10, 2014 – Blackmagic Design today announced Toronto based Banger Films used Teranex 2D Processor and DaVinci Resolve to complete “Super Duper Alice Cooper,” a new documentary looking at the life of Alice Cooper. The film will premiere in the US at the upcoming 2014 Tribeca Film Festival and will be distributed commercially worldwide.
Banger Films has become one of the most recognized names in musical documentaries, creating the VH1 “Metal Evolution” series and the award winning documentaries “Iron Maiden: Flight 666” and “RUSH Beyond the Lighted Stage,” which won the Audience Award at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Its new film, which has been dubbed a DocOpera, follows the life and career of rock legend Alice Cooper.
Built entirely around archived footage, the film tells Alice’s story through personal, concert, news, fan footage, interviews with musicians and celebrities and stock footage from early silent films, including the classic 1920s horror film “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Banger Films had to work with footage in a large number of formats used during the past 50 years and transfer it all into a final 1080p HD project. All of the conversions for the film were completed using the Teranex 2D Processor.
“I have a ton of experience with historical, stock and fan sourced footage, and this film was the hardest thing I have ever worked on in terms of post workflow. Not a single shot in the film is new. It is all archival footage,” said Andrew Konawalchuk, online editor and technical supervisor at Banger Films and online editor for all of Banger Film’s documentaries. “All of the footage went straight through the Teranex. At first we were worried about blowing up a ton of footage and that it would make some of the footage look off. But Teranex handled it all, and the Teranex settings are simple. Just pump it through and hit the right buttons.”
He continued: “Even with the huge amount of conversions, using the hardware based Teranex was a lot faster and easier to use than any software solutions I used on ‘Flight 666’ or ‘RUSH.’ And Teranex gave me control over the conversion process, so that when a stock house sent me bad conversions, I would just get the NTSC or PAL master and do it myself. I was able to dial in my own settings, which was great.
“Since Alice was such a huge celebrity, we got some really unique fan footage that I thought would be hard to use. The most difficult footage in the film came from a guy in the 70s interviewing Alice coming out of a bar in NYC. It was done on an old half inch open reel camera, and the footage quality was absolutely terrible. Teranex cleaned it up easily.”
In putting Alice Cooper’s tale to film, Banger Films decided the tone for the film needed to closely match the style of 1920s silent films, in particular “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” from which stock footage was also used. To set the style and match the stock footage, Banger Films used DaVinci Resolve for color correction. With much of the stock footage needing a large amount of work, Banger Films did full color correction on each piece of footage after a Teranex conversion had been completed, instead of waiting for final post production.
“We set the color we wanted early on. Stock footage was coming in all the time, and the footage went into the Teranex, out to color correct on DaVinci Resolve and then over to the graphics guys. Color correction was always happening. Being able to use DaVinci Resolve as the shots came in was huge for us and saved us from having to take every piece of footage out to a separate post production house for correction, which would have slowed the workflow to a crawl,” finished Andrew.
About Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. For more information, please check www.blackmagicdesign.com.
