Concealing and Revealing Identities on A Scanner Darkly

In the drug-crazed world of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 futuristic novel A Scanner Darkly, you’re either a narc or an addict, paranoid either way, and not always entirely sure which side you’re on. Fast forward nearly 30 years and add to that complexity director Richard Linklater’s vision to give Dick’s world shape and movement on the big screen - using an ever-shifting animation technique to both obscure and illuminate each character’s reality. Then do it all for less than one-tenth of the budget of a typical Hollywood animated movie. Now you begin to understand the technical and creative challenges the filmmakers faced on this movie, which stars Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson, and Robert Downey Jr.

Luckily, several of the team members, including editor Sandra Adair and sound supervisor and mixer Tom Hammond, had worked with Linklater on previous films including Waking Life, which employed a similar animation technique. So they planned a comparable workflow - shoot all scenes on digital video, create a complete cut of the story, and then give the locked picture to animators who digitally paint over each frame using a method titled “interpolated rotoscoping.” For A Scanner Darkly, the crew was able to build on their earlier experience to improve this innovative workflow and achieve Linklater’s highly stylized vision, handling all of the post production, except for the final two weeks of sound mixing, out of studios in Austin, Texas, the home base for Linklater, Adair, and Hammond.

Choose Your Weapon

Linklater and cinematographer Shane Kelly opted to shoot digitally using multiple Panasonic AG-DVX100 cameras capturing at both 24 and 30 frames per second (fps). Based on their experience of filming Waking Life, they expected to shoot a huge amount of footage (they ended up shooting 140 hours). In addition, they recorded audio separately with a DAT machine to ensure high-quality digital sound. When it came time to choose the editing system that could efficiently handle all of these different requirements – and provide the stability and creative toolset needed for such an ambitious and visually arresting project - Adair and assistant editor Chris Roldan researched a number of options and found that only the Media Composer Adrenaline system could fully meet the filmmakers’ needs.

“We wanted to hand over QuickTime files to the animators that were close to 24fps. That was our first goal,” explains Adair. “The film was shot at 24fps, but the DVX100 uses advanced pulldown, which means that when you shoot 24, you’re really getting 23.98. The Media Composer Adrenaline system handled the 2:3 insertion perfectly. It also handled the mix of 30- and 24-frame material and gave us the multicamera grouping capability and horsepower we needed for so much footage. It was also the most stable system by far for syncing dailies from DAT.”

The editing team’s equipment decisions made them pioneers in several regards. While it’s common for independent films to use the DVX100 camera, Adair says, “Studio features don’t usually do that. Also, at that time [in 2004], the Adrenaline system had been used on just one other film.” Almost immediately, their decision to step out on the technology edge paid off.

Linklater and Kelly shot an enormous amount of footage (at an 80:1 shooting ratio) using up to 11 cameras at once, capturing both 30 and 24fps material. And Adair watched all of it. “One day, which I call Black Thursday, I had 22 hours of dailies,” says Roldan. Adair used the Media Composer Adrenaline system’s multicamera grouping capability to watch all 11 cameras, which she says, “was the only practical way I’d have been able to see it all.”

The Adrenaline system handled the 2:3 insertion [from the DVX100 camera] perfectly. It also handled the mix of 30- and 24-frame material and gave us the multicamera grouping capability and horsepower we needed for so much footage.

- Sandra Adair, Editor, A Scanner Darkly

From Technology to Technique

With the majority of the technical requirements in check, Adair was able to turn her attention to the creative task at hand – cutting to tell the complicated story and to highlight the best performances – all the while knowing that the animators would then apply their craft to the foundation she had built. One of the biggest challenges was to address the complex scenes where actors appeared in “scramble suits” worn by undercover agents conducting surveillance of their friends and neighbors, checking for drug use. The scramble suits covered the characters from head to toe, enabling them to project different physical images that disguised their true identities.

“When the actors acted that portion of their scenes, they were wearing plain gray clothing, but [in the final film] the scramble suits cover their whole body and head,” explains Adair. “When I was editing the video, and character A was talking to character B, I’d cut between medium shots and close-ups, and I could see the expressions on their faces. But I knew that in the final animation, we wouldn’t even be able to see who it was – never mind what emotion was going to show on their faces. It was a guessing game.” She adds, “Now that I see what the animators have done with the scramble suits, it’s amazing. The emotion is still there; the performance and delivery of lines has remained intact in the final film.”

Hammond, who used a Digidesign Pro Tools|HD 3 Accel system for the sound design and the mix, also faced the challenge of the scramble suits. “Those cloth suits have a projected image on them that  makes the characters look like different people - they’re shifting constantly. We tried to do that with their voices. For example, we experimented with recording about 20 different people saying the same line, and then we used a sequence of compressors triggered by various lengths of pulses to shift between the voices. It was very interesting to hear a sentence delivered this way - not simultaneously by 20 different voices but with fragments of 20 different voices - but it didn’t work. With our ears and mind, we need a voice that can clearly convey some emotion and is not distracting. Because the scramble suit is constantly shifting, the audience and the characters really needed the voices to identify one scramble suit from another. We also tried to take Keanu’s voice and manipulate it, but you could always tell it was him unless we processed it to the point that he sounded like a monster. We didn’t want to just use a voice changer or do some extreme pitch processing because we would have lost his performance. Besides, the complicated [scramble] suit is more sophisticated than that,” he says.

In the end, the sound team brought in actors to replace the voice of Reeves and the other characters while they were in the scramble suits. “To capture the vocal performances, we used a looping technique with Pro Tools playing and recording over and over again so the voice talent could mimic exactly what the actors were saying. We often recorded more than 20 times, often editing the bits and pieces from many of the looped takes so we could really match the performance with the main talent. We used Synchro Arts’ VocALign Project to precisely sync the replaced voice with the original. I then processed it using Pure Pitch from SoundToys, to change the pitch slightly and make it more gravelly, and beefed it up with the Pultec EQ plug-in from Universal Audio to give it size and power.”

Hammond notes, “It was critical to get this right since the film is primarily dialogue oriented. There aren’t a lot of explosions or effects.”

Our process on Scanner worked out really well. Because of the easy translation between workstations and mix rooms, the editors are now handling the volume graphing and some of the EQ.

- Tom Hammond, Sound Supervisor and Mixer, A Scanner Darkly

More Creative Challanges, More Solutions

Beyond the scramble suit, Adair and Roldan faced other challenges on the picture editing side. In one key scene, Reeves’s character is on government surveillance duty, watching 11 monitors showing the output of cameras that have been installed in his own apartment. Adair used the Media Composer Adrenaline system’s multicamera functionality and Picture-in-Picture feature to place images inside all of the on-screen monitors.

She explains, “I was able to take each of the cameras, group clip them, do a picture-in-picture to place them in the different monitors that had been shot blank, and use the 3D Warp tool to give each individual screen the correct shape [within a shot]. With the Adrenaline system I could keep all of those images synced throughout the scene, using a different camera in each surveillance monitor. Making changes and keeping track of sync on 11 cameras was painless. Thankfully, every time I had to make a change I didn’t have to replace each shot.” Once rendered, all surveillance monitors played in sync and the rendering was very quick on the Macintosh G5.

She adds, “When I had to make a change it got a little complicated, but I could always use the Match Frame feature on that group clip, toggle over to the next camera, and put an in-point there – cut that camera in, toggle to the next one, put an in-mark, cut that camera into a different surveillance screen, and just march down the line of different camera angles and plug those into the screens. No other system out there could do that. It wasn’t an easy scene, but with the Adrenaline system, it was straightforward.”

During the editorial process, files were transferred smoothly between picture and sound editorial via OMFI (Open Media File Interchange) exchanges. After Adair and Roldan locked picture and handed it off to the animators, Hammond and the sound team began to edit and experiment with the sound design using the Pro Tools|HD and Pro Tools LE systems at Hammond’s studio. Most of the film was mixed on one Pro Tools|HD 3 Accel system with a Command|8 control surface in a small acoustically treated 5.1 surround room also at Hammond’s studio. Because there are no large mixing stages in Texas, except for a private Dolby approved stage at Troublemaker films, the last two weeks of the final mix were completed using a Pro Tools setup with a Digidesign ICON integrated console at Warner Bros (Dub Stage 6) in Burbank.

“Because we’re in Austin, we have to do things a little differently,” says Hammond. “We do most of the mixing in a small room here, and then for print mastering and final tweaking we take it to a Dolby approved stage either at Swelltone Labs in New Orleans or a Pro Tools stage in Los Angeles. Because all of the automation information is within Pro Tools, as long as the final print mastering stage is Pro Tools, it translates easily. There are limitations to mixing in a small room - for instance not everyone can fit into the sweet spot right in the middle where the acoustics are correct. But if the producer and post production supervisor understand that the time-consuming detail work, like the dialogue EQ and the panning, can be done in a smaller environment, there is huge potential for saving money on larger pictures. Pro Tools is making this happen.”

He adds, “Our process on Scanner worked out really well. Because of the easy translation between workstations and mix rooms, the editors are now handling the volume graphing and some of the EQ. It really saves time, and it makes it easier for the editors too – they don’t need to do as much work with the ambiances. Sometimes you’d build a large ambiance to hide hum. But if you can take out that hum, you don’t need to spend the time building a long handle there.”

Doing things their own way, whether it was giving sound editors a piece of the mixing action, shooting and editing video vs. film, pioneering an editing workflow, or using an innovative animation technique, is what enabled the filmmakers on A Scanner Darkly to achieve a final product that is true to Dick’s very complex story and Linklater’s vision of it. It’s also a hallmark of the rebel Austin filmmaking culture, and this Texas-based crew would settle for nothing less.