INDEPENDENTS SAY: HEART-POUNDING EFFORTS

HOLLYWOOD — He's a bad guy. The hero of Crank, a new all-digital indie film from Lakeshore Entertainment, is a hit man named Chev who finds he's been hit himself — by a rival using an exotic neurotoxin that will stop his heart as soon as his heart rate calms down to a certain level. 

The plot involves Chev's heart-pounding efforts to find an antidote and get the guy who poisoned him (and also make up with his girlfriend). So the star, Jason Statham (Transporter), spends the duration of Crank exerting himself: running, fighting, driving things very fast, and getting into an altercation with his rival aboard a private helicopter whose pilot reacts by flying the thing up to an exceedingly high altitude. In one sequence Chev propels his huge, vintage '72 Buick into a mall and up an escalator. Co-director Mark Neveldine characterizes the movie's pace as "a bullet from a gun" — the story's four-hour span is told in 85 minutes.

From acquisition to post, the action never let up for DigitalFilm Tree either. "Crank is an extremely interesting project on both technical and artistic fronts," says Ramy Katrib, a founder of DFT and an executive producer on the film. As proof Katrib points to Statham's climactic fall — not on greenscreen, but on a cable dangling down to the real streets of LA. He also stresses that Crank joins the few and the brave this summer — like Superman Returns — that shot on HDCAM SR.

According to Travis Baumann, DFT's VFX super on Crank (who also served as compositor, designer and producer on the film), the directors shot the film in Sony's SR format using three Sony F-950 cameras. On many action shots the filmmakers also used a versatile Sony "T-cam," a light, maneuverable unit comprising an HD lens on a length of cable attached to the main body of the camera. Co-directors Neveldine and Brian Taylor shot much of Crank themselves — working alongside DP Adam Biddle. 

"The whole way the directors took on the filmmaking process was like nothing I've ever worked on," says Baumann, "and I've worked on quite a few features shot on film. Having the HD SR capabilities, you literally have the directors strapping the camera onto their back and putting on roller blades and being dragged behind a motorcycle; getting handheld [T-cam] action that you've never really seen before. That T-cam is so mobile relative to a film camera or even a 950, which is still a large-body camera." 

In contrast to an 8,000-foot-high copter sequence, where the directors were "hanging out" of the copter shooting the actors, the motorcycle sequence involves a dangerously intimate POV as the T-cam follows the action from a very low altitude.

SHUTTER SPEED ENHANCES INTENSITY

"Another thing that enhances the speed of the film," Baumann says, "is they cranked the shutter speed up to between 200 and 500." Well above a norm like 180, the accelerated shutter speed gives the action a "staccato" feel, Baumann says, that's free from the fluidity and motion blur of standard action shots. "You get a crisp, clean image of someone in motion." When Chev emerges from a swimming pool, water falls off him "like diamonds" rather than in smooth streams.

You see the individual droplets of water. "We had a large car detonation in one scene and you can actually see the pixels of dust in the air in the finished HD SR image," Baumann adds. "Glass shatters, you see every little cube of glass punch out of that window. It's perfect for the mood of this film, it really brings the intensity and the edginess to it. Baumann says the F-950 offers in-camera CCD effects like "detail crispening" and "edge crispening." 

Nick Theodorakis was vital as DIT (digital imaging tech), Baumann says, in handling all camera irising, exposure, CCD effects, setting shutter rates and actually rolling all tapes when it was time to record.

And there were a lot of tapes. Since the Crank shoot was HD SR rather than film, the directors "would shoot everything," Baumann says.  "They would have three, four cameras going at any moment."