Behind the Scenes on Zero Dark Thirty

I really enjoyed Kathryn Bigelow’s previous film The Hurt Locker – mostly for the thrillingly suspenseful action. So I’m really looking forward to seeing Zero Dark Thirty, politically charged though it is (and hopefully better than Green Zone), as soon as I can.

Production Design, Editing and Sound Design – Video Interview

DP/30 has a great interview with editors William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor, production designer Jeremy Hindle and sound designer Paul Ottoson about their work on the film.

ARRIRAW Onset Workflow

If you want a very detailed technical run down of the onset workflow Zero Dark Thirty used then Below The Line has what you’re looking for. It focuses on the productions use of Codex recorders to record the ARRIRAW…

Each day, ARRIRAW data from the Onboard Datapacks was collated to a Codex Storage-10 Diskpack (10TB RAID-3 protected) and to direct-attached SAS storage. Once the two copies were complete and verified, the datapacks were cleared and returned to set. “Datapacks were delivered to the lab in two splits, at lunch and at wrap,” Eggleton explained. “As a result, the morning’s material was graded and ready to view by the DP and director on wrap.”

Editing Zero Dark Thirty

Editing Zero Dark Thirty was a mammoth task for editor Dylan Tichenor with over 320 hours of footage to wade through to carve out the final film in just four months. Oliver Peters has a fantastic behind the scenes look at how Tichenor and then William Goldenberg (fresh from cutting Argo) tackled that challenge. There are also some great details about their Avid Media Composer workflow.

“Kathryn likes to set up scenes and then capture the action with numerous cameras—almost like it’s a documentary. She’ll repeat that process several times for each scene. Four to seven cameras keep rolling all day, so there’s a lot of footage. Plus, the camera operators are very good about picking up extra shots and B-roll. There are a lot of ways to tell the story and Kathryn gave us, the editors, a lot of freedom to build these scenes…. That’s great for an editor, but you really feel the responsibility because it’s your decisions that will end up on the screen.”

 Sound Design on Zero Dark Thirty

Soundworks Collection has a great (as usual!) interview with Oscar winning Sound Re-recording Mixer and Supervising Sound Editor Paul Ottosson, who also worked on The Hurt Locker for Bigelow, about how he tackled the sound design for Zero Dark Thirty. It’s interesting to hear how he tended towards mono sounds over 5.1, avoided ADR as much as possible and the lengths he would go to, to maintain a high level of authenticity.