Production Diary & Inspirations

Twin Peaks (2017) Dir. David Lynch

‘Punch-Drunk Love’ comes to Criterion with a surprisingly simple, almost pedestrian cover made from a framegrab. Along with the packaging, it’s a far more sober, humanized entry point into the film than the playfully abstract Jeremy Blake artwork that accompanied the initial theatrical and video release, which makes me think about the job of reframing contemporary films as they age.

Peter Becker on Criterion covers:

“The producer in charge of the project fills us in on the story of the release – what is significant about the film and filmmaker, where it fits in the director’s filmography, what its key cinematic gestures are, what its impact has been, and what we are trying to communicate about the social, political, and historical context of the film.”

“The design needs to serve as an invitation, an introduction for the uninitiated, subtly setting expectations for the film they’re about to watch without giving too much away. Unlike a theatrical poster, out of sight as soon as you leave the theater, our editions are intended to be kept as part of a library, so their designs need to remain relevant and compelling after the films are over. Ideally, a design is even more resonant for someone who already knows the film.

“It’s nighttime. Ship’s moved by some terrible power at a terrific speed. And although it’s imperceptible in the darkness, I have an intuition that we’re headed towards a shore. No one else seems to be aboard the vessel. I’m very keenly aware of my aloneness.”

Tremendous work from Framestore on a bespoke dream sequence in ‘Lincoln’, which shimmers and shifts as time passes rapidly, accompanied by DDL’s VO and a haunting drone.

“Framestore contributed several concepts to Lincoln's dream sequence, the origins of which were the President's actual diary entries. "Lincoln was very clear about what he saw," says Ben Morris. "He described being on the deck of an ironclad boat - the USS Monitor - moving at incredible speed heading towards a coastline that he can never reach - it keeps eluding him. It's a metaphor ultimately for the Thirteenth Amendment and his second term.””

“It had to have a sense of dreaminess, but also convey speed in the relative darkness of night."

Kristen Stewart on director Kelly Reichart:

I still find myself thinking about David Hoffos’ ‘Scenes From The House Dream’, an installation of miniature nighttime suburban dioramas. Each scene is augmented with hidden CRT televisions that precisely reflect in moving elements (people, billowing curtains, boats, fireworks) into an otherwise perfectly static scale model. It’s a haunting, affecting tour to take in person. Hoffos describes his work here:

A quick look at some of the VFX for Brian De Palma’s ‘Mission Impossible’ entry, supervised by John Knoll at ILM. I still think visual effects from the 90’s have an ineffable, ideal quality – the tools weren’t perfect (colour correction hacks, guesswork with on-set video taps), but many of those flaws either made it through to the final shots in a pleasing way, or were disguised in the messiness of printing back to film, combined with a much greater reliance on practical elements. Even the most computer-y stuff that ILM pumped out in those days had a handmade quality to it.

Given a limited set of options for time-warping 35mm film, John Knoll discusses using a super old-school technique with the bluescreen plate of Cruise propelled away from the explosion:

To impart the proper effect, [Cruise] flayed his arms at half-speed to correlate with the final speed Knoll would attain by skip-printing the shots. “I wanted to make it look plausible that he’s being blown through the air by the explosion,” Knoll explained, “to make it look fast, but not comically fast. At the point of impact on the train, we stop the skip-print and go back to real time.” Skip-printing required Knoll to take into account the interactive lighting on the bluescreen element of Cruise. “The overhead lights in the soundstage ceiling fired off in sync with the camera shutter being opened on particular frames. I had to program different sequence patterns to simulate different speeds of travel. There was one pattern at 24 frames per second and another for the skip-printing portion. That way, the lights would appear to be going at the same rate, instead of looking as if everything had slowed down.”

Letter Never Sent (1959) Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov