Has anyone seen the film "28 days Later" directed by Danny Boyle. It appears that he used the XL1s (many of them) together with the Mini35 adaptor and although the film has received a mixed reation for both content and style it seems that he did at the very least try to get the most out of the XL1s, and not use it in the rather boring and cliched degraded way of Soderbergh. In other words trying to use the DV medium as a true viable alternative and not as some kind of sketchpad.

Looking at the trailer http://www.28dayslaterthemovie.com does seem to show some quite stunning shots.

Regards.

Yeah, I saw it a while back, I actually posted on here asking what camera was used but obviously no-one had heard of it at the time. So you've answered the questions I had about it :). I don't know if you've seen it, but I thought it was pretty good, some parts you could tell it was DV, some DV artifacts and it lacked sharpness, but all in all I was really encouraged that a general release(in the UK anyway) film was shot purely on prosumer cams.

John.

Direct link to the trailer:
http://www.fox.co.uk/trailers/28_days_later_new_hi.mov

John,

Since very feww people seem to be talking about this film it is good to find someone who has seen it.

I have not seen it myself unfotunately I have only seen the trailers (it does not seem to have been on release in my part of the world), but perhaps you could eloborate on the picture quality a bit. You see that at times the DV and artifacts are noticeable - in what way would you say? Do you think it shows that DV is perfectly usable in this way or really remains an interesting experiment?

Regards.

OK Where to start :) I thought the film was good, the quality of the images were noticable worse than film(Obviously :) ) I think for the type of film this was then DV was a good choice and I think it was perfectly usable in this instance. Like you said Danny Boyle didn't try to degrade the DV like in full frontal, but there are times during the film where it looks pretty bad. It's hard to describe what was wrong with it, you know the type of compression artifact you see on DVD's well this was noticable on some scenes but not all, it also lacked sharpness, it was a bit blurry. Don't get me wrong I was really encouraged at the fact that a $3k camera can be used in this way to produce a feature film, I mean 5 years ago no way would anyone be doing this and I actually thought the quality on the big screen was good for DV. No where near as good as film but as I said a $3k camera you can walk into a store and buy, it's pretty impressive.

I imagine that the film will look much better when it does make it onto DVD on a small screen, so if you get a chance watch it, it's actually a good film and to be honest the people I saw the film with(Not really into DV etc) thought it was just using some new look for film they didn't realise it was good ole' DV. They enjoyed it too.

hope that what the info you were after :)

John.

I'll preface this review by saying that I had no idea this was shot on digital. This probably shows my ignorance more than anything but I saw this on a projected screen and while I had an inkling that parts were video I had no idea this was an XL1S / Mini35 shoot. Now that I know this, I'm twice as impressed by this production. And I thought the film was decent. The featurette on the official site shows the XL1S. This was a major shock to me when I saw it.

Review below:

FRESH ROTTING FLESH
28 Days Later
dir. Danny Boyle starring: Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Megan Burns, Brendan Gleeson, Christopher Eccleston
The director of "Trainspotting" and "Shallow Grave" Danny Boyle has made an innovative and entertaining submission to the post-apocalyptic zombie-fighting genre but takes a U-turn into moralizing just when it starts getting good.

Proving again that there is always another way to remake a shopworn genre, Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland have infused the zombie mythology with plenty of style and energy, which makes "28 Days Later" genuinely fresh. If there was ever an 'art film' zombie picture, this is it.

Set in near future England, the film begins with a series of violent images from documentary footage of conflicts around the world, shocking pieces of real horror that are a foreboding of what is to come. This barrage of violent images (Riots, shootings, Saddam Hussein) are impressed upon chimpanzees in a secret laboratory which is soon broken into by a group of radicals with predictable results.

Unfortunately, none of them seem to have seen horror films recently as the first thing they do is release a chimpanzee which promptly attacks them. As they soon discover, the chimpanzees have been infected with 'rage', a virus that causes the afflicted to puke blood horribly and act homicidally towards other humans, spreading the disease in their wounds.

The protagonist of the movie, a bicycle courier (Cillian Murphy) convalescing in a hospital, wakes up 28 days after the chimp attack to find London deserted. He soon learns that an epidemic has struck the city, causing it to be evacuated. Since we know that it is only a matter of time before he meets with the murderous undead, the time he spends poking around London is an excercise is restrained suspense.

After his first harrowing encounter with the Londoners the courier falls in with two other uninfected humans, who give him the low down on the events that lead to London's evacuation and teach him how to survive. Here Boyle and Garland begin to develop their thesis further, that rage is endemic to humans, not just the infected, and that the solution might be for humans to reject each other, not to pull together. In another nice twist to the genre, the stupid one in the band of survivors is the male protagonist, not the girl. Naomie Harris as the hard bitten survivor with a meat cleaver is not eager to team up with other humans who might slow her down, and is suitably vicious when circumstances call for her to act. Also refreshing is that there are no rapidfire solutions to their zombie problem. Americans might look down on the gunless weakness of the British in the face of post-apocalyptic chaos but dramatically, having to face the undead hand-to-hand makes for surprising thrills.

Learning that there might be a potential cure through an automated radio broadcast, the growing band of survivors decide to take their chances making their way across an uncertain country. It is when they finally meet the band of soldiers behind the broadcasts that the film begins to give way to heavy-handedness that frankly takes the joy out of the journey.

The squad of soldiers lead by stalwart Christopher Eccleston are the inevitable humans who act as poorly as the savage monsters they are fortified against. A bit of a zombie cliche already, the soldiers gone wild represent a bit of a bitter pill that Boyle makes you swallow as if to make you guilty you were having fun for rooting for the humans. This is the only negative in what is otherwise a fresh turn to an undying genre.

Coming to DVD.

I am blown away. I watched this a few days ago on my 27" computer monitor. I knew it was video, but I figured it was a CineAlta unit. Any artifacting I noticed I assumed was part of the compression from my computer.
Keith asked me about it this morning, and I told him as a complete joke that it looked like PD150 footage. Then I told him I was kidding. Then he sent me the link to the featurette showing multiple times that it is an XL1. That showed me!

I'm not 100% sure all of it was done with a mini35. In one scene of the featurette it looks like just the manual lens when they are using it handheld (as opposed to the Steadicam shots).


The BEST part is... (smug mode on)One shot on the featurette shows an image from the XL1's viewfinder and "FRAME" is clearly visible. I think that answers whether it can be used for theatrical release films or not. (smug mode off)

All in all, knowing that this was shot on the same camera I have, moved this from my 5th favorite zombie movie, to my 2nd favorite.
I loved the movie itself, despite the last half of the movie, which was one big cliche. Boyle was obviously heavily influenced by Dawn and Day of the Dead.

Anyway, for sale: One black Corvette. Will trade for mini35 and lenses.

The making of featurette from the official site:
http://www.28dayslaterthemovie.co.uk/video/featurette_hi.html

28 days later did not use a min35. It used standard xl1s PAL cameras with manual lenses.

I can't recall where i read all this, but it was a stylistic choice to use the cameras to give a more imediate and realistic look to the film. Also they knew it would degrade the image on the big screen which is what they wanted, as it was a degraded world they were depicting.

They had a budget of around 15 million USD, but chose to make it in that vain, using lesser known actors and a small crew, to make the story more involving.

It was actually a very strong and good movie, unlike a lot of movies that cash in on an idea, they never really talked about the fact it was DV, they just wanted to give the audience a feeling.

I would recomend seeing it, it was a fun ride and a lot better than most of the tripe coming out of holywood.

Zac

//28 days later did not use a min35. It used standard xl1s PAL cameras with manual lenses. //

Even more impressed. Do you have any links to more production info for the movie?

I was involved in the Post Production of 28 Days Later and can probably fill in a couple of details.

Cameras were xl1 PAL - Tests were done on various cheaper DV cameras and it was decided that the xls were the most suitable. All material was shot in 4:3 and (I am pretty certain) standard interlaced mode. This was then transferred to D1 via SDI and all subsequent work was done in Flame/Inferno. We were aware from the beginning that the DV footage would need careful treatment for it to maintain quality. To this end we didn't even want to archive the footage in/out to D1 and kept it on the Inferno's throughout the project (despite the fact that D1 should have no generation loss...it does !). All the footage was treated with five-d (RIP) filmstyle spark and deinterlaced. This was a real 'number crunching' exercise and kept a few Flames running late into the night.

3D work was done in XSI and all compositing was done in Inferno.

I think the reason Danny Boyle decided to use DV was his experience with two films he shot for the BBC (Vacuuming and Strumpet), both shot on DV. There was certainly no intention to make it look 'degraded' that was just the limitation of DV. Additionally the nature of the shoot meant that he had to use a lot of cameras (during the Picadilly Circus scene for example) and the use of DV meant that costs could be kept down.

I think that the movie does look like it was shot on DV, but it doesn't detract too much from the overall look. It is, however, particularly noticible at the end when real film was used to shoot the 'happy ending'.

Simon

Thanks a lot for that information, Simon.

Simon
In one of the shots of the featurette, it shows a shot through the XL1s' viewfinder showing FRAME mode enabled. Is this just a coincidence?

I have just spoken to one of the the flame artists and he also couldn't remember (helpful eh ?!?). He did say he seems to remember de-interlacing all the footage, so I am assuming that frame mode wasn't used.

He corrected me on one point, we didn't use the 5D filmstyle spark on this project (although we did on Vacuuming and Strumpet), the final grade was done in Telecine.

I will ask the guy who transferred all the from footage from DV to D1 if he remembers when I catch up with him.

Simon

OMG :) Pretty cool that people who worked on that hang out on these boards.

I've got to congratulate you on your work!

What company did the vfx work on the film?

Alex,

mostly done by Clear Ltd, in Soho.

simon

Do they do summer jobs or internships :) ?

I'm a keen vfx artist in my spare time...I'm currently about to take my Chemistry Finals, and then I've got all Summer to work on VFX and short films. It would be cool to perhaps get even a menial part time job somewhere like that.

Alex


edit: changed avid -- > keen to avoid confusion ;)

check your email.

I just saw the trailer for this film on a huge screen before the movie 'Identity'. I do not mean to offend those who worked on the film, because I know the limitations of DV, but to be honest it just looked horrible up on the big screen. The colors were very muddled, and the lack of shallow DoF was almost jarring. They also showed the first teaser trailer, which I don't think is nearly as good as the full length version.

Again, I'm not expecting film quality because I know this was shot with the XL1s and I'm sure its going to be a great film and well edited because I love Danny Boyle's movies. But at the end of the trailer, someone yelled out "stupid!" and everyone laughed. This is unfortunate and it goes to show that a lot of people (Average Joes) aren't yet willing to accept miniDV on the bigscreen (unless everyone tells them they have too). They immediately think 'home video' and label it as amateurish.

I for one am excited to see this movie. I think it looks interesting.

I find it interesting that you selected lack of depth of field as one of the major drawbacks, having seen only the trailer.

This is nothing new but DV blown up to 35mm always looks crappy the first few minutes you watch it. Then, if the story is engaging, the brain just adapts to the lesser resolution and it tends not to be a problem so much anymore. This is something I have observed many times.
So, in effect, a trailer can not do justice to this kind of movie because you don't get the chance to adapt and if you have other trailers which originated on 35mm shown just before the difference in resolution is just going to stand out that much more.
I have to add I haven't seen the actual trailer projected on the big screen. But I have seen many other movies originally shot on DV, and you just get used to it once the story starts moving along. For that very reason, I would be very wary of mixing footage originating on 35mm and on DV however, unless justified directly in the story itself.

The DVD (Zone 2, UK) will be available in a couple of weeks. Should be interesting to listen to the audio commentaries.

ANy idea when we'll get a Zone 1 DVD release?

Seems the US theatrical release is planned for june 27th. So I guess the Z1 DVD will have to wait a while...

That sucks, but at least I'll get to see it again, this time on the big screen.

While we're on the subject, Simon, do you know where the transfer to film was done?

Transfer to film was done at MPC (iirc)

http://www.moving-picture.com/

si

I just got the DVD of 28 Days Later through today and all I can say is WOW, it really looks damn good. It's amazing what you can do with a DV cam :-)

John.

where'd you get it from john??

I can't wait till monday! :)

I Pre-ordered it online from Play and it arrived today.

John.

So, do the bonuses give any further insight on how the film was produced?
Are the commentaries interesting?

Bear in mind, when you look at trailers, they are often rushed to get the hype going and are not necessarily representative of the final product.

It looks like 28 Days is going into wide release, and that certainly will make it one of the more successful dv productions automatically. I'd love to know the total cost of the post production.

It'll be out on R2 DVD in a couiple of days.

http://www.playserver5.com/play247.asp?page=title&r=R2&title=114189

I went with my 6 year old to see X-Men 2 the other day and saw the "28 Days Later" trailer. It looked very edgy and raw but I assumed that was the look they wanted for the trailer to a zombie movie.

Zombie movies are real low on my "must see" list, but now that I know that it is shot in DV I will check it out.

my local paper is showing a June 27th , 2003 release date for "28 days later" ...

fox seachlight is showing June 28th release date

http://www.28dayslaterthemovie.com/upcoming/

Not to judge you or anything, but you took your 6 year old to
X-Men 2? I would not take my 12 year old there. I think most
rating systems are way way way too low, but that might be me...
I am from Europe after all <g>

I mistyped. I left the 6 year old at home and took the 10 year old. (Pretty scary. I only have two and I get them confused. Oh well.)

I watched the first X-Men movie on DVD before taking my son to X-Men 2. I found nothing in either the first nor the second that exceeded the level of violence found in the cartoon shows that I allow them to watch on Saturday.

Truth is if I really wanted to shield them from violence I would worry more about CNN than X-Men.

Xl1 or no, I still don't understand why danny boyle did a sequel to a sandra bullock movie ;)

Okay, I read the entire thread, what I still want to know is: Was it shot with the mini35 adapter or not, one said yes, another said no. Anyone know for certain?

Personally I thought the trailer looked pretty good on the big screen, I would have never guessed it was an XL1S!

No Mini. Not only did someone who worked on the post production actually say so on this thread, you can look at some of the behind the scenes footage from the official site where you can see a plain jane XL1.

Hmm, thats interesting, I don't recal Simon saying no to the mini, and why can't some of the sots have been done without it?? The behind the scens stuff also shows FRAME in the viewfinder.

Here's an interview in RES:
http://www.res.com/magazine/articles/28dayslateraninterviewwithdannyboyle_2003-05-21.html

It doensn't clear this up. I do know that some scenes were filmed on celluloid. Danny Boyle answers three questions relating to the DV. An interesting one is where he said altering the frame rate made

"I wanted this enormous energy from theose who are infected, which I was going to get through this particular menu on the camera, which allows you to alter the frame rate; things appear to be speeded up but actually it's real time. So you kind of snatch at fast images, like falling rain or a man running, snatching at them in a slightly unreliable way. "

I wonder what he's talking about. It sounds interesting.

I guess someone here is going to have to get the Making Of docu to find out.

http://us.imdb.com/Details?0339542

Another interesting tidbit:

"One of the key effect sequences was a petrol station explosion, which was shot on a set and then composited into a location in London. Due to the limitations of wide-angle lenses available for the DV camera, Clear used REALVIZ Stitcher to piece together six live action plates, from six different cameras, to create the city-wide shots required by Boyle."

http://www.cgfocus.com/NewsDetails.cfm?NewsID=655

Oh wow. I didn't realize that Anthony Todd Mantle also shot "Festen" (Celebration), my favourite all-time DV movie.

A great interview where Mantle talks about his feeling of shooting Celebration. No storyboarding, just 'emotional shooting'.

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/spring1999/pixel_nation.html

Well it is *officially* official, this month's issue of AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER confirms that "28 Days Later" was shot with an XL1S with an OPTEX B4-XL adaptor and some CANON EC and EJ Hi-Def primes.

Gooooo CANON!!!

We are definitely getting together one night to see the film in Hollywood sometime between June 26-30, while we are at the Entertainment Technology Show (June 27-28). We are probably meeting first for a few rounds at a place yet to be determined. The more the merrier. Stop by at the Canon booth and say hello. Would like to meet any and all DVi Wranglers who will be in the area during that time.

Looking forward,

- don

Is it a good article? If so I am buying the mag today.

Yes it is, says my buddy Mizell from ZGC, who by the way will be working alongside us in the CanonDV booth at the ETW SHOW. Mizell will be demonstrating the P+S Technik Mini35Digital adaptor. A fun time is guaranteed for all!

- don

It looks pretty promising - sorry to digress in this thread - but know you're trying to contact the guy - will you get a first-hand look of these? I'm especially interested in the Nikon and Canon adaptors...

please and thank you!

here's some proof:

http://www.filmcentre.co.uk/search.asp?str=28_days_later

There is an interesting review in Slate.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2084944/

They comment on the look of the film:

Boyle's work here surprised me. It's less heartlessly show-offy than in Trainspotting (1996) and less dopily picture-postcard than in The Beach. The music by John Murphy is an eerie drone that kicks into acid rock when the zombies show up. And it looks like nothing you've ever seen. The movie was shot on video by Anthony Dod Mantle, who often works in the low-tech Danish film collective Dogma. He gives it a documentarylike fluidity but with the punchiness of a horror flick. The light from those low, overcast English skies is yellow-gray and weirdly diffused: You believe London's lone surviving cab driver, Frank (the endearingly blustery Brendan Gleeson), when he surveys the empty pots he has set out on the roof of his skyscraper and curses the sudden drought. It's a mad world, indeed, when the rain stops falling in England.

I just got this e-mail from Fox Searchlight pictures... Doesn't say anything about DV, but he makes some great points about the horror genre, and the "knowing wink" that plagues soooo many films these days:

The following message is from director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, The Beach), his producer partner Andrew MacDonald, and writer Alex Garland (The Beach, The Tesseract) - who collectively are the creative forces behind 28 Days Later, in theatres nationwide this weekend.

In many ways it is useful to work within a genre. If nothing else, it means that a considerable amount of the hard work of filmmaking and story-telling has been done by the people who have worked in the genre before you.

In the case of 28 Days Later, we were working in a sub-genre of sci-fi and horror: the post apocalypse. The roots of the genre were born from the fall-out from a real apocalypse: the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Novels like John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend seemed to result from the nuclear paranoia that followed - a realisation that it had become a reality that mankind and civilisation might be ended, and not by the traditional act of God but by ourselves. The grip on our imaginations that nuclear paranoia exerted seems to be a clear indicator of how little we trusted ourselves to cope with such power.

Arguably, cinema followed the cues of these novels with equally fearful works, though found cause for paranoia in different areas, such as social issues and consumerism. Possibly, the finest examples of cinema’s contribution to the post-apocalyptic genre are found in George Romero’s Dead trilogy - Night, Dawn, and Day. But honourable mentions also include The Omega Man, which is an adaptation of Matheson’s I Am Legend, and also David Cronenburg’s Rabid.

There are other films and books that could be mentioned, but the point remains the same: that 28 Days Later is essentially a contribution to a lineage. We borrowed, sourced, and stole from these earlier works. Our opening sequence of a man waking in a hospital bed to find that London has been destroyed is lifted from Day of the Triffids. A scene set in a supermarket is a reference to the plundering of the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead. The chained ‘infected’ - our version of triffids, vampires, or zombies - made his first appearance in Day of the Dead.

Aside from providing structure, genre also allows you to play games with convention. To pick one convention example out of many, it tends to be the case that in any horror film worth its salt, there will be a version of a scene where, say, a girl will walk into a dark and obviously dangerous cellar, holding only a flashlight with dying batteries as defence. At this point, all members of the audience will be asking, internally or externally - why the hell are you doing that? Our version was a drive into a dark tunnel full of smashed cars and broken glass. In this instance however, at least one of the film’s characters is smart enough to point out the complete idiocy of the action. Not that anyone listens, of course.

Our close relationship with genre raised a question for us as filmmakers - how much do we sign-post the borrowings and convention games? And we decided that we wouldn’t sign-post them at all. This was an attempt to sidestep what has become another convention of sci-fi and horror: the knowing wink. The ironic nudge made by the filmmakers at the genre-savvy audience.

The problem with the winking and nudging is that it has become a way to let everyone off the hook. If a scene is supposed to be frightening or suspenseful, an ironic reference becomes a way that the filmmaker can protect himself from failure. In other words, if the scene fails to be suspenseful, the filmmaker can pretend he was really just making a post-modern comment on the nature of contemporary cinema. Equally, the audience is let off the hook, because if the filmmaker has succeeded in making the scene suspenseful, the audience can reassure themselves by congratulating themselves on their ability to reference, sub-reference, and knowingly deconstruct the history of cinema.

The last (but probably most valuable) of the gifts that genre provides is that it provides you with proven story mechanics which you can customise as you see fit. Often, the customisation becomes a large proportion of what makes one genre piece distinct from another - the hidden agenda and social commentary.

It’s debatable whether sci-fi frequently operates as a debating ground for social issues because of the filmmaker’s noble intent, or whether it is the result of a failure of the imagination - that when trying to invent a new world, you end up drawing on the world you see around you. Either way - genre makes for a great agenda vehicle. Not least because it puts a limit on pretentiousness. (Okay, you want to make a piece of earnest work about the collapsing fabric of society. Congratulations. But let’s not forget you’re also making a zombie movie... so stop messing around and blow up a petrol station already.)

Danny, Andrew, and Alex