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News - Nice Shoes Color Grades and Titles Garbage Dreams

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By Documentary Filmmaker Mai Iskander
Posted: 08.12.2009 13:53

Nice Shoes demonstrated its continuing commitment to independent filmmaking by providing color grading and titling for the feature documentary, “Garbage Dreams,” produced and directed by Mai Iskander, a Sundance Documentary Program Fellow. “Garbage Dreams” premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival in March and has already garnered numerous honors, among them the Nashville Film Festival’s Reel Current Award presented by former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore. The film will be screened in New York City and Los Angeles this summer during DOCUWEEKS, which provides the theatrical runs that qualify documentaries for Oscar contention. “Garbage Dreams” marks the feature directorial debut of Iskander, a cinematographer by trade. She shot the documentary over a four-year period during which she followed three teenage boys born into the trash trade and growing up in the world’s largest garbage village on the outskirts of Cairo. This community of 60,000 Zaballeen (Arabic for “garbage people”) survives by recycling 80 percent of the garbage it collects, far ahead of any modern “green” initiatives. Nice Shoes colorist Gene Curley met Iskander a few years earlier when he color graded a Panasonic Technics commercial she shot. They teamed up again to color a short film of hers, and then she called Curley again as “Garbage Dreams” neared completion. The vast majority of Iskander’s footage was shot on DV. While this format lent itself to realistic, guerrilla-style filmmaking in the Zaballeen community, it didn’t create a very distinctive look. “Mai really wanted to push it,” Curley recalls. “She wanted the Zaballeen town to have a saturated, golden look with the garbage very pronounced while Cairo appeared cooler and more modern and metallic with its skyscrapers and cars. After the first round of color grading Mai wanted to push it even more. The results turned out great especially with the uprez to HD.” Curley also color graded DV footage that the boys shot themselves with cameras given to them by Iskander. In the final scene, Gene let 16mm scenes of a wedding reception “go natural and look contrasty, saturated and festive.” This footage and the look Curley created, concludes the film on an upbeat, depicting the Zaballeen in a time of celebration. The colorist utilized FilmLight’s Baselight color correction system -- the highest performance grading system on the market -- which enabled him to “breeze through” the footage. “It was my second long format project with Baselight which was installed here last summer,” Curley points out. “I wasn’t given an EDL so I could mark all the scenes, but Baselight’s scene detection feature caught about 90 percent of them which made things very efficient for me in a quick turnaround situation. We laid off to D5 at the end, but Mai wanted a QuickTime, too. Baselight renders QuickTimes on its own so we just dropped it on a drive for Mai to walk away with.” If Curley’s mandate was to push the look of the film, VFX artists Bryan Rosenblum and Vincent Roma’s brief was to give a subtle touch to the titles. “They couldn’t overpower or take away from the documentary,” Roma explains. The VFX artists layered the titles, faded them on and off and rendered them in HD. The titles often begin in Arabic script changing to English to introduce locations and characters. Rosenblum and Roma also crafted all of the film’s subtitles and end titles. Says managing director Mike Donovan, “At Nice Shoes, we’re always excited to lend a creative hand to a project like Garbage Dreams – that not only looks great aesthetically but also contributes to an improved social standard, worldwide.”

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