By Anonymous on Sunday, July 22, 2001 - 11:11 pm:

By Steve Pang

Post Account: HBO's "Band of Brothers"

"Band of Brothers" is based on the book by Stephen Ambrose and details the experiences of Easy Company during the Second World War, from their arduous training in Toccoa, Georgia, to their parachute jump into Normandy on D-Day, through fierce winter battles in Belgium, their discovery and liberation of a Nazi concentration camp and finally the taking of Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" headquarters. Their story has all the ingredients of a great war movie, but it all happened for real. Stephen Ambrose's book also recounts an incident which became the basis of the film "Saving Private Ryan." The series was executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, and produced by Tony To and Billy Fox for HBO. It is believed to be the most expensive made-for-television project in history.

Principal photography began in March 2000 at Hatfield Studios, Hertfordshire, England, where much of "Saving Private Ryan" was shot. The production employed a crew of approximately six hundred people including an army of carpenters and plasterers housed in the studio's vast hangars, busily creating towns and buildings, much of which would eventually be blown to smithereens.

The flat ground surrounding the disused airstrip at Hatfield (once a British Aerospace factory) was transformed into movie set depicting some of the various locales that feature in the story of Easy Company. In one corner was France, in another, Austria. Across the fake river carved into the earth by diggers was Holland. Step onto the airstrip itself and you found yourself in Toccoa, Georgia. The production would also be filming on location around England, and in the Swiss Alps.

Our cutting rooms were at the studio too. The editorial team consisted of four editors (Billy Fox, Frances Parker, John Richards, and Oral Ottey), three first assistants, two second assistants (of whom I was one), a third assistant and a trainee.

We had a total of nine Avids (running on Mac 9600 CPUs) on a Unity network with roughly 900 Gb of storage and an LVD drive bay for transferring telecined rushes. The equipment hire company was Hyperactive. My job prior to "Band of Brothers" had been NBC's "The 10th Kingdom." On that production we used Mediashare FC which was a little clunky to use (control is via a Java-based console) and at times temperamental; I still vividly remember the bizarre, horizontally scrolling picture bug that hit us when the number of mounted volumes on our system exceeded 40. In contrast, Unity was reliable, smooth, easy to maintain and generally hassle-free.

The only "issue" we had with Unity was that occasionally Avids would not see material that had just been digitised on an assistant's machine. The standard "refresh media databases" procedure known to all Avid users is complicated somewhat on Unity by the fact that all volumes (or "workspaces," as they are known in Unity-land) have a subfolder representing each Avid on the network. Within this subfolder is an OMFI MediaFiles folder and a set of media database files. Factor in the ability to log on to any of the nine Avids as any of up to nine operators with different access privileges, and you get a situation where database files can be trashed at desktop level by a user but not remade. Similarly, media could be moved around or deleted at desktop level by a user, who then might find it impossible to update the database files from that same machine. In short, it makes things a bit confusing. This isn't a bug or a flaw in the software: It's just something that operators have to be aware of. Despite the demands we made it on it, though, the Unity system held up remarkably well and was a lot more stable and faster than Mediashare FC.

Our daily workflow was as follows: Every evening, the day's sound rushes (on DAT with Nagra back-up) would be digitised and broken down into takes. Early the next morning, our dailies would arrive from BBC's telecine department on an LVD drive and on Digibeta tape. The digitized rushes would be dragged and dropped from the LVD drive onto our Unity drives, the Avid bins copied to our project folder and syncing up would begin on the Avid.

It had been decided that the DPs should get tapes of the dailies at master/uncompressed quality. This presented a problem to us since it meant we had to produce DV tapes of sunc-up selected takes only, at full digital master quality -- not Avid playouts. The only way to get round this was for the 3rd Assistant to compile a tape-to-tape edit of selected takes using the Digibeta TK masters while the syncing up was happening on the Avid. All the In and Out timecodes were written down, and then an exact copy of the compiled tape would be made in the Avid - using the sunc-up labrolls as the source. The result was an Avid sequence that matched frame for frame the compiled tape -- but with sync audio. The audio tracks could then be laid back to the video on the compiled tape giving us uncompressed pictures with sync sound! This was probably the most time-consuming task of the daily rushes routine, but it had to be done.

Once sunc up, the dailies would then be broken down, arranged into scene bins and sent across to the relevant editor via a shared Unity workspace -- each editor hand their own project stored on their 9600. With the rushes prepped and ready for the editors to work on, all that remained was for dailies tapes to be made for various heads of department and production personnel.



After the first few weeks of shooting, the original plan to have one episode shoot at a time with a slight overlap for pick-ups was pretty much abandoned and it became the norm to have two main units shooting episodes simultaneously. Working in post, I don't know much about line-producing but scheduling this gargantuan project must have been a nightmare. How it all went so smoothly I'll never know.

The average amount of film shot per day was roughly 12,000 feet but the most we had to deal with was a total of 54,000 feet over a two-day period (which happened to overlap with the UK petrol crisis, if memory serves me). The average amount of footage an assistant might expect on a "normal" feature film often doesn't exceed 8-9,000 feet and can be as low as 1,500 feet.

The VFX department was headed by Angus Bickerton and worked closely with Editorial, both metaphorically and literally since the VXF crew were based in the same building. For most viewers, the stand-out VFX sequence will probably be the D-Day parachute jump into Normandy, which blends dozens of computer-generated C-47 planes careering through a storm of anti-aircraft fire, with miniature models and live action shots of the men leaping from their planes and parachuting down to earth. There are literally hundreds of other shots though, from minor fixes and enhancements to a CGI recreation of wartime Paris.

One of the most unusual aspects of cutting the shows is that HBO have not enforced any show lengths on the production: the directors and editors have been allowed the freedom to make each episode as long or as short as they feel appropriate, in a way more akin to feature film production.

"Band of Brothers" was a mammoth project for all concerned and looking back it seems miraculous that the thing went as smoothly as it did. Now the series is in the final stages of post and is expected to air on HBO in September. Recently, there was a special commemorative D-Day screening on the Normandy beaches for the actual veterans whose extraordinary story is told in the series. While I can't reveal much about what you can expect to see, I can safely say that "Band of Brothers" will be an incredible viewing experience and I'm glad I played a small part in the telling of this amazing, true story.

More "Band of Brothers" and Avid-related links can be found on Steve's home page.

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