Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah - Blackmagic Design Inc. has announced that We Are the Strange, a 94-minute animation produced in the United States and whose workflow utilizes Blackmagic's DeckLink Pro capture card, is being screened at Sundance Film Festival.
In addition to being the only full-length feature animation at Sundance, We Are the Strange is unique in that it is composed of mixed media consisting of 3D, stop motion, and 2D, taking almost three years to complete. The film was produced, written, and directed by M Dot Strange. Chaylon Blancett was brought aboard for postproduction.
Strange and Blancett used Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects 7 to create 1920x1080 Blackmagic 10-bit uncompressed movie files. In post, the final movies were exported as standard-definition (SD) movies to be off-line edited on an Apple G4 and a Mac Pro using Final Cut Pro 5. Online assembly was also performed with After Effects.
The After Effects project files were then sent to a G5 dual 1.8 with 4GB of RAM. Using the SD files as reference in Final Cut Pro, the uncompressed 10-bit files were color corrected in After Effects. The DeckLink Pro was used to preview their photo JPEG files on both an analog CRT monitor and a DLP projector with SDI inputs.
"The DeckLink Pro was fantastic and extremely easy to use and install. It allowed us to view all of our 10-bit uncompressed movies simultaneously, taking analog out of the card to the CRT monitor as well as SDI out to the digital projector," says M Dot Strange, director, screenwriter, and editor of We Are the Strange. "We also enjoyed the flexibility of previewing anything we wanted through the card in any resolution."
Blancett, co-editor on the film, adds, "The DeckLink Pro is the perfect product for young creative individuals to finish what they have worked so hard for. With the DeckLink Pro, we are able to work with the highest-quality formats while manipulating and finishing the project perfectly, without any loss of quality. We were not bound by the restraints of digital or analog signals. The use of the DeckLink Pro card made it easy to complete our vision for the movie because we were equipped with the right tools."