Jonathan Baltrusaitis is the Calgary-based editor of Radiant City, the Burns Film/National Film Board documentary by Gary Burns and Jim Brown that examines suburban sprawl through the eyes of one family. It is currently playing in theatres across the country via Odeon Films.

By now, every independent filmmaker in Canada knows that they can shoot in HD, edit in a relatively inexpensive offline suite and blow up to 35mm film once (or if) theatrical prints are needed. It’s a godsend in terms of economics and workflow, especially in our frugal production climate.

But there are also some unexpected bonuses that turn up in the edit suite, as I discovered editing Radiant City last year. A great deal of image manipulation can be done, opening up new esthetic possibilities and shifting the balance between what can be accomplished in an offline and online edit.

Director Gary Burns chose the Panasonic AJ-HDC27H VariCam to shoot his first feature-length documentary. Most of Radiant City was shot at 720p24, which allows for about one half-hour of footage onto each tape. This enabled co-director Jim Brown to conduct long interviews, and for a suburbanite’s entire morning commute to be captured with only one tape change.

The footage was digitized at full resolution into a Mac running Apple Final Cut Pro, precluding the need to re-digitize from tape for the online. Gary, Jim and I were thrilled to discover how the images could be manipulated on the fly without waiting for rendering. The system gave us a lot of freedom to experiment and to see the results immediately.

Radiant City includes numerous talking head interviews. Jim and Gary wanted to feature them without relying too much on B-roll cutaways, which presented a challenge in terms of maintaining a visual rhythm. In these cases, I digitally created camera moves by resizing and panning the image over time. The moves could be timed to punctuate an interviewee’s point, lending visual emphasis to just the right word or gesture. I made some of the moves very realistic by introducing a subtle nudge or jog that a camera operator might make involuntarily while shooting.

Digital camera moves were also useful when cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin found himself physically constrained, as in the back seat of a car. By cutting and magnifying an image in the suite, one shot easily became three. In our first 35mm test reel, we learned that a shot could be zoomed in as far as 140% and still look good on a theatrical screen. Grainier footage from a second consumer camera was also intercut, which allowed us to stretch the VariCam footage as far as 200% without stepping outside of the film’s visual consistency.

Some of Radiant City’s most beautiful images are the under-cranked slow-motion shots of construction machinery and the time lapses of traffic through suburban neighborhoods. Patrick captured these shots using the VariCam’s in-camera off-speed settings. I manipulated a few of them further in the suite to create unusual visual effects, such as a slow-motion shot that plays at normal speed and a time lapse that accelerates as it plays.

All of the film’s special effects shots were built in the offline edit, and did not need to be reconstructed in the online. There is a green-screen composite shot and several matte shots in which one part of the image plays in real time while the other races by in time lapse. The ability to see these effects as they would appear in the film – and not as mere ‘place holders’ or suggestions for the online – was a great advantage.

Radiant City was delivered to post house Rainmaker in Vancouver on a hard drive as a series of five uncompressed QuickTime movies. There it was color corrected, titles were added, the still image for the end credits was animated, and the 35mm film transfer was made. Neither the original tapes nor the raw-footage files were needed again.

There are some holdouts who argue that HD doesn’t stand up to 35mm film in picture quality. I like to point out that unless the two formats are intercut, no theatrical audience is going to notice a difference. I’m sure that some readers will balk at the idea that an HD image can be manipulated as far I have claimed, but the evidence is on the screen.

www.radiantcitymovie.com