End-to-End, One-Stop-Shop, All-in-One...

...or: all the above.

David Ayer is one of the screenwriters behind huge hits like The Fast and The Furious and Training Day. Harsh Times is a much smaller production, but it meant a lot to Ayer, who wrote, directed and produced the small budget feature. Ayer and cinematographer Steve Mason felt that shooting in the Super 16 mm film format, posting at LaserPacific with a digital intermediate, and outputting to 35 mm film was a no-brainer. “It’s one-stop shopping,” says Ayer. “You can handle everything at once, including the blowup, dust busting and scratch removal, color timing, reframing, grain reduction, and the creative control of the image.” 

Ayer and Mason compared DI tests from three houses before choosing LaserPacific. “Everybody has a different equipment lineup and philosophy on the right way to do a DI,” says Ayer. “It was an easy choice once we saw the output. Part of it is probably the Kodak partnership, and Laser’s deeper understanding of color science, and part of it seems to be the purpose-built hardware at LaserPacific. My advice is to get your money people and investors into the actual DI room and give them the demonstration. Once you see it, it’s self-evident.” 

LaserPacific provided front-end lab work as well as DVD dailies. The conformed negative was scanned at 2K resolution with a Spirit DataCine. Timing was done in a theatrical environment. The DI took two weeks. 

Mason makes this analogy, “David is a writer, who is used to refining drafts of his scripts. That’s what we did with the images in DI.” 

“There’s something really exciting and satisfying about seeing the look of the movie come together,” says Ayer. “It’s amazing just watching the movie develop and grow.”