Editor's Guild Magazine: 'Bride' Stripped Bare. "Technologically, this is a movie of many firsts; it’s the first feature-length, stop-motion film edited using Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP), it’s the first feature shot using commercial digital SLR still photography cameras and, perhaps most significantly, it’s the first movie to choose digital cameras over film cameras based on the criterion of image quality.

First assistant Ralph Foster explains that having so many JPEG still frames seems to challenge the system. That demand is unique to stop-motion production. Adding more RAM didn’t help, so to cut down on JPEG overhead, they were converted into QuickTime.

Lucas is running an Apple G5 (dual-2GHz) and FCP 4.5. Although version 5 and Mac OS X Tiger became available during production, there was no switch midstream because of the risk that it might break something in the production’s custom pipeline based on Final Cut Pro 4.5. Final Cut Pro generates XML data of shot information. XML data, which is just specially formatted text, is much easier to integrate into animation pipelines. For Corpse Bride, data wrangler/computer programmer Martin Pengelly-Phillips wrote a utility in Python computer language to convert the XML data into a flattened reel. The shots get validated for naming and length, and checked against the list of known shots in the editorial database in FileMaker Pro. In Python, a series of AppleScripts are created to update the editorial database with the most recent cut.

The FCP project is 80 minutes long at 720 x 480 (offline) and 23.98 fps (for easier NTSC pull-down). Every shot is a folder of images, and each clip is treated as a reel. The EDL is eventually exported in CMX format for 2K conform on Quantel IQ, then output to film on Arri Laser.

FilmLight built software to take a raw file from a digital camera and output a Cineon file with the look of 5248 film stock. Production software incorporated dcRAW and Truelight’s proprietary color transforms. The software took care of resizing and annotation by generating code that directed Apple Shake to produce QuickTime files for editorial and 2K DPX sequences to match the color profile of 5248 film scans. Although the Canon would shoot 4k, the images were wrangled at 2k (2048 x 1365) because that would be the final output with the Arri Laser.

Corpse Bride, along with films like Sin City, lead a trend in using emerging digital technology in ways not intended for feature filmmaking. Whether using gear designed for digital still photography or for HDTV, the visual results are striking.

Digital filmmaking has long been considered a trade-off compared to 35mm filmmaking; digital was cheaper or could do things impossible with film, but at a cost to overall image quality. With Corpse Bride, this is no longer the case." New technologies are expanding boundaries of visual narrative possibilites. Are you up to the challenge?