Sable.. what you talking about? Explain please.. and in detail
There's not much to tell. I was the senior art director and head of 2D at Warner Bros Digital Studio at the time that this picture was being made, and we supplied some of the visual effects for it. It's all a bit of a blur because I was also working on one of the Batman pictures and other projects.
The reason that it comes go mind is that I had to do a bit of salvage on a sequence, which I seem to remember as being from Contact. It was a chase sequence. The camera assistant had neglected to check the gate of the camera during the shoot, which is a no no. And, of course, the camera developed a problem. The film advance was ever so slightly grinding film around the sprocket holes and the material was being deposited top and bottom of the gate with the result that two pyramids of emulsion bits were forming in the image area. The production was faced with having to reshoot the sequence, a potentially huge expense.
I was asked if I could "paint out" the pyramids, restoring image in those areas, one frame at a time. To put it mildly, I was dubious that it could be done, but I agreed to try . I spent a couple of days meticulously restoring the missing image by hand, one frame at a time. Some of the missing imagery I could cadge from other adjacent frames, massage it into the missing area and retouch lightly. Other elements I digitally hand painted in a photographic look, there being no photographic material to harvest. When I completed the test scene it was recorded back to film.
I remember telling the others in the screening room that they better not laugh. I was convinced that the effort would be a flop. Then we screened the shot.
The damned restoration worked seamlessly except for a pop in one frame, which could be fixed. The good news was that the compromised footage could be saved. The bad news was that the compromised footage could be saved, bad because it was a grueling process, one that I had no desire to continue to do.
Fortunately, I was able to hand it over to one of my staff, and that poor bastard had to do the restoration over the next three weeks, one frame at a time. I did a clean up pass after he had done all of the grunt work.
I'm pretty sure that the sequence was from Contact, as we were working on that show at the time I did the test, but it's always possible that it came from one of the other shows I was doing along with Contact. As I wrote at the beginning, it's a bit of a blur because I was touching a number of productions simultaneously.
