“Dayton Duncan, one of my long-time producing partners, came to me about 10 years ago with the idea of making a documentary about the national parks,” Burns says. “I said yes within a millisecond. We both thought of this as an opportunity to celebrate the special places in our land, which for the first time in all of human history were set aside not for kings, other royalty or the very rich, but for all people for all time. We saw this subject as an opportunity to understand not only where we have been as a people and a nation, but where we are today, and where we are going to be tomorrow.”

Director Ken Burns behind the camera

 

The documentary artfully interweaves archival still and motion pictures with images culled from some 400,000 feet of new Super 16 film produced at national monuments and the 57 parks in 49 of the 50 states.

Duncan and co-producer Craig Mellish scouted locations, and decided where and when to capture the wonders of nature on film. Squires was the principal cinematographer with additional camera work by Allen Moore, Lincoln Else and Burns.

 

It was no walk in the park. Duncan and Squires typically started hiking to locations several hours before dawn, and began filming at sunrise. The weather ran the gamut from snow storms to sunshine and temperatures ranged from 20 degrees below zero to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. They typically hiked back to camp in the dark.

A mule occasionally accompanied them, but Squires generally carried everything he needed in a backpack, including his camera, Canon 8:64 and 11:165 mm zooms and 300 mm lenses, a tripod, and an ample supply of film. Squires had Kodak Vision2 500T 7218 and 100T 7212 on his palette.

“There is something magical about the look of a tungsten-balanced film exposed in daylight with a Number 85 filter on the lens,” he says.

Squires frequently captured dramatic unplanned shots on film, e.g., hot plumes from geysers of boiling water thrusting up through a frozen landscape, a buffalo with icicles hanging off of his furry chin, and bears catching salmon with their paws at the bottom of a waterfall.

“The film that Buddy shot is so spectacular and beautiful that it transcends being pretty pictures,” Burns observes. “He captured the essence of nature.”

 

John Dowdell at Goldcrest Postproduction in Manhattan was the colorist. “I met Ken and Buddy in 1985 when I collaborated with them on The Statue of Liberty,” Dowdell recalls. “That was their third film. I have worked on all of Ken’s subsequent films, and also re-timed Brooklyn Bridge (the first film) in HD format.”

Dowdell joined Goldcrest about three years ago. The post production facility installed an ARRISCAN around six months later.

The EDL, negative, archival source tapes and film, and high-resolution animation files were delivered to Goldcrest Postproduction. They scanned the Super 16 film at 3K resolution. Dowdell stresses that the ARRISCAN is pin-registered, assuring an absolutely steady transfer. The 3K transfer was down-sampled to a 2K log file.

Dowdell estimates that they had approximately four terabytes of data stored for each of the six films. When color corrections were completed, he and Goldcrest online editor Peter Heady collaborated on adding final touches to the documentary.

 

After Dowdell completed color timing, Burns and Duncan came in for screenings. There were usually other people who had worked on the film, friends and guests from PBS in the 50 seat theater which has a large screen and a DLP 2K projector.

 “At the end of each screening, the guests would leave, and Ken, Dayton and the editor would go over their notes with me,” Dowdell says. “It was always simple things, like they wanted a little more saturated colors, or something to be darker or warmer.”

Burns put that into perspective: “This isn’t like a narrative movie, where you are manipulating colors for moods. Nature was our gaffer. Basically, we are comparing the projected images to our memories of what it was like while we were capturing images on film. Just because technology allows you to make blacks blacker or pull details out of dark shadows doesn’t mean you should do it. We love the mystery that evokes.” 

The National Parks: America’s Best Idea will also be released in Blu-ray and standard DVDs formats.” I transferred and color-corrected two extra hours of behind the scenes images,” Dowdell says. “The DVD release will be 14 hours long. I’ve seen Blu-ray versions on a 70-inch plasma screen, and they are absolutely spectacular.”

His final observation: “The ARRISCAN is a dream machine. There’s a sunset scene at Yosemite with a mountain in the background where you can literally see the texture of the water in a lake in the foreground, and that is just one example.”

 

RELATED LINKS

Ken Burns' National Parks
http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/


Goldcrest
http://www.goldcrestfilms.com/postny/index.html


ARRI Relativity
http://www.arri.de/digital_intermediate_systems/relativity.html




EXCERPTS and PREVIEWS on YouTube

PBS PREVIEWS: NATIONAL PARKS | Extended Preview | PBS

THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA'S BEST IDEA | Grand Canyon/Kir