In the nonfiction programming world of the early '90s, the word documentary was taboo. “We don't use the d-word,” I was told by more than one producer at the time. “The word documentary turns people off,” they would say. This in spite of the fact that Ken Burns' Civil War had all but launched historical docs as an industry.

Co-executive producer Nick Stein shepherded Songs Under a Big Sky for several years until he found the right partnership, which ultimately included National Geographic Television and Mandalay Media Arts, the main HD advocate on the project. (National Geographic Television, Gabriel Olegavich)

In the last 10 years much has changed, however. The History Channel has become a marketable brand-name while films like The Buena Vista Social Club have actually made money. Meanwhile, documentary film festivals continue to spring up across the country, as more filmmakers have become interested in making nonfiction films. Suddenly, the d-word has cachet again.

And now, high-definition video looks to take the documentary genre to even greater heights. Two new, traditional documentaries, both with strong pedigrees and word-of-mouth, have recently wrapped production. Songs Under a Big Sky is a high-def cultural documentary developed by Nick Stein, and Price for Peace is a historical documentary directed by Academy Award-winner James Moll for the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. The two films, both of which are yet to air on broadcast television, share an ease of production and beauty in projection born from high-definition video. They also share serendipitous beginnings.

Careful What You Wish For

“I'd been to the D-Day Museum, just as a member of the public,” recalls Moll, who won last year's best documentary Oscar for The Last Days, the story of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors. “I sat in a theater and watched a film that [Charles] Guggenheim made called D-Day Remembered, which had been nominated for an Oscar a few years back [1994]. I thought, ‘I would have loved to have made a film like this for a museum like this.’ And literally weeks later, when I came back to Los Angeles, the whole idea of making the film came about. It was a tremendous coincidence.”

Moll had previously helped Steven Spielberg establish the Shoah Foundation, and had recently begun interviewing Iwo Jima veterans as research for a dramatic film that Spielberg was interested in developing. Coincidentally, historian Stephen Ambrose was looking for a film to be made on World War II's Pacific Theater for the opening of the Pacific wing in the new National D-Day Museum, which Ambrose founded. When Ambrose asked Spielberg for suggestions, a marriage was proposed. “I was jumping up and down I was so excited,” says Moll.

Price for Peace, shot in Sony’s 24p format, is a collaboration among Academy Award-winning director James Moll, historian Stephen Ambrose, and producer Steven Spielberg. It premiered at the National D-Day Museum on Dec. 7, 2001.

Moll's emotions were quickly sobered by the daunting task of capturing the Pacific War — from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki — in 90 minutes, and he turned to Ambrose for support. “I freely voiced my concerns and said, ‘I can't tell the whole story. Things are going to be left out; things that are very important,’” Moll recalls. “And he said, ‘There's no way you can tell the whole story. You're on the right track. Go with your gut.’”

Moll also went with his gut on a key technical decision. “I'd heard about 24p and wasn't convinced because I'm a bit of a film snob,” admits Moll. “But when I was hunting around for a postproduction facility to come onboard as a partner … I spoke to Emory Cohen at Laser Pacific, and I mentioned that I was interested in 24p. I must have sat silent on the phone for an hour listening to him talk about 24p. Then I began to ask questions. And when I was finished, I pretty much made up my mind that it was going to be 24p. I wanted to try the format.”

Barbershop Music

Songs Under a Big Sky was shot on location with five Sony HD cameras at the Womad Music Festival in the English countryside. The crews captured performance footage, as well as interviews with the festival’s international artists, in a complex, one-day shoot. (National Geographic Television, Oreste Lanzetta)

“I was getting my hair cut and I love my barber,” recalls Nick Stein, creator and co-executive producer of Songs Under a Big Sky. “At one point he says, ‘Have you ever heard of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?’ I said ‘no,’ and he started telling me about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, world music, Peter Gabriel, Real World Records, and loaned me a bunch of CDs. It was like a light bulb went off in my head. I said, ‘I have not seen this on television.’”

Stein shepherded the project for years before he finally found the right partnership to get it off the ground. “I must have run into a half-dozen people who said, ‘I wanted to do that,’” Stein says. “Well, it's not just the idea, it's the execution, it's the partners, it's the branding. It's all of that. By the time we put it all together — with Mandalay, me, National Geographic, and Real World — that was the right partnership.”

Geoffrey Daniels, vice president of development and head of regional production for National Geographic Channels International, applauds Mandalay Media Arts for its “investment in the film and their advocacy of the HD format. They were the ones that made it possible,” he says.

Daniels gives an executive perspective on green-lighting an HD production: “When you get to any stage in development between development hell and production reality — whatever you want to call it — there are always hard decisions being made on a budget basis. And the first things you start cutting are the things where there's not a direct benefit to you in final distribution; where there's a diminished return in terms of what the value of the higher quality format is going to bring you in real sales potential.” Obviously, Songs Under a Big Sky was able to make its case for HD. But, instructively, both Songs and Price for Peace — even with such illustrious producers as Nick Stein/Barry Clark/Peter Gabriel and Steven Spielberg/Stephen Ambrose/James Moll, respectively — had to make deals with post houses and manufacturers in order to get full funding.

Going for HD Gold

With its blend of archival film footage and 24p high-definition video, Price for Peace documents the Pacific Theater portion - from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki - of World War II.

Even with Spielberg's backing, Price for Peace needed Laser Pacific as a post partner. That was in part because the National D-Day Museum, which commissioned the film, is a nonprofit. Songs needed five Sony HD cameras to capture the live concert at England's Womad music festival, a requirement far beyond most documentary production budgets. Again, National Geographic's Daniels: “What you end up needing is the champion that's going to find and leverage the relationships that they have through the Sonys and the Panasonics of the world — the people that provide the equipment. Frankly, it was Mandalay that made their involvement in our project contingent upon high-def, because they believed in the format, particularly in terms of its relevance to this particular concept. They were the ones who delivered some of the deals that made it possible.”

Producer Stein says Sony and the other HD equipment manufacturers seem to look for projects that will showcase their technology as HD is still trying to gain traction in the marketplace. “This seemed to have a lot of elements that seemed attractive to Sony,” he says, referring to Songs. “It was a concert film with multiple cameras. It was a true documentary in Third World countries. It was a music thing, a culture thing. You don't get a lot of that together in one project.”

Sony has an obvious stake in promoting HD as the wave of the future. But what about the filmmakers themselves? For documentary filmmakers, what are the advantages to high-definition video over film?

“As a documentary filmmaker, it’s a tremendous advantage to be able to shoot without cutting the camera for 50 minutes,” says Price for Peace director James Moll, comparing the duration of a 24p videotape to 12-minute film reel.

Certainly director and self-proclaimed film snob Moll sounds enthusiastic about shooting on HD 24p. “As a documentary filmmaker, it's a tremendous advantage to be able to shoot without cutting the camera for 50 minutes. It's a 40-minute tape, but since it's only 24 frames a second, rather than 30 frames, which is the standard video rate, you get more time out of it, so you get 50 minutes out of a 40-minute tape,” he says, adding that he changed film every nine minutes on the Last Days shoot. “In an interview, where people tend to get very involved in a story or begin to get emotional, it's difficult to pull them out of it and say, ‘Hold on while we change film.’”

As a producer, he sounds equally enthusiastic: “If you want to have a true film-look, and if you know you ultimately want to project, 24p is the way to go. Also, a high-def 24p master enables us to make a PAL master for European markets because it's 25 frames — it's close enough to 24 frames. We can make the NTSC master transfer; we can make a film master. It just seems to be the answer: it gives us the most flexibility in distributing the film, and the look is fantastic. I was really surprised.”

Moll also had positive things to say about the on-set, high-def monitor: “There's no guessing. You don't have to wait for the film to come back from the lab to see what it's really going to look like — 'cause it always looks different to the eye than it does when you get your film processed. This way, you get to see the final process.”

The high-def monitor was a savior to the Songs crew when they hauled all the HD equipment from Bur-bank to the Womad festival in the English countryside at the eleventh hour. “All those cameras were coming from America,” says director Michael Coulson. “We had very little time to go through all this gear and see how it was all functioning.”

“The HD cameras worked incredibly well with this low light [onstage at the Womad Music Festival],” says Michael Coulson, director of Songs Under a Big Sky. “They picked up these incredible tones. I was really happy with that.” (National Geographic Televsion, Douglas Kirkland)

The team, which only had one day to capture the festival, got the gear to Womad in time to set up a camera with a good HD monitor and do some shooting during the lighting tests. “Technically, we had difficulties with the lighting at Womad because we were worried about the strobe,” Coulson says. “Some of the stage lighting they used had a kind of beat to it, which was affecting the cameras. We had these tests the morning before we shot to make sure we were working in the right frame rate so we didn't get the strobing effect. We pretty much got away with it. There were one or two shots that had a kind of line rising up, but really we were very lucky.”

On other lighting fronts, Coulson was quite happy with the way the HD cameras performed. In the evening, as the daylong festival drew to a close, an impromptu jam session sprang up, with Irish singer Iarla Ò Lionáird, Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo, and Tanzanian singer and musician Hukwe Zawose, among others. Coulson decided to light it all in candles. “So we set up these candles very quickly and little lanterns all around the artists, and the lighting guy did a very nice, subtle little fill and circle of lights for them to come in and out of,” Coulson says. “The HD cameras worked incredibly well with this low light. They picked up these incredible tones. I was really happy with that.”

Drawbacks? “I didn't realize until later on in our project how heavy these cameras are,” exclaims Coulson. “We were in Naples and I was working with Axel [Baumann, the DP] — he was just about to kill me when I asked for yet another shot of a man with a tambourine. He gave me the camera, and that's actually when I realized, ‘My God, this camera is incredibly heavy, no wonder this guy's falling over.’ I wished I'd shot a bit at the concert just to realize how hard it was. … And these guys were working handheld, and they worked from late morning 'til about 1:30 in the morning.”

The Role of Film

Moll's biggest problems on Price for Peace turned out to be with film — stock footage to be exact. Perhaps the most striking element of the documentary is the amount of archival color footage of the Pacific war. As producer (something he swears he'll never do again), Moll had to oversee the acquisition of vintage WWII footage from the National Archives and then telecine it to 24p. The film was ordered in 35mm whenever available, color-corrected in the telecine, then run through an automatic DVNR process at Laser Pacific. “I wish we had the budget to go through and clean it up further, and get on the Flame and go frame by frame,” Moll says. “There were shots that were so many generations away from the original negative that along the way they began to shake in the gate. They were very shaky. I would have liked to have stabilized some, but ultimately everybody knows it's archival footage.”

Once Moll had incorporated the archival film into Price for Peace, the project saw its last bit of celluloid. “When you see it projected, it's being projected from a computer, from a hard drive — not from film or videotape,” Moll says of his finished product, which premiered at the museum on Dec. 7, 2001, to coincide with the 60^th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “There's no tape in that projection booth. There was no film in that projection booth. They let me go upstairs and grab the mouse and press the start button. And it was amazing, truly amazing, when I first saw that image. I was just blown away by the look.”

Will an appropriation of the industry by high-definition undermine our love of cinema and documentaries? “I do not believe that,” states Moll emphatically. “I have had that romantic notion for many, many years. I was a big film snob. Ultimately what's important is the story. Certainly the look of the film contributes immensely to the story, but I can look at a film like The Celebration that was shot on a consumer camera, and it was a story so well told that you look far beyond what the look of the film is. And the subtle differences that may result from switching from film to 24p high-def ultimately will be negligible to telling the story.”

National Geographic's Daniels is even more charitable about a high-def future. “One of the most obvious parts of nonfiction programming is reality television in that it is contrived,” he says. “What I would hope [to see] is a trend toward something more organic and truthful in storytelling, that perhaps strips down barriers between the audience and the subject in ways that hasn't been done before. Maybe it would represent a new form of trust between filmmaker and audience, to be engaged in the material and stories that we're telling. … So much of the power of [Songs] comes from the voices and the personalities and the stories of the artists and of the subjects themselves, and I think when you have a format like high-def, the ability to remove that barrier is further enhanced.”

Documentary lovers can only hope. And Moll seems fairly sure: “New technology is always interesting. And it's clear that our industry is moving toward HD 24p, certainly as a means of distribution of films. And it's likely that it will be our primary means of capturing them as well. I really believe that — and sooner than we think.”

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Darroch Greer is a documentary filmmaker and historian who is currently completing a film on hunger in America called Time of Hunger. He is also researching Abraham Lincoln for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2004 in Springfield, Ill.

What is an HD image? Zeros and ones. What is a computer-generated image? Zeros and ones. This bit of symmetry has now touched the documentary world, changing the debate around another common documentary question: What is real?

The hottest topics in documentary filmmaking today revolve around the relative merits of film versus HD, and the potential of HD to change the economics and aesthetics of documentaries. But long before there were 24p cameras, people debated the ethics of documentaries, indeed their very nature. From the Maysles brothers, whose remarkable fly-on-the-wall work suggested that filmmakers could be invisible, to Barry Clark, who stages elements and uses nontraditional narrative techniques, documentarians have long asked themselves how to tell the most truthful and interesting stories.

Now they have something new to consider: the CG documentary. Digital technology now makes it possible for dinosaurs to roam the earth. Space can materialize before our eyes; weather can be whipped up that even storm chasers can't capture on film. The re-creation of past, distant, or dangerous worlds is now possible at a level that would have made the producers of You Are There envious. Ironically, as today's reality TV shows seek to put people in real danger and real situations, documentarians now have an option — some would say an obligation — to put viewers in artificial worlds that seem real.

“It's no longer enough for a paleontologist to hold up a dinosaur bone and tell you about it,” says Pierre de Lespinois, who produced the Discovery Channel's CG documentary When Dinosaurs Roamed America. “People don't want to see a dinosaur bone, they want to see a dinosaur.” The Emmy-winning de Lespinois is one of the most experienced HD filmmakers around, having served as executive producer on the pioneering HD series The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne. In the last two years, de Lespinois has shot $60 million worth of HD programming. He has used Sony's 24p cameras inside a volcano, in sandstorms, and in a British Columbian deluge. He started a multiweek shoot in the Arctic Circle by dropping the camera, bending the matte box, and cracking the chassis. The shoot went on.

But de Lespinois' faith in HD goes way beyond his confidence in durable electronics. It goes beyond the fact that he really, really likes not having to reload every 12 minutes. Just as important as the practical concerns, de Lespinois is interested in the storytelling revolution that HD enables. From a technical standpoint, HD provides a much more seamless pairing of live action and CG footage. “We don't spend any time trying to make the animal look like it belongs in the environment,” de Lespinois says, noting that the texture of HD footage and CG imagery is similar — no film grain. “And we can see the composite right in the field so we know right away if we got what we needed.” De Lespinois adds that the use of CG is a change that will affect nonfiction programming in a big way. “There was a template for documentaries that is now in major upheaval and transition,” he says.

The Discovery Channel’s When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth, which was produced by Pierre de Lespinois, fuses live-action HD footage with CG elements to take viewers back in time.

The Discovery Channel — a pioneer in CG documentary programming with Inside the Space Station, Dinosaurs, and other shows — clearly believes in the potential of CG as well. Earlier this year, Discovery Communications Inc. entered into a partnership with de Lespinois' Evergreen Films to open Meteor Studios, a state-of-the-art visual effects facility in Montreal. The facility provides animation to the range of Discovery shows, and also provides non-Discovery filmmakers with access to CG tools and artists.

In addition to enabling CG documentaries, de Lespinois feels that HD will be part of a larger revolution in the visual language of documentaries. “We are the last generation that will shoot on film,” he says. “I say that and I do shoot film. I choose the right medium for the job.” But within 10 years, de Lespinois predicts that HD will be the standard medium.

He's looking forward to the “new visual experiences” that will emerge as filmmakers embrace HD and the skills of the film and video worlds blend. “There was a time when you were a film shooter or a video shooter,” he points out. “The only thing in common was that they both shot moving images. When we first started shooting HD we had no lenses, no matte boxes. Video people had no idea what we were talking about.”

Now de Lespinois says the influences of film-style shooting are finding their way into HD. This means that both film and video shooters will need to learn new skills, he says. Film shooters will need to study the HD camera and medium. “There are a 100 variables and you have to spend the time to learn how to use them. You have to get under the hood,” he says.

But he also sees an imperative for video shooters. “The guys coming from the film world bring camera moves, lighting, focus, and filtering skills that video shooters weren't thinking about in the past,” he says. “The days of not knowing will be over. You won't be able to look through a lens and say ‘my fingernail's in focus and so's that mountain.’ People with skills and subtleties honed in film shooting will come into the video world and change the imagery and the visual vocabulary. This will bring the game up.

“It means old assumptions will have to change,” he concludes and with a laugh returns to more practical matters. “It means one union.”