Filmmaking is a collaborative art form. That's why it's important that the images cinematographers put their heart and soul into are seen accurately in dailies and during post-production. When the costume designer is wondering how a certain red dress will play once the cinematographer has desaturated the color, or the production designer is choosing a certain texture for a wall, consistency is crucial.

LaserPacific in Hollywood has devised a solution to the consistency issue called accurateIMAGE^TM (aIM) system. It uses proprietary Kodak technology and the ASC Color Decision List to capture and reproduce perfectly the cinematographer's intentions at each step of production and post-production. Everyone involved sees the same picture, which eliminates confusion and incorrect expectations, saving time and keeping projects on schedule.

DP Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC shows the before-and-after look when using LaserPacific's accurateIMAGETM (aIM) system with a scene from Bolden!, during a slide presentation at Plus Camerimage International Festival of the Art of Cinematography in Lodz, Poland.

The aIM system was recently put to the test by Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC on his film Bolden!, a mythical account of the life of jazz music pioneer Buddy Bolden. Zsigmond and director Dan Pritzker envisioned a desaturated look for the film, which is set in 1890s New Orleans.

"I wanted to light the film like a black-and-white movie," says Zsigmond. "While we were preparing, I saw some tests of the aIM system, and I said 'This is for me.' Each night of the production I would sit down with my stills photographer, Peter Sorel, and desaturate the stills to make them look the way we wanted the dailies to look. His laptop computer was calibrated to the LaserPacific system. We emailed those images to LaserPacific, and the timer, Bruce Goodman, matched the stills 100 percent. We saw dailies in a large hotel room, with a large projection from the aIM DailiesPlayer. It was so amazing to see the images in dailies matching the stills perfectly – not more, not less."

"We could also use the aIM DailiesPlayer to change the images right then and there," says Zsigmond. "I could show the director variations, and I could make it darker, brighter, add more color or take away color, and that information would go back to LaserPacific. When we got to the DI, we could start off with the exact correction that we had done on location during dailies. I was very glad to have the system."

Glenn Kennel, vice president and general manager, Feature Film Services, for LaserPacific, has been an innovator in digital filmmaking technologies for two decades. He says that the aIM system is based on more than a year of research and development and a year of production testing. "aIM gives filmmakers pictures that look like the final film product from the first dailies to DI and through to all the deliverables. It's the first full end-to-end, color-calibrated process for film production. Before, people involved in the filmmaking process got used to seeing pictures in different formats, on different types of displays. Video, even high-definition video, has color, contrast and imaging characteristics that are quite different from film. The color-calibrated aIM telecine process and the aIM dailies system deliver trustworthy dailies that look like film and not video.

"aIM is a process designed to allow filmmakers to carry their creative vision from pre-production to delivery," adds Kennel. "We basically burn the film LUTs into the editorial and video dailies copies. aIM ensures that what you see on the set, in dailies and in previews, and in DI will match the film and digital cinema releases. Starting on day one, what you see is what you will get. And even more importantly, what you see is what everyone else sees, too."

"I think it's a fantastic system," says Zsigmond. "The director, the producer, the production designer, and even the actors said they'd never seen dailies like this. I think it's a miracle."