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AZ Works OPENS IN Cineport Busan
By Joe Ng, 1 May 2009The southern port city of Busan, which is home to the Pusan International Film Festival, and the Busan Film Commission (BFC) took firm strides towards establishing itself as the premier Asian film and broadcast production with the recent opening of AZ Works post-production complex in Busan’s newly developing Centum City.
Five years in the making, the new post house is located in a four storey, 8,236m² glass wall building in the heart of Busan City. It is also known as ‘AZ Works on the Beach’, to reflect its location in a fast-developing beachside borough not far from Haeundae Beach, Busan’s premiere resort area.
The facility is equipped to handle a full range of post-production work including film processing, editing, graphics CGI, VFX, digital color correction, Blu-ray authoring & mastering, IPTV conversion, hologram contents development and archival restoration.
Second only to Seoul (in the Northwest of South Korea) in terms of location shooting, Busan (in the Southeast) accommodates on average 40 feature film shoots a year, but up to now the city had been lacking in post facilities.
The post services are offered in tandem with BFC’s location services, studios and production support, taking Busan closer to its aim of becoming a one-stop Asian hub for the filmmaking industry.
The new post-production facility is the second phase of Busan’s initiative, Cineport Busan, which was formulated by Busan Film Commission to help foster a stronger film industry.
Korea’s leading post house HFR won the bid to run the post-production facility proving their mettle with their commitment and sound business plans to build Asia’s best film and digital post-production facility.
AZ Works, which also has labs in Seoul and Beijing, is headed by CEO Lee Yong Gi, a leading digital intermediate colorist who worked on landmark Korean films such as Bong Joon-ho’s The Host and Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird.
At the facility’s opening ceremony, veteran director Im Kwon-taek said it was encouraging to see such developments, as he observed there were times in the past when Korean films failed to succeed abroad because of shoddy post-production work.
Present at the facility tour were Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) director Kim Dong-ho, filmmaker Park Chan-wook, who did post at AZ Works on his upcoming vampire thriller Bakjwi (Thirst); Ryoo Seung-wan (The City Of Violence) whose new action drama film was presented at the Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF 2009), and Ming Beaver Kwei, producer of the upcoming Korea-China co-production Sophie’s Revenge (working title), starring Zhang Ziyi.
Busan - with ambitions to be the center of Korea’s film industry - hopes to keep the momentum going, planning to build additional state-of-the-art facilities by 2010 including the Busan Image Center and Film Experience Museum. It also plans to complete a new home for the Pusan International Film Festival by 2011.
More recently, Busan and the Japanese city Sapporo signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate on film production, distribution and training programmes within the film industry in each city.
The MoU was signed in Busan at the Asian Film Policy Forum during the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF). The signing marked the first time that the Busan Film Commission has collaborated with another Asian city. Previously, the city had signed collaboration agreements with Australian and US cities.
“We wanted to catch up with the achievements of the Busan Film Commission. Also we hope to become the starter among Japanese film commissions to proactively develop international collaboration,” said Toshihiko Inoue, commissioner of Sapporo Film Commission.
In the initial stages, the film commission in each city will provide US$16,128 (KWR 20m) each year to fund film projects from Busan and Sapporo, according to Inoue. Recent film collaboration between the two cities include Japan’s Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival funding Busan-based filmmaker Kim Kih-hoon in making short films jointly with two filmmakers from Sapporo.
Yubari is a city nearby Sapporo in the Hokkaido region of Japan. Inoue said the collaboration between Busan and Sapporo could be extended to the whole Hokkaido region.
“Busan has the beach and sea scenery while Hokkaido owns snow and mountain landscapes. This makes us complementary cities in providing various scenery and landscapes for filmmaking,” he said.
Extending its reach, BFC also signed a memorandum-of-understanding (MOU) to create a “Busan-South Gyeongsang Province shooting location cluster” of film commissions with cities in the area. The MOU aims to bring 60 per cent or more of film productions to shoot in the area by creating a network between regions, offering locations information and opening an integrated website.
To this end, BFC held a forum on “Busan’s media industry in the next 10 years”, anticipating a new filmmaking industry order centered on Seoul and Busan, and discussing the needs to be met by the local government in such a case.
For its new post facility, Busan Film Commission (BFC), HFR and attending consultants did extensive research before finally
making a decision to adopt a digital film scanner (FilmLight NorthLight2), two color grading systems (FilmLight BaseLight 4 48T), colour management hardware and software (TrueLight), SAN (DVS DVS-SAN), mastering system (DVS-Clipster), and a number of VFX systems with ‘render farm’ capabilities.
With the set up, high resolution images are stored on RAID protected hard drive storage and can be played and graded interactively. Grading features use a combination of high performance computer hardware and well-proven sophisticated colour grading software. The colour management system allows users to see the images the way they will be when delivered to the end user to ensure the colour integrity of the delivered production.
BFC took the cue from other Korean facilities like HFR (Hollywood Film Recorder), 2L Film, Star East, Chongnam Techno Park (CTP) to install FilmLight film scanning and (in some cases) DI grading systems. HFR, which operates the AZ Works facility, has prior experience and knowledge with its existing NorthLight 1 scanner.
The NorthLight 2 film scanner is designed for “non-compromise” film scanning and can scan 35 and 16mm at resolutions of up to 8K. Scanning can be done round the clock as an automated task. Both 35 and 16mm keycode can be scanned from the film to maintain accurate references to the original film at later post production stages.
The BaseLight FOUR is a resolution independent DI colour grading system. Images can be colour graded, objects can be easily isolated and graded separately and image enhancements can be added. The tool set is widely regarded as the most extensive that there is in the industry.
The BaseLight FOUR uses a ‘cluster based’ design that allows for high speed real-time grading and simultaneous background ingest of material for the following job. The system is configured with four GPU render accelerators, that enhances the speed and interactivity of the grading process.
Recent projects at AZ Works include director Park Chan Wook’s new movie Bakjwi (Thirst) and director Bong Jun Ho’s film ’Mother’.
