SOHO IMAGES COLLABORATE ‘MAD DOG’

SOHO IMAGES, London’s leading laboratory facility and Digital Film Lab, have collaborated on the UK feature film ‘Mad Dogs’ starring Jonathan Pryce, Saeed Jaffrey and Paul Barber.
Shot on 16mm for blow up to 35mm, ‘Mad Dogs’ was written by Simon Louvish and directed by Ahmed Jamal.
The story centres around Rabbie Burns, a young man with a history of mental problems, who is hearing voices which inform him he has two days to save the world, before the ‘Supreme Being’ himself puts an end to the entire human project.
The partnership between, Simon Louvish and Director Ahmed Jamal, who’s credits include the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary ‘Dead Man Talking’ have collaborated on a number of feature length scripts, however this was the first time either had post produced a 16mm feature film via the digital route.
Jamal said: “We decided the digital route mainly because ours was a relatively low budget film but we wanted a big budget look. The digital route was ideal because our script involved shooting certain scenes on digital betacam. Some of the scenes included: the documentary sequences, the news reportage and scenes that required characters to talk via a TV monitor.”
Inferno artists, Claus Greffel and Sam Smith, carried out a number of special effects including an apocalyptic scene in which the sun and moon rise above and over St. Paul’s Cathedral. Extra chimneys were added to a warehouse, a seamless removal of a mask from a character’s face, speed changes on action shots and even a winking eye of a severed head were worked on using Inferno.
The Inferno was also employed for re-grading and enhancing a particular problematic scene, in which a fill light was left on in a background by mistake. This led to a miss-match between cut-backs of the hero and the wider fill light shots. The inferno overcame this obstacle by darkening sections within the picture frame on the wider shots in order to match the rest of the scene.
Once completed, the entire feature was re-recorded to 35mm Master Digital Negative via the Arri-Laser at Digital Film Lab-Copenhagen onto a colour intermediate for release printing at Soho Images. The prints were struck from the master negative by Soho Images after a protective interpositive was made.
‘Mad Dogs’ recently enjoyed a hugely successful premier at the recent Cannes Film Festival. (CD)