Is Windhorse the world's first digital feature film?

Windhorse is one of the first--if not the first--dramatic feature movies shot on a digital camera and subsequently transferred to 35mm for theatrical release. Perhaps what is most interesting is that this achievement, if such it is, was more a function of creative expediency than a desire for technological innovation.

Today, the idea of a feature film using digital technology is old hat. In the indie film world, it is the fastest way to the lowest production budget. In Hollywood, it is the most powerful post-production tool for special effects, color work and all sorts of image manipulation.

But when we shot Windhorse in the fall of 1996, it was hardly accepted practice anywhere in the industry.

The Sony SX1000 prosumer camera had recently come onto the market and it seemed the obvious solution to a central problem we faced in pulling off the Windhorse production- in order to elude the Chinese secret police, we had to appear to be tourists, not professional filmmakers, while shooting scenes inside Tibet. The "little camera," as we called it, worked admirably in that regard. One afternoon we were using it to film panoramas of the Lhasa skyline from the roof of the Dalai Lama's palace. Nearby, I observed an American tourist in Bermuda shorts also shooting views of the city with his home video camera. It was a Sony 1000.

Another then-new digital tool that proved to be quite helpful in the clandestine production inside Tibet was a small DAT recorder used by our sound recordist, Sam Chapin. With the small DAT stuffed in a pocket inside his jacket and a wire running down his sleeve to the mic, Sam was able to record a variety of evocative and unusual location sound. Lhasa is like no other place in the world. The voices of market sellers and buyers, the prayers and chanting of pilgrims, and the bells, horns and cymbals of the temples all gave a compelling authenticity to the final soundtrack assembled by sound mixer Skip SoRelle.

Also new to the marketplace in 1996 was the professional Sony DVW 700 WF digibeta camera. The Professional Products division of Sony generously loaned us an early model of the camera. I often cringed, thinking about what the Sony folks would say if they had seen their beautiful new (and expensive) camera being toted on the back of a Nepali porter wearing flip-flops on his feet, walking along narrow snow-covered trails, 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas.

The 1000 was used for a week of filming in Lhasa and the surrounding countryside right under the noses, and security cameras, of the Chinese police. The 700 was used for all of the filming in Kathmandu and in the remote mountain regions of Mustang, along the Nepal-Tibet border. Director of Photography Steve Schecter did a fantastic job getting the most out of both cameras. Like me, Steve had never worked on a dramatic feature. But we shared a background in ethnographic filmmaking, and his many years of experience, especially those spent shooting indigenous peoples in the third world, paid major dividends.

Once back from south Asia, we spent the better part of a year cutting the film on an early model of the Avid 1000 which had been our regular off-line system since 1991. Avid was so pleased with the project that they subsequently used some of our footage in ads and demos of the Avid line. (For most of the 1980s, when tape-to-tape video editing had been the only option, I had clung to film editing on a Steenbeck which is, after all, a non-linear editing device. But by the late 80s, editors like Tony Black, who worked with us on Windhorse, had proven the value of Avids and other digital systems.)

In the later stages of post-production, the digital tools really proved their worth. Despite--or perhaps I should say, because of--the documentary, "grabbed" style in which much of the film had been shot, we needed to create a handful of special effect shots. Rather than the magical sorts of digital "monster and spaceship" effects then starting to gain favor in Hollywood, we required "fixes" of footage that was unusable or simply less effective than it might have been otherwise. Looking at the finished product, I would be surprised if most viewers, even filmmakers, can spot the special effects rendered by the now defunct Roland House post production facility in Washington, D.C. (I'll give you a hint-in the middle of a tilt shot on a Lhasa street scene showing a guy brushing his teeth, a little kid stuck his face briefly but completely into the lens. He was digitally erased.)

Finally, it was digital color correction that gave Windhorse the kind of visual polish one associates with a dramatic feature. At the time, you heard a lot about film vs. video, "film look" treatments, etc. Today, a lot of that pointless debate has subsided. We were fortunate to have the help of Fritz Roland, the owner of Roland House and a longtime "film guy," serving as colorist on a da Vinci system. We did not add grain of any kind, but we did apply a digital "pulldown" effect with a DVE box.

I don't know if it "looked like film" to other filmmakers, but my own goal was met-I thought it looked good, especially on tape or DVD. The bump to 35mm was provided by 4MC (also now defunct) using a three strip film encoding process. At the time, Sony had started doing digital to film transfers, but we couldn't quite afford what was, at that time, a very unique and expensive process.

Windhorse became one of a group of films coming out in the late 90s that established digital as a viable medium for feature film production and post production. Whatever our claim to fame as the first digital dramatic feature released theatrically, it was probably the only way we could have done what we did.