Behind the Lens Series: BANTING (2014)

BANTING (2014)
By Derrick Loo

In the film Banting, Yasmin Muhammad (Izyan Mellyna Ishak), an amateur wrestler, battles not just her opponents in the ring, but also society expectations of her. Raised in a strict Malay family, her endeavor inevitably raises a lot of eyebrows, including those of her best buddy Zaidy Salihin (Fauzie Laily). In spite of that, Yasmin perseveres through the rigorous training drills and with her natural athletic talent, impresses everyone, including her jaded coach Harry Kosugi (Jimmy Taenaka), in her debut fight victory.

Zaidy and the wrestling buddies convince Yasmin to give one more shot at wrestling.

Feeling encouraged, Yasmin began committing more time to wrestling while at the same time, having to find ways and excuses to hide involvement with the club from her mother, Halimah (Mastura Ahmad), often times to hilarious effect. However, luck ran out eventually and that culminated in a confrontation between Yasmin and Halimah, threatening to derail her from her dream. Just as she's poised to give up her wrestling dream, her wrestling buddies and Zaidy conspires to wist her away to fight in a match that could change the course of her life - and her relationship with her mother.

Banting's story is something that is very close to heart for writer/director Raihan Halim. It's essentially a story about courage and perseverance in overcoming the challenges in one's pursuit of his/ her dreams; a topic that transcends race and religion - and one that perhaps parallel that of Raihan's in his film making journey thus far. And this message comes across robustly, in spite of the lighthearted approach that the director adopts. "My story about being true to yourself, breaking free from the expectations that comes from either ourselves, our family or society at large," Raihan explains.

Director Raihan Halim (L) and DP Jason Tai lines up a shot.

Despite having extensive directing experience, mostly in TV productions, Banting is Raihan's first outing as a feature director. He ropes in some of his usual collaborators to work on the film, such as art director, Junior Foong and editor, Huda Azzis. Cinematography duties were handed to Jason Tai, who had also worked with Raihan on several of the latter's projects, and shares similar sensibilities and tastes as the director himself. "It helps that we watched the same type of films. So when I said, ' I want a Hot Fuzz (2007) shot', or 'Give me a Nacho Libre (2006) shot', Jason knows what I was talking about," adds Raihan.

As a long time wrestling fan, Jason was inevitably thrilled when approached with the project. He recalls how he enjoyed watching wrestling on TV but noted that the scope and scale of the wrestling scenes in Banting would be much smaller. "Typically people would know about the big one - World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), where the production value is off the charts but at the same time, there are in fact a lot of independent wrestling associations out there. And most of the time, the venues that they performed in were much less glamorous. It could be some high school gymnasiums or any indoor space that can accommodate the ring and a few rows of chairs!", Jason says.

In pre-production, the camera choices were narrowed down to between ARRI Alexa or the RED EPIC. Eventually, the cinematographer chose the RED EPIC. He reasons, "We had some high speed shots we wanted to do but couldn't fit in a dedicated high speed camera into the budget, so we chose the EPIC because it could achieve slightly higher frame rate." Accompanying the RED EPIC on this outing was a set of ARRI Ultra Prime lens (T1.9) that ranged from 16mm to 135m. Initial tests were done to check the noise characteristics of the camera at various ISO, before establishing a working ISO 800 as a baseline.

The 16ft by 16ft lighting grid fabricated to light the wrestling ring.

Principal photography began in late 2013 to early 2014, over a span of 2 months, shot mostly on locations, including the wrestling arena set which was built inside a disused warehouse at Kallang Way. Jason notes, "This particular warehouse is perfect, both aesthetically and in practical terms. We had visited many other warehouses but most of them were lacking in one way or another. Either the space is too small or the layout is unsuitable." Raihan agrees that finding the right place to build the arena is crucial since that set would feature extensively throughout the film. So when the team eventually scouted that warehouse, they knew they had found the right place. The ceilings were high and the space is right. It also had a loading area where vehicles such as cherry pickers could be driving right into the space.

The 6k space light helps with controlling spills.

The warehouse, however, had no existing lighting fixtures, which means the production had to somehow find a way to light it. Working closely with Junior, Jason designed a "16ft by 16ft grid lined with fluorescent tubes to be suspended above the wrestling ring.." The art department was tasked to fabricate the grid, which was then rigged, via ropes suspended from existing ceiling trusses, by key grip Abdul Malik Basar. An external contractor was then brought in to wire up the fixtures. Jason explains that the lighting grid served not just as a source of light but also as a practical that was frequently seen, especially in the wider shots. "It adds to the overall feel of the set because it looks like this ragtag team of indie wrestlers moved into this space and this is what they've whipped up to light up their wrestling ring." He continues, "This rig is greatly inspired by what I've seen when the production team attended a wrestling show put up by Singapore Professional Wrestling (the same folks who trained our cast for the stunts performed in the film). They had a suspended square rig made of pipes and garden floodlights." To further supplement the exposure, he had Malik rigged a 6k space light from the center of the ring. A couple of 1kW tungsten Fresnel units on floor stands, providing kicker lights, completed the main lighting set up for the sequences in the ring.

Another lighting setup was used for scenes within the arena but outside the ring - "the goal post". It consisted of a 12 feet pipe slung across two high rollers, usually with one or two 4 feet 4 banks Kino Flos on it. This was mainly used for wrestling spectators shots. Jason explains, "We chose to do this because it was fast to move around and not as restrictive if it's pre-rigged. I'm a big believer in less is more, in that the visuals are not just painted by lights, but also by shadows. So this retains the ability to dictate where the pockets of light fall and where they don't."

Gaffer Shahril takes a reading before a shot.

Leading the lighting team is gaffer Mohammad Shahril Bin Dzuikeply. On Shahril, Jason says, "We first met working together on the set of Fighting Spiders back in 2008, and have since worked together on numerous occasions, including a few of Papahan Film's (which is headed by Raihan and Banting's Executive Producer Edmund D. Lim) other productions." He continues, "On Banting, we would plan out the general look on lighting setup of each scene, perhaps stating a preferred fixture or so to be used. And Shahril will then lead the lighting crew in the setup and take care of the details. Because we're largely in sync in the way we approach lighting a set, this process is very fast and there's minimal miscommunications."

Shooting the actual wrestling scenes in the ring was tough for both the actors as well as Jason (who operates the camera) and his first camera assistant/ focus puller, Weiming Choo. As Raihan prefers a more visceral approach to the scenes in the ring - which ruled out all the flashy angles and huge camera moves - Jason had to go hand held and stay close to the actors. Each fight sequence was shot from the start till the end, which takes about 5 minutes at a time. Raihan realized early that when the actors are in the ring, it's as if they were performing in a theatre show and it's difficult to break the sequences up because that would affect their energy on stage. Jason remarks, "Sometimes I feel like Weiming and myself are the third and fourth competitor in the ring! We had to memorize the choreography and when to get out of the way (of the actors)." With the camera and actors constantly moving in the ring, Jason shot the scenes mostly a T4 to T4 1/2, giving Weiming a good chance in hitting the focus.

Yasmin floors Queen Kong in the dramatic finale.

Jason also paid close attention to placement of camera for shots from outside the ring. Years of watching wrestling on TV gave him a good idea of how wrestling matches were traditionally covered, as well as the sort of coverages that were needed. "Hopefully that would bring some familiarity to people watching it," he continues. And also because of this, the filmmakers decide to shoot flat (1.85:1), which is very similar to that of HDTV (1.78:1) - an aspect ratio that Raihan and Jason were both intimately familiar with coming from a TV production background. Raihan jokes, "To sell me his preferred aspect ratio, all Jason said was, ' Well, Avengers (2012) was shot 1.85...' and I'm liked 'That's it, I'm sold!'"

The production recorded 5k full frame for the most part (4k and 2k resolutions were used for high speed shots) at 23.976fps directly to REDMAGs which were then offloaded at the Wrangling station, supervised by data wrangler, Leslie Tan. Backing up the data were done via R3D Data Manager, with check sum done with each transfer. Leslie elaborates, "For production back ups, we were using 4TB G-Technology drives. For my own uses, they were Hitachi Enterprise hard drives enclosed in Raid 5 configuration, totaling 12 TB." He also had to transcode the R3Ds into 1920x1080 PRORES 422 LT for editorial. Other times when he's not busy offloading the mags, Leslie was always on hand to assist and advise the DP whenever the latter had concerns regarding the images. As this way Jason's first outing with the RED EPIC, there were times when he needed to make sure his lighting strategy did not result in lost of any details.

Another location that was interesting was the HDB flat that the production chose for the family scenes. They had managed to find one unit in Marsiling where it was two individual units combined into one - one corridor unit and a corner unit. This allows the filmmakers ample space to stage their shots with greater depth. And having access to the corridor space right outside the flat also meant that they could easily black out the windows to shoot night scenes. Jason says, "I prefer to black out the room from a distance away instead of being right at the window because that would be too obvious." Also notable is that the set design in the house was warmer in tone, with an abundance of wood furniture and decorations, as well as wall colors in shade and hues of yellow/ orange. This stands in stark contrast against the gritty looking world of wrestling, where the filmmakers deliberately painted the wall grey and "keeping most colors out of it" - clearly representing the two different worlds that Yasmin is straddling. 

Offline was done at Flashforward Films and edited by Huda Azzis, who is a regular in many of Raihan's Suria channel projects. Raihan says, "It's important to work with people whom you have develop a short hand with because that allows ideas and communications to be exchanged efficiently."

Experimenting with different looks.

Color grading was done is another facility, MochaChai Lab, with colorist Isnor Dzulkarnain Jaafar. After the R3Ds were ingested and checked for proper conform in DaVinci Resolve v10, he began grading with instructions from Raihan and Jason. The first couple of days were spent understanding the style of the film and what the filmmakers were going for. They also spent time experimenting on the different looks for the film. "For me, I do have some references in mind for different parts of the film. But sometimes those ideas clash and we need to think about how that may or may not help the film as a whole." Raihan explains. Thus it took some time of careful considerations before the DP, director and colorist could agree on the direction.

Once the color direction was decided, Isnor went ahead to work on the primaries and secondaries to match the scenes as best as he could, finishing 6 reels in 5 days. The grade was monitored via a Barco projector in DCI XYZ color space. Film grains were added at the end of the grading process via Film Convert. "Once everything is finalized on the last day, I exported the final grades to 4k DPX RGB 10 bit 3996x2160 in flat. It took roughly two hours for each reel to be exported," said Isnor. As of print, Banting is in fact the first Singapore Malay feature film to have a DCP done in 4k*.

Looking back, Jason feels it's just a matter of getting accustomed to the way feature film projects were done. Citing his background in TV, he feels strongly about "getting things right in camera, as far as possible" and accepts that he would have the luxury of extensive post production to finesse his images. He recalls a funny moment on set, "When we were doing our first wide shot of the wrestling arena, I was so concerned with how much details the camera was seeing that I thought I was lighting it wrong. I had to take a picture with my phone and slap on an Instagram filter to convince myself that indeed the image can be manipulated to get close to what I had imagined!"
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A huge THANK YOU to all who contributed generously to this article.
All still images courtesy of Papahan Films Pte Ltd.

*(Correction: It was incorrectly stated that Banting was the first feature film in Singapore to be output in 4k DCP. Instead it should be 'the first Singapore Malay feature film to be done in 4k DCP'. Article has been amended as such.)