With a $1 million-plus investment in an HD telecine, Chicago-based i^3 - pronounced i-cubed, which represents imagination, interaction and immersion, as the company's business cards note - made an entirely counter-intuitive investment in a device that outputs HD video data as 35mm film. Sure, these film recorders are great for filmmakers who shoot their low-budget feature on HD to save on film stock and processing, then land the longshot theatrical distribution deal. But why would a post house in Chicago, with a tiny indie film community but the third largest agency community in the world, buy one?

The answer lies partly in a five-spot package for Wrangler jeans out of an agency called Two by Four, and partly in the creative approach to technical innovation at i^3, a multifarious outfit that handles special effects, creative color, high-end finishing, HDTV, electronic film output, sound design and DVD authoring. The Wrangler spots were shot on 24P, then edited with Betacam rodeo footage licensed from ESPN. After reducing the 24P palette to black & white, tarting up the ESPN sequences with a muddy red tint and up-rezzing it to HD, laying in graphics and a digital version of the client's leather label, and the usual tweaking (like removing the camera shake in a dolly), the spots were converted to film. I^3 partner and Fire artist Arturo Cubacub instructed the laboratory to skip the customary bleaching process when it developed the negative, a treatment Ridley Scott used on both Blackhawk Down and Gladiator. Naturally, the film then had to go through the telecine, where i^3 colorist Mike Matusek could use all the bells and whistles available with his DaVinci color corrector to further shape the look of the spots. "When we finished, the spots had a sort of layered look, video on top of pigment, on top of video," says Cubacub. "The graphics looked pasted on when they were still purely digital, but after we took the film back through the telecine, the type and the patch looked like optical effects, as if they had originated in film." Overall, it's a warmer, more analog look, similar to the effect audio engineers achieve when they convert a ProTools mix to analog, then redigitize the tracks.

"This is a campaign for Wrangler's Western line, but it's directed at construction workers, truckers and farmers, so we wanted to replace the Western landscape with a white limbo and let the characters embody the Old West values," says Dave Stevenson, CD and co-owner at Two by Four, who trusted Cubacub entirely and never asked for test footage. "The skip bleach process makes the film really jump, and the stark, contrasty, black and white gives it a contemporary look." This was the first 24P shoot for director Christopher Griffith, a fashion photographer making the transition to spots, who also delivered photos for seven print ads and 27 POS pieces in five days of concentrated frenzy. Cubacub didn't require anything special in the lighting scheme for sequences like a champion cowboy or a Brahma bull against a white cyc background: "We just wanted it as flat as possible." But the economies of 24P were apparent when Cubacub began sifting through the footage during the rough cut. "You tend to keep the camera running with 24P," he explains. "Some of the best shots happened when Christopher walked into the frame to demonstrate the posture he wanted." (Griffith was erased in post, of course.)

I^3 opened six years ago with the first Fire in North America (see www.i-cubed-fx.com), and Cubacub has pushed the device's effects capabilities to the point where he's never felt the need to acquire an Inferno. Nor an Avid. For a time, Cubacub resisted competing with the offline shops that feed him compositing, effects, and telecine assignments, but now he's occasionally doing the rough cut as well. Using a Fire for a rough cut is like commuting in a Ferrari, but Stevenson likes the idea. "We had serious budget limitations and it's so efficient when you don't jump from one room to another," he says.

Cubacub and his partner, engineer Mark Adler, are developing some additional circuits for the film recorder and exploring other lab tricks to realize even more effects from the video-to-film-to-video process. But film isn't going away entirely any time soon and i^3 is more than happy to work in the traditional film-to-video mode, especially for jobs like a Pop Tart spot that came through the shop a few years ago from Leo Burnett. Cubacub turned Irv Blitz-directed footage of Pop Tarts and sprinkles into exploding firecrackers, and synced them to the not-quite martial rhythms of that ultimate wake-me-up track, "The Star Spangled Banner," as performed by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock.