Sin City (2005)

In 2005 director Robert Rodriguez released the cinematic version of one of the most controversial graphic novels of the early 1990s: Frank Miller's Sin City. Considered by many a turning point in the comic book movie genre, Rodriguez's film is almost unique in the way it manages to bridge the two media (comic book and motion picture). The array of technologies involved in the production is extensive, since this is one of the first movies to have adopted an all digital workflow through all production phases. Like many other directors like George Lucas, James Cameron or Peter Jackson, Robert Rodriguez spent his whole (although relatively young) career in filmmaking constantly exploring the opportunities that technology gives to artists to explore new territories and push the boundaries of the imagination. While producing the Spy Kids children film series, he started to investigate the potentials in digital cinematography thanks to an earlier Sony prototype that George Lucas lent him. After some experimentation, Rodriguez was fascinated by the opportunities that a fully digital workflow would give to cut costs and production time while at the same time increasing the creative freedom of filmmakers.

What Rodriguez's mastery in the use of digital technologies has allowed him to do is to take the whole narrative from a medium (the comic book) and transpose it, rather than adapt it in the conventional sense, into another medium. As Ebert (2005) said, “this isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life”. The director himself explained it: “I wanted to bring Frank’s vision to the screen as it was. I didn’t want to make Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City. I wanted to make Frank Miller’s Sin City” (Rodriguez, 2005). As an adaptation, the movie is a shot by shot version of the comic book, in the sense that most of the shots are framed in the exact same way as they show up in the book.

The movie was shot entirely with digital cameras, and mostly in a digital backlot environment. This means that, apart from the actors and a few props, nothing of what the spectator sees on the screen is real, but rather added later digitally. The degree of freedom that this kind of workflow creates makes the making of a live action film more similar to the creation of an animation film, where the only limit is creativity since anything can be created and anything can happen with no relevant impact on budget or time. The adoption of digital cameras along with a digital post production workflow allows to cut intermediary steps like printing the film, processing it, scanning it, etc., and also speeds up the shooting process too since it is possible to approach it with a “what you see is what you get” attitude. For many years films and part of films have been shot against green screens to later composite foreign elements into the shots, but the digital cameras allow for real time composting pre-visualization. This way the performance and the mise-en-scene can be adjusted, if necessary, or better yet the environment can later be adjusted to it.

The colour palette in Sin City is, for most of the time, limited to a very small number of unsaturated, or low saturated, colours. The use of black and white, even in very contrasty forms, is not new in movies, but the way the digital technologies allowed for it to be implemented in this movie is rather unprecedented. In Miller's graphic novel, as in many other black and white comic books, most of the character and objects have an almost omnipresent edge quality in the way they're drawn. Far from being new, this technique has been often used in drawings to better separate the subjects from the backgrounds, to better isolate them, make them stand out and focusing the reader's attention to them. While in live motion picture a similar effect is usually achieved projecting a backlight to the rear of the subject in order to separate him from the background, this technique implies a lots of limitations in the camera movement and in the way the subject is forced to (or rendered unable to) interact with the background. On top of that, once an image is desaturated and it's contrast is increased, the amount of information that usually comes from colour and subtle changes in light in inevitably lost, making the contours of all the elements in the shot to blend together. Shooting the actors against a green screen with very little or no background allowed them to be isolated, then composited on top of a CG or separately shot background. This meant that the characters could undergo a separate lighting and colour correction process, which made it possible to wrap them in a light silhouette and make them better stand out from the background. This way yet another visual characteristic peculiar to the graphic novel is transposed into the motion picture thanks to the employment of technology.

Another element of the original graphic novel, and a very peculiar one, is the presence, from time to time, of small elements in full colour inside the black and white shots. These elements, other than contributing to the visual style of the comic book, also carry a meaning or explain a characteristic of the character, the landscape or the setting. Being the comic book part of the gore genre, elements like the blood, the bandaids, cars and even weapons are made to stand out as silhouettes or as the only item in full bright colour in the picture. This kind of effect, once achievable only through long and painful rotoscoping of the images, can now be achieved with selective chroma key using coloured elements on the set.

For most of Sin City's background elements, computer generated imagery (or CGI) was adopted. Along with the use of green screen, this allowed for very few set pieces to be built, lowering both production costs and time. But the main reason why the narrative itself benefited from this solution is to be found, once again, in the relationship between the movie and the comic book and between the comic book and reality. A graphic novel is, by its nature, a low level representation of reality. The amount of details that a drawer can put into designing, sketching and inking every single board is limited, and therefore the author usually adopts a more subtle approach and paints a mediated version of the reality, in which only the main tracts are conveyed. We could arguably relate this principle to the Uncanny Valley hypothesis, which stipulates that the closer we go to a reproduction of reality without really reaching full detail depth the more unsettling the resulting element will be for the human mind. This is why in many occasions throughout the movie background and foreground elements, along with props, were computer generated with an intentional low detail level, so that in the context of the live comic book they would look, if not real, right. Once again, Rodriguez's knowledge of the technology allowed him and co-director Miller to deeply commit to the source material. They bent the tools to the task rather than being forced by a lack of tools to bend and crack the source material in order to adapt it.

From what has been said so far, the conclusion could be that a similar result in the transposition of this graphic novel into film form would not have been possible without a deep knowledge of what tools the technology makes available to the filmmaker. To elaborate on that, it seems that what was created with Sin City was a total synergy between technology, creativity and narrative, an unbreakable link that made the whole film simply work flawlessly in this new, innovative art form. To better understand the unique character of reciprocity between technology and narrative achieved in this movie, we will now examine how two subsequent comic book adaptations have managed to follow this remarkable piece of filmmaking, buying into its methodology with very different results.