STAND AND DELIVER
Disney+’s Renegade Nell marks a bold departure from Happy Valley for its creator, Sally Wainwright, but her new show is a riotous ride from start to end. Set in 18th-century England, this rip-roaring adventure follows the titular Nell (Louisa Harland), a highwaywoman with superpowers, as she confronts a plot against the Queen of England.
Sex Education director Ben Taylor reunited with collaborator Oli Russell to set the look for the series, working closely with The Look. Catherine Goldschmidt BSC brought her touch to block two with director Amanda Brotchie.
“The look for Renegade Nell was achieved by combining subtle film grain and film look emulations, but we also had to ensure the image had impact in high dynamic range for the many Disney+ viewers that will see it in this format,” notes Thomas Urbye, The Look CEO and senior colourist, who worked with fellow colourist Grace Weston on the series.
The show plays out before the advent of electric light, which was a fun challenge for both the cinematographers and the grade. “All the creative play comes in the shadows, as candlelight and expertly placed lighting brings shape to night scenes, and so our role as colourists becomes to find the detail in the shadows,” Urbye continues. “You can’t just put face shapes on everyone and expect it to look natural, so begins the careful tweaking of the exposure curves scene by scene.”
“Thomas tweaked and tried different looks and we ended up with a really successful grade,” adds DP Russell.
It’s been a prolific few months for on-screen highway-folk, with Apple TV+’s The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin debuting in March. Shot by Rob Kitzmann, Vanessa Whyte and Will Hanke, the show was graded by Harbor Picture Company’s Jateen Patel. Digital Orchard’s DIT Josh Hughes also worked on Turpin. He enthuses: “I had the pleasure of joining the wild ride of …Dick Turpin last year. We shot in some stunning locations with our DPs, bringing Dick’s colourful world to life!”
Other key recent projects for the Bucks-based post house have included Bridgerton S3, Doctor Who, Scoop and The Stimming Pool, which they describe as a “beautiful collective work directed by Steven Eastwood around the topic of neurodivergence”. Digital Orchard colourist Jo Barker looked after the grade and the team also did the film scan on the Gregory Oke-lensed project.
Kings and queens
IMAX release Queen Rock Montreal gave audiences a larger-than-life, front-row immersive experience of the British rock band’s exhilarating 1981 concert. OnSight provided full picture post on the film, including grading, restoration and remastering for the giant screen.
Initially OnSight provided Mercury Studios and head of post production, Rosie Holley, with some remastering tests of the film back at the beginning of 2019. The results from these tests were so outstanding that MD Simon Craddock introduced Mercury Studios to the IMAX team later that year.
Most of the restoration and remastering work was completed by OnSight during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, but it still took some time to make it to IMAX. Silver Salt assisted with preliminary film fixes and an open gate 4K scan of the 35mm film print was used to create the full height IMAX version of this historic Queen performance. Revealing new parts of the original frame, extensive restoration was required before finishing and enhancement work could begin.
Following grain reduction and image processing, a fresh colour grade was applied by senior colourist Andy Lee, thereby digitally re-mastering the look of the film to the highest standard possible for the IMAX Experience. Working directly with IMAX, OnSight optimised for the IMAX format and delivered the film for additional adjustments using proprietary IMAX tools for further image enhancement including the IMAX DMR (Digital Media Remastering) process.
From Queen to kings, and landmark Sky History Original series Royal Kill List tells an epic story of bloody revenge, following King Charles II’s hunt for his father’s killers. Splice’s head of colour Adam Dolniak, who worked closely with director Alice Smith and DP Duane McClunie, explains the creative process of the grade.
“I’ve worked with Duane and Alice before so we are used to a workflow of using different LUTs on location for various scenes and locations. Each LUT is chosen for the lighting conditions and narrative.
“Some scenes needed a little relighting work where they didn’t have time to sculpt the light on location. Grain, blurring, sharpening and diffusion were all used throughout the series to add either grittiness to certain harrowing scenes or a little romance to others.
“We remained consistent in the LUTs used on location but pushed the looks further in some scenes to capture the right mood. We combined this with some specific curve grades to create deep, rich shadows.’’
The latest series from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, This Town, tells the story of an extended family and four young people who are drawn into an explosive and iconic music scene. UNIT Film & TV delivered full picture post on the Midlands-set series, working closely with DP Ben Wheeler BSC. The grade, carried out by UNIT colourist Dan Coles, ensured a filmic feel, strong in contrast and bold in use of colour. He enhanced colour separation, and added shape and depth to characters where possible, using a soft highlight and shadow roll off, and embracing the natural texture provided by the lenses.
Suite success
When Netflix live-streamed the Screen Actors Guild Awards this year, it turned to BMP, a hybrid creative agency, to edit a series of video cut-downs highlighting key speeches and moments from the event. Phil Loeb, director of post production, immediately understood the task: Enable his dispersed team of eight editors caption video content as quickly as possible.
“We decided to leverage Suite Studios’ cloud storage for the project,” he explains. “The big advantage was centralising our media on the cloud.” From ingest to export, in just six hours, Loeb & his team spread across the United States were able to create 25 flawless, fully captioned assets ready for distribution across Netflix’s various international channels. Working directly off Suite, a cloud-native filesystem that enables real-time media access for dispersed media teams, Loeb’s editors accessed files instantly, without downloading media locally; communicated with the team via video chat; and, when finished, let quality controllers export the final cut straight from the same cloud-connected storage. “We eliminated numerous push-pull steps; we really only had to export media once,” Loeb remarks on the cloud-based workflow. “In aggregate, we saved at least 25 percent of time. I want to remind you: We don’t have a central boardroom or an office connected to a server. Every edit was completed on individual machines, from home, on a Saturday. Our big goal was to simplify—it wouldn’t have been possible without Suite.”
Another sweet success for The Mill came with the release of Coca-Cola’s latest advert, directed by Tim Fox, that celebrates the holy month of Ramadan. Collaborating with Coca-Cola and creative agency AKQA, the Mill+ team has brought to life a narrative that transcends cultural boundaries and reminds us all to come together. ”We wanted the animation to feel vibrant, full of life and really capture the feeling of celebration. The aim was to have a collection of more intimate moments between characters that when combined created a world full of life,” says Chris Welsby, animation supervisor at The Mill.
Romesh returns
Jonathan (Romesh Ranganathan) is back in BBC comedy Avoidance and he’s reinvented himself. He may have a new body, a new hobby, and a lot of lycra, but he’s still stuck avoiding conflict and all the mess that causes. Envy’s Sonny Sheridan had worked with director Ben Green on season one, so came into the grade with a strong idea for the look and feel for this sequel.
“The first series had a muted colour palette with more pastel tones and slight desaturation – which gave the impression of a film print look from the ‘70s,” he explains. “We wanted to continue this appearance in series two but make it even warmer. Prior to production, I built a custom LUT that the DP, Matthew Wicks, and the team on location could use as a guide to the look whilst filming on the Sony Venice. This LUT replicated the warm feel from series one but was modified to create some separation from the cooler colours. It was great getting involved in the series early on as everyone was on the same page and the shared vision on how the final show would look, and I think that made the series even stronger.”
Upcoming Netflix drama A Man In Full is the latest release to incorporate visual effects provided by Light Iron, the post production creative services division of the Panavision group. Light Iron also provided dailies and final colour for the project, with supervising colourist Ian Vertovec collaborating with cinematographers Tobie Marier-Robitaille CSC and Craig Wrobleski ASC CSC for the final grade.
Boundless imagination
IF, the family comedy from writer-director John Krasinski, follows a girl who discovers that she can see everyone’s imaginary friends. Creative studio Framestore served as the lead VFX vendor on the film, producing over 40 visually distinctive imaginary friends across the studios in London, Montreal, and Mumbai. Krasinski entrusted production visual effects supervisor Chris Lawrence and animation supervisor Arslan Elver to lead the artists in this feat of character development and animation.
Involved from end to end, the studio’s Visual Development department steered on the design for the Ifs (imaginary friends), while the Pre-Production teams (Framestore Pre-Production Services, or FPS) provided previs and postvis on pivotal sequences within the film. The vibrant final colour grade was delivered by sister company, Company 3.
Bristol-based VFX studio Lux Aeterna was approached by Netflix and BBC Studios Science Unit to work on over 70 shots for the historical drama Einstein and the Bomb. One of the key scenes was set in the now destroyed Berlin Philharmonic Hall, which was digitally rebuilt for the film. Using creative lighting techniques through Nuke, Lux Aeterna blended VFX for the building with live-action images filmed at Shepperton Studios.
The support of a historian was enlisted to create an accurate model of the hall. This was used as the base and more architectural details were built around it using Houdini, Maya, and Nuke. Furthermore, green screens and VFX crowd simulations were used to create sequences with hundreds of extras.
To be able to blend together so many different elements, it was vital to have consistent lighting which was achieved by precisely aligning lighting in 3D rendering with VFX plates. Lux Aeterna’s compositors were able to accurately merge CGI and live-action elements thanks to the information of AOVs (Arbitrary Output Variables). In the end, cooperation between the compositing and 3D departments was essential in achieving the realistic visuals.
