Here’s the new trailer for “In Your Dreams” Finished at Water Tower Color. Very excited for this one to be released in November!
Dear Mama
7/12 - Update: “Dear Mama” Emmy nomination for Best Documentary or Nonfiction Series
Well, if you are my age and grew up in the ’90s, you listened to Tupac. Even all of us white boys from Camarillo knew every word to every song. His music really was the soundtrack to the last decade of the millennium and my youth.
Tonight is the final installment of “Dear Mama.” FX’s most-watched unscripted show.
Perfect for a Mother’s Day weekend! Please go check it out on FX tonight or streaming on Hulu.
Allen Hughes directed this insightful docuseries. Fitting because Allen and his brother directed Tupac’s early music videos. Sure, there was a bit of drama, but that adds to the flavor of the story. That connection to the material made Hughes the quintessential choice for captaining this ship. Tupac wasn’t any one thing; more like an eclectic stew of many influences and identities. One thing is for sure. Dude was thug life for real.
Cognac hues or Hughes as it were
Allen was clear on the look and vibe he wanted for the series. Cognac was the word. We spent a couple of weeks developing a look that feels like you have filtered the light through a fine liquor. We also used Live Grain to achieve that end-of-the-film-era perfect Kodak grain structure of the 90s.
Documentary grading is an entirely different beast. Here are a few tips for you to tackle your next interview-based production.
Color management - I preach this a lot, but even more critical with many different sources.
Sounds basic, but group your interviews.
Normalize the frame rate upfront.
AI up-rez is like salt; a little is good, but too much ruins the dish. Don’t be afraid to let some pictures just look old.
Build a KEM reel of all interview setups. Having the A and B cam shots together in the timeline will help you reference grades quickly.
The first step was look development. Allen had already shot some of the interviews we used to refine the look. I built an LMT that had the cognac golden vibe. I used that look and the ACES standard outputs to create a 709 LUT for Avid media creation. Eric DeAzevedo was the operator responsible for many terabytes of dailies. We also normalized all the archival footage to 23.98 during the dailies step. Cortex was used to make the mxf files and bins. We had to double-hop to render in LiveGrain since it wasn’t supported in Cortex at the time.
Early on, we were still in the late stages of the COVID lockdown. I built a reel of every interview setup and had a ClearView session with Hughes and Josh Garcia (Producer). This scene was super critical to our success going forward. It set the bible for the show's look and ensured that Allen’s vision was consistent through the many days of shooting. At the start of each episode, I applied our base settings using a “Fuzzy” match. (yes, that is a real Baselight thing.) Basically, “Fuzzy” is a setting that allows the machine to match grades presumed to be from the same camera roll rather than a timecode approach. This put all the interviews 90% of the way there from the get-go. The next step was to sort the timeline by clip name and time of day. I would then work through a pass where I would track the shapes and balance out any inconsistencies in lighting as the sun hung lower throughout the day. The archival footage didn’t have as graceful of a strategy applied. Each shot was its own battle as the quality differed from source to source. My main goal was to ensure that it was cohesive and told the story Allen was crafting.
The first deliverable out of the gate was a theatrical version for the Toronto International Film Festival. I graded in ACES cc going out to PQ 1000nits. Then that was run through the DoVi analysis, and a P3D65 48nit version was trimmed. Finally, we applied a P3D65 to XYZ lut on the output render to create the DCDM.
The biggest challenge of this show was keeping up with editorial. As you can imagine, documentary storytelling is honed in the edit bay. The edit was constantly being updated as shots were cleared or discovered. Back at my shop, Leo Ferrini would constantly update my project to chase editorial. Multi-Paste (Remote Grades for our Resolve friends) was clutch in this situation. We took the old grades and copied them across. Leo would categorize the new material so I could sort the scene for the changes. The timelines constantly evolved and took shape until we got Allen in for the final grade. Allen has a great eye and religiously kept us in the world he had envisioned. We paid particular attention to eye-trace and ensured the information from each visual told a straightforward story without distraction. Next was a pass of Dolby trimming to take the approved PQ to 709. We would send that 709 file to Allen and get notes before creating the final IMF for delivery.
A super big thanks to Paul Lavoie for managing this one. There were many moving parts on this production but thanks to him, I rarely felt it. It’s a blessing to have a partner that doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty even though he’s one of the suits😜.
Be sure to check out this killer doc about one of our generation’s most prolific artists, told through Hughes's equally unparalleled artistic voice. Allen is a true master of many formats but has solidified his place as one of the best documentarians. Thanks for taking the time to peek behind the curtain, and let me know what you think.
Here are some more before and afters. Mellow yella’ Dan Muscarella would have been proud.
DC League of Super Pets
Super excited for everyone to check out the latest from Warner Animation. DC League of Super Pets is a super fun romp expertly animated by the talented team at Animal Logic.
Toshi the Wonder Dog!
Anybody that has ever had a pet is going to love this movie.
Post services provided by Warner PPCS include an ACES HDR picture finish and sound. Truly a post-production one-stop-shop.
The project was supervised by Randy Bol. The great thing about working with Randy is we have a level of trust that has been built over many other projects collaborating together. There is definitely a shorthand when both of us are in the suite. One of the best post sups you’ll work with plus just a good dude too.
Color was supervised by co-director Sam Levine. This guy was cracking me up every session. Not only was he hilarious, but damn, what an eagle eye. I was sort of bummed when our time together ended.
A big thanks to Paul Lavoie and Leo Ferrini too for keeping the ship afloat. I would be drowning in a pile of pixels without these guys.
Now go see DC League of Super Pets only in theaters… Preferably a Dolby Cinema one.
The Sea Beast - High Dynamic Range on the High Seas
Hey everyone, the Sea Beast is out today on Netflix and I am super thrilled to share some of the innovative aspects of the color finishing. I hope you all enjoy reading about the techniques used and the “why” behind some of the choices. It’s a gorgeous film and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to contribute my small part.
If it’s not on the page it’s not on the stage
It all starts with a script. In Sea Beast’s case, that script was co-penned by the story’s visionary Director Chris Williams. I’m a big fan of Chris’s past work, so getting the chance to collaborate with him on his latest was exciting, to say the least. He’s sort of animation royalty in my book.
The world was conceived from the minds of two fantastic artists. Matthias Lechner wore the mantle of art director while Woon Jung took up the production designer role. Sony ImageWorks was tasked with bringing the characters to life supervised by Stirling Duguid. Steven Schweickart kept us on time and honest, while Tim Archer supervised the post. Joyce Arrastia was the editor who put it all together. Netflix put together the dream team of animation heavyweights on this one and it shows on the screen.
The World
The look of the world in one word would be painterly. We used Filmlight’s Baselight to “paint” the frame with a lot of soft, atmospheric touches.
Much of the film takes place in humid locations with a lot of volumetric haze. This does two things for the picture. One, it softens what could be a sometimes overly contrasty CG aesthetic. Two, it really plays up the scale of the world by imparting a sense of depth.
We always made sure to play the background a little desaturated and low con. This was inherent in the design and execution of the files coming out of ImageWorks, but was further enhanced in DI with the use of mattes and depth channels.
Cyan blues were also very important, as you can imagine for a movie set out on the sea.
The sky and the weather were closely linked to the dramatic plot points of the story. We made sure that the sky felt like a reflection of the mood that was at play in the scene. One such example was when we darkened the storm clouds in the second act. This gave a threatening feeling as the characters trudged forward in the story.
Shapes used to create an ominous feeling in the clouds.
Enhancement of the Blood moon to create a foreboding presence.
Another important color consideration was the look of one of the main characters named Red. As her name implies, the character is a very saturated red hue. We made sure to play up the complementary nature of the relationship to the opposing cyan sky and ocean using secondary hue swings.
Special attention was made to ensure Red had the right hue for the environment. This meant slightly leaning Red’s skin color to align with the scene. Warmer in sunlight and more towards the cooler side of magenta at night.
A different type of script
The Sky was not the only color consideration when it came to plot. Matthias and Woon came up with a color script that we diligently adhered to. Here is a graphic of the most important hues vs. time.
You can see that as the film is building tension we leave the “pretty colors“ for a more earthen palate. One reference Matthias gave me was “Delicatessen” shot by the great Darius Khondji. I love that film and immediately knew what he was going for. We used the uneasy, green side of yellow to symbolize corruption.
As the character's adventure unfolds we see that certain arcs are “corrupted” by revenge, greed, or just plain ignorance. We linked the intensity of this descent to the intensity of our yellow look that we developed. I achieved this by mixing back the full look with differing levels of opacity to get peaks and valleys over time. I feel that the use of this device goes a long way in helping set the tone of certain moments. The idea is to be felt but barely perceived.
HDR modulation
Early in testing, I received a note from the team that the skies were too busy vs what they designed and were used to seeing. I started to explore what was causing this reaction because I liked the look that I had first presented very much. Once I dug in a bit more, I found that due to COVID restrictions most of the approvals were done in SDR. This was the first time the creatives were seeing what was hiding in their data.
I built an LMT to solve this concern. Up to this point, the show’s pipeline was vanilla ACES. The LMT mimicked what the sRGB output looked like but tone mapped to 1000nit PQ. I started with an exact match. Then I used a simple curve to “stretch” the picture so that the middle grey was mapping correctly. I then rolled off the top end, mapping the specular highs around 600nits. This gave us the feel of the SDR but still took advantage of the extra range.
Simplifying the sky by blending the LMT layer
This was a fantastic way to simplify the sky and get the picture closer to the original artwork. The LMT approach proved to be much more efficient and safer than a key would have been. We also found that in some cases the opposite was true. There are a handful of pivotal moments where maximizing the range was to our benefit. Certain shots hit harder from being more complicated in their HDR rendering. The images shown here in SDR don’t really showcase what is happening +100 nits, but hopefully, you get the idea.
We ended up riding the opacity of the LMT to taste. This gave us one more device that we could use to link the look with the narrative arc. Here is a graph of the “amount” of dynamic range over time.
You can see that the trend line shows we used more range as the film progressed. You might think that the curve would correlate to the action scenes, but I noticed while gathering the data for this graph that it was actually coupled to the scenes with the most emotional weight. This was a first for me but I plan on using this technique on other shows going forward. I have always said just cause you have the range doesn’t mean you need to use it. HDR is like salt, a little goes a long way, and too much ruins the dish. I now feel it’s better to approach the extra range like punctuation that enhances key moments. If everything has an exclamation point it sort of loses its meaning.
Mastering
We spent two weeks on the HDR grade. I’m a big proponent of HDR first. It is your highest quality master and the one that will live on past the others. Once we had the HDR P3D65 1000nit master perfect, we moved on to the Dolby SDR trim. This was pretty straightforward except for a couple of scenes. There is a scene early on with a very flared vibe. The Dolby tools were not allowing us to get to where Chris wanted to play it. I was unable to achieve the toe compression in the shadows that I wanted no matter how I trimmed the lift up and gamma down (I call this the gamma shuffle.) Changing the analysis and the L3 mid data didn’t get us there either. We needed to use the higher precision tools found in the color corrector.
We opened back up the HDR pass I made a curve tweak to the toe, keeping an eye on the SDR output simultaneously. I found something that worked for both and was by no means a sacrifice in the HDR world. Other than those scenes it was business as usual.
We also created a theatrical version for a DCP. We did that pass in a day and a half making slight contrast and saturation tweaks. I did this in the same timeline giving a “Theatrical” category to the stacks that I used specifically for the 2.6 48nit XYZ version. Then in the exports of the other versions, I set this category to “bypass.” There is a deeper dive into this type of workflow in my post on Space Jam a New Legacy under the “multiple deliveries, one timeline” heading.
Archival
We also created an ACES AP0 deliverable in addition to the standard display referred masters. This GAM (Graded Archival Master) had all of the grades plus the LMT baked into a linear gamma EXR with ACES primaries. Standard ACES transforms applied to the GAM will get you back to the display targets where we were in DI. We also created a NAM (Non-Graded Assembly Master) that was only the conform without the grades. Both of these masters can be sourced for remastering in the future. Since I’m a card-carrying member of the organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Pixels, I can safely say, no pixels were harmed in the making of this motion picture.
Thanks
A big thank you to Leo Ferrini, Paul Lavoie, Chris Coleman, Patrick Brennan, and the entire Warner PPCS staff. This was a super fun swashbuckling project with an amazing team. I’m looking forward to this rich world’s following chapter and to “sea” what’s next for Red, Blue… and green 😉 Thanks for reading, and as usual, reach out with any questions or post in the comments below.
Now go watch The Sea Beast on Netflix today!
Happy Grading,
JD
Kimi - Virtually a Virtual Production
Hey everyone! Steven Soderbergh’s latest “Kimi” is out today on HBO Max. This was a fantastic project to have been a small part of. Here is a quick look at how the color was finished.
Getting the Band Back Together
Firstly, It was great to reunite with Steven and the team. Kimi marks the sixth picture helmed by Soderbergh that I have been credited on. There is a shorthand that has been developed over the years with his core post team consisting of Corey Bayes, Larry Blake, and Peter Mavromates. The speed of this kind of communication and the trust built over the many projects makes for an extremely efficient finish. When the maestro is at the helm, it is not movie-making by committee. Truly just a singular voice of one of our generation’s greatest auteurs.
Another exciting aspect of this project was that it utilized virtual production technology. Bruce Jones supervised the visual effects on the show. I have worked with Bruce going all the way back to Michael Jackson’s “This is it” concert. The Stereoscopic LED portion of that show was directed by Bruce and I did the 3D finishing. Again, there was the benefit from a comfort factor built over many years. The first task was to ensure the plates matched the 3D asset that would be playing back from Unreal. The second task was to tweak the white balance of the plates to ensure they answered back the way Steven was expecting once captured by the RED camera off the LED screen. The color pipe for the screen ended up being REDWG Linear to REDWG log3G10. It was all a bit of voodoo to me after it went into the engine. Unreal is an area I would like to devote more time to in the future. A few years ago I made a VR app in Unity. In hindsight, I should have been tinkering with Unreal. Thankfully the masters at Weta Digital ensured that the footage was tone mapped correctly to the LED display provided by Monolith.
Kimi LED wall background
The Look
Sometimes it’s not the buttons you press but the ones you don’t. When you have a cinematographer as masterful as Peter Andrews the only thing to do is mind the picture. A younger me had to learn this lesson the hard way. Often I felt my worth as a colorist was defined by how much I did to the picture. Over the years I have come to realize that to be truly in service of great cinematography, you just need taste, a tempered hand, and a language for giving cinematographers consistent results. This is one of the reasons why I default to film terminology so often. Most folks know what a stop or one point looks like.
I used the RED ippv2 color science with Filmlight’s basegrade for a majority of the film. There are a few shapes here and there but that’s pretty much it. Soderbergh lights and shoots what he wants.
Mastering
Most of the heavy lifting was done in HDR P3 D65 PQ 1000nits. Second up was the theatrical version which was a tone-mapped derivative off of the PQ master. Once we were at a good place on the projector, we screened in the Steven J. Ross Theater marrying the sound for the complete experience. After those two versions were locked I used the theatrical p3 D65 2.6 gamma output as a reference for the Dolby SDR trim pass. I set up the Baselight in dual cursor output with a p3 to 709 LUT in-line on the reference output. Then I trimmed to get as close as the Dolby tools would allow on the other cursor. There was one last screening to approve the 709 derived off of the XML.
Watch it on HBO Max
Kimi is a fantastic story that taps into the zeitgeist of the world we are living in now. I’m very excited for it to finally be released. Go check it out on HBO Max and let me know what you think.
Happy Grading,
JD