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.