FEATURE ADDING COLOUR TO DRAMA
Over the past few months there has been a wave of high-quality dramas on our screens. Aside from the prerequisites of top-notch direction, sparkling scripts and stellar performances, it was the distinctive
BIRDSONG Colourist Stuart Fyvie Post house LipSync Grading system Quantel Pablo
What was your brief? Director Philip Martin didn’t want the usual conventions of a war story – we felt the ‘Band of Brothers’ desaturated look had been done to death. Plus, France in summer can actually be very hot and the greenery would have been bombed out. It was almost like a desert during fi lming in Hungary, so the idea was to make it look like Helmand in Afghanistan, with a very contemporary, sun- bleached, hyper-real feel. In contrast, we wanted the fl ashback sequences to be much softer and lighter.
How did you achieve it? We only had time to do a quick ses- sion with DoP Julian Court before he went on to his next job, so we graded a promo that we could use to discuss how he wanted it to look. Then Philip and I worked together to complete the grade. For the war- time sequences, I used the Alexa look-up table so the images looked quite thick, but I chose not to use the look-up table for the love story; I just softened it and didn’t harshen the blacks so much. We do a lot of fi lm grading, and
this project has the ambition of a movie. The sheer scale of Birdsong was incredible. It’s as big as it gets for TV drama – VFX, big budget, HD, great cast. It’s a cut above the normal TV drama fare. The only
22 | Broadcast TECH | January/February 2012
Birdsong: war scenes were made to look like Afghanistan, while fl ashbacks were softer
look of Birdsong, Top Boy, Public Enemies and Sherlock that captured the attention of viewers. Over the next few pages, some of the country’s top colourists talk about the kit they use and how they grade.
difference is the timeframe. With TV you have a TX date and there’s no getting around it. There was still some tweaking going on right up to the delivery deadline, whereas with fi lm, it can be a bit more fl exible.
Why do you use Pablo? Grading toolsets are largely similar across the board – they all do pri- mary and secondary colouring and they all operate with a ball. A lot of differentiation is in the workfl ow and how systems are integrated. Quantel’s Pablo allows us to get material in and turn it around quickly, keeping things fl uid and let- ting us use the suite as a creative room rather than a conforming room. The latest thing that has been
really useful is the Pablo PA, which
‘Pablo PA allows the technical work to be done in the background so we can focus on the
creative stuff’ Stuart Fyvie
is like a mini version of the Pablo timeline on a workstation. We con- formed the offl ine of Birdsong on it. You can build up the project and make sure the layers are right, then drag it into the Pablo room where it rebuilds with everything in the right place. As a back-end system, it’s really effi cient because it allows the technical work to be done in the background so we can focus on the creative stuff. A great feature of the Pablo is that
you can break down layers of VFX shots and work on them independ- ently. There’s a scene in a café with a green screen window where the VFX team had inserted a street scene. I was able to get the key channel to regrade the street scene independ- ently, contrasting correctly with the
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