Broadcast TECH
Public Enemies: realistic look reflected gritty nature of the story
FEATURE
tracked the matte onto their faces to keep the eyes sparkly and alive and to draw in the audience.
Why do you use Nucoda Film Master? When we made the decision to buy Nucoda Film Master in 2005, it was the most advanced system and had capabilities far ahead of Autodesk’s Lustre, and Baselight was still rela- tively crude. It was clear to us that Nucoda was the most complete system. One feature that would have been useful for Public Enemies, a three-part drama, would have been to open more than one timeline so I could compare grades and images without joining the episodes up, almost like a playlist. That is where Baselight has an edge.
PUBLIC ENEMIES Colourist Tony Osborne Post house Films at 59 Grading system Nucoda Film Master
What was your brief? When it came to the grade, the look and feel that DoP Tony Miller and director Dearbhla Walsh wanted to create was something that wasn’t too glossy or contrived. They wanted a realistic look to reflect the gritty nature of the storyline.
How did you achieve it? We went for a look that had a lot of warm tones such as tan, beige and brown because it suited some of the grim locations. For example, there’s a shopping centre that had a lot of browns and the look has fairly high contrast; there are some very deep shadows and bright highlights but not to the point of being too stark. If we saw anything that was a
strong blue or green, we tended to subdue it because we wanted to keep within the range of a restricted col- our palette in those warm tans and beiges. There was one scene where Daniel Mays’ character talks to his sister in the street and the Alexa
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really captures the warmness in the tones. They’re standing in front of a black garage door with the paint peeling and that looks really great. But just off to one side was a bright, almost luminescent green, recycling bin, so I used the Nucoda Film Master I-Keyer tool to pull out some green from that and tone it down so it didn’t dominate the scene. The series includes a lot of intense
one-to-ones, which were generally played out as mid shots and close- ups in an interview room. It’s critical to see their eyes – we wanted them to be pin sharp. Occasionally the focus was slightly out, so I created mattes for their eyes, adding a little bit of the system’s DVO sharpen tool, and then
‘We wanted to create a realistic look to
reflect the gritty nature
of the story’ Tony Osborne
Which camera gives a colourist the best images to work with? I had worked on a lot of projects that shot with the Red One, but other than tests, this was my first time working with the Alexa. A lot of DoPs prefer the Alexa because it’s more familiar and has a better layout, design and so on. But unless you are using an outboard recorder, you can’t capture 4K image as with the Red. The other advantage of Red is the ability to adjust the metadata of files, so you can sometimes rescue a bit of overexposure and turn wide shots into mid shots. But the Alexa has a nice organic feel to the images. The Red seems more punchy and dynamic, whereas there is a gentle- ness to the Arri images.
Nucoda Film Master: preferred system
What reference monitor did you use? When I graded, we used 32-inch CRTs. There were problems keeping them lined up, so we bought some Pioneer Kuros, which are now obso- lete. We ran them next to the CRTs and they look every bit as good for a fraction of the price. We got them lined up and graded to those. Now we are replacing them with larger TV Logics and one of the huge Dolby monitors. We’ll probably have the Dolby in the grading suites and TV Logic in the offline rooms.
January/February 2012 | Broadcast TECH | 27
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