BECOMING YOU BIG PICTURE
PRODUCTION
initially in SDR. Once they’d locked off the look for the sections, he went into HDR. “The collaboration was very strong and Tom had a lot to say so we found it was more beneficial to have him online with me, even if it meant working in SDR,” says Farrell. With lockdown easing, Tom was then able to come into the building to view the HDR. The production executives all had access to HDR monitors. The grade used native media, working off RAW
files, allowing Farrell to have “the full potential of each camera, to explore every pixel.” “We wanted every frame of every sequence in
every episode to have a classical feel, a real look, aspirational, but also three dimensional. Almost to feel as if you’re in the mind of that child,” says Farrell. “My main vision from the outset was not to overcook the elements given by beautiful photography.” “We wanted this massive look, with the theme of
inspiration through it. But we were also very sensitive to the fact that it should stand the test of time and not look dated.” They were after a look for each location, but at the same time to stand by the rules of the overall aesthetic. “What we did was to keep a reality to it. We embraced every location as it was.” The faces of the children were all-important. “We were constantly drawing around each face,
making sure the viewer could see into their eyes. There was a lot of contrast, sharpening of eyes in every scene. We wanted to make the faces leap out of the screen to give a perception of 3D.” He used beauty filters and shapes to bring faces and bodies up. He also used grading flares and glares and plug-ins to create suns, glows or glints. Vfx weren’t prominent, but included some
of the series’ most ambitious scenes. One shot incorporates a cgi character as an imaginary friend, using character based vfx with no actors. “We worked out with the matte vfx supervisor what behaviour we’d actually seen and shot plates to put that together and match the eyeline,” says Barbor- Might. “We were reverse engineering the whole process, blending character cgi with documentary.”
SOUND DECISIONS The sound on the series was crafted by a team from Bristol-based Wild Buffalo Sound Studio, with a pedigree for working on natural history and features. Sound editor Jonny Crew describes how the production borrowed from scripted. “There was a whole classroom of about 16 kids with little mics, but we got clear dialogue on every single child.” He could use snippets of interaction and
interesting stories, even background elements. Co-sound editor Tim Owens had “an abundance
of material” to work with to create the series’ soundscapes. The generous budget on location allowed for a sound recordist and another member of the crew recording wild tracks. “We ended up with a soundtrack that you’d expect with a drama,” says Owens. “We knew it was going to look fantastic, so we approached it another notch up, quite enhanced.” “With the look and feel of a natural history
documentary - with observed creatures - the way we normally use material is in a precise way: the lens observes and the sound follows……I’d look at a sequence and figure out how to build up a sound scape, it might be a baby sleeping, with their brain growing and I’d figure out how to make a chemical impulse-y, sound to feel like something is happening.” Ben Peace worked on the Dolby Atmos mix.
“When the camera cuts off at the mother’s waistline and her answer comes out of the sky, it uses the height of the Atmos.” One scene shows a small boy overwhelmed by sound at his first baseball game, another is a child walking through a Tokyo with sound bouncing off buildings. “It gave me the chance to make everything bigger and more exaggerated, as if you were a little child experiencing things for the first time.”
Spring 2021
televisual.com 33
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