By Adrian Pennington

Audiences were amazed by the depth of deception exposed in the Netflix true-crime story The Tinder Swindler. The film follows the victims of perpetrator Shimon Hayut, aka Simon Leviev, who posed as a billionaire diamond mogul on dating apps. He met multiple women and conned them out of thousands of dollars.

“These women fall into a trap thinking that someone is in love with them,” says cinematographer Edgar Dubrovskiy. “Shimon Hayut is brutal, telling these women for months that they will buy a house together and have kids.”

The Tinder Swindler was produced for Netflix by Raw TV, the British indie that is credited with delivering cinematic production value to tough documentary stories.

Dubrovskiy and director Felicity Morris chose to acquire on Red, making this the first show for Netflix of any kind shot on the Komodo camera system. It was mastered in HDR in a predominantly ACES color-managed Dolby Vision workflow.

Ross Baker

The doc’s central story is told in interviews with Hayut’s victims, filmed in Sweden, Norway, Amsterdam, London and the United States. Interview footage was rounded out with stock footage, archive footage and dramatization, plus graphics of social media posts. Post production went through Molinare, where senior colorist Ross Baker handled the grade in FilmLight Baselight 4.

“From the first scene, it was clear Felicity and Edgar wanted to embrace a romantic and evocative world,” says Baker. “They achieved this with the soft warm tones from the interviews, using very minimal lighting. Edgar opted to just use practicals in the interviews to light the scene. The Komodo handled this with very little noise.”

Dubrovskiy sent Baker SDR stills as references for an approach that would distinguish the look between the victims and the journalists. Baker translated the SDR stills into HDR grade.

“Using Molinare’s proprietary streaming software, MoliStream, we shared the output with Edgar and explored our options, discussing the look live,” Baker says. “Here, we delved into how we could treat the images in different ways and how this would be perceived in each dynamic range.”

As many documentary filmmakers are experiencing HDR in production for the first time, it can be a massive learning curve for all involved. Baker says the extra dynamic range can sometimes be too much as it natively appears in ACES and HDR.  “Edgar liked the IPP2 roll-off that you see from the Red in SDR when you apply the soft tone-mapping and low-contrast options. This played nicely to the desired cinematic style required by Felicity. As these options are not available in ACES, I created a curve that would give us the same result while allowing a little extra head room to the highlights. I created a custom-grade stack that allows me to work with SDR content and push it to 1,000 nits (if desired) without breaking the images apart.”

Dubrovskiy shot 6K RAW to fit Netflix deliverables, with the data overhead allowing Molinare’s finishing team to punch into the image as required.

“Blending the Komodo footage alongside a wide range of sources is always going to be tricky as image sensor quality and lens choices play a massive part in the final look,” Baker says. “I’m fortunate to have worked on many documentaries that have used lots of different media sources, so I’m able to draw on years of experience on what works.

“A big part of making the sources work together without compromising the ‘hero’ camera is to understand the difference in contrast and chroma and try to align them all together. It’s never plain sailing but with the Baselight you have the tools at hand to make the adjustments needed.”

For example, the social media posts and text messages, which assist in driving the story, shouldn’t jump out of the edit. “The graphics are predominantly bright white screens that could be jarring. Controlling the luminance and softly vignetting with a small amount of grain helped to maintain consistency with the interviews and reconstructions.”

Baker adds, “This was my first time working with Edgar, and he is a very creative and technically minded DP. He was very passionate that the right look be achieved.”

Adrian Pennington is a UK-based journalist, editor and commentator in the film and TV production space. He has co-written a book on stereoscopic 3D and edited several publications.