Netflix’s Firefly Lane follows the close friendship of two women from the time they meet at age 14 as neighbors through to their 40s. The series, from showrunner Maggie Friedman (Witches of East End) and based on the novel of the same name by Kristin Hannah, follows Tully (Katherine Heigl) and Kate (Sarah Chalke) throughout an unbreakable friendship as they experience the highlights and tragedies that are a part of every life.

Paul Ghezzo

Naturally, the series had different actors portray the besties at 14, but for all the portions beyond that age, Tully and Kate are played by the actual leads, transformed in a variety of ways — through the lighting techniques of cinematographer Vincent De Paula, CSC; makeup, costumes and wigs; and an elaborate visual effects pipeline in which Technicolor VFX took the lead. Additionally, Company 3 Vancouver refined the facial work significantly for many portions within color grading sessions.

The Visual Effects
Technicolor VFX was enlisted to help add visual effects to convey the various decades portrayed on-screen. Creative director Paul Ghezzo was involved from the beginning, helping with testing to determine the levels of de-aging needed. Cumulatively, the team worked on nearly 1,600 shots over the course of the season, ranging from the significant de-aging work to general clean-up to monitor comps and, appropriately, adding fireflies.

Sara Eberhardt

“The look was driven by the creatives, including Maggie and the post production team,” Technicolor VFX producer Sara Eberhardt explains. “In the color grading process, a filter was applied to the flashbacks in the 1970s and 1980s to help visually show a time difference. When discussing the de-aging needs of the show, we all worked together testing different levels of the filtering work in the grade combined with traditional VFX de-aging work.

“When it came to spotting sessions, the filtering was applied first and then reviewed in color sessions to call out what shots needed additional VFX de-aging work. We then did the VFX work as normal, on non-filtered raw plates.”

According to Ghezzo, “Most of our work was 2D compositing using Foundry’s Nuke and Autodesk’s Flame. We also created some DMPs [digital matte paintings] using Adobe’s Photoshop. For the location replacement sequence, we built a 3D environment in Foundry Modo and Autodesk Maya to proof the layout, then rendered pano’s and detailed the renders into DMPs. Finally, we also used a combination of Chaos Group’s Phoenix FD and SideFX Houdini for some of the effects work in that same sequence.”

The Color Grade
Once Technicolor’s work was complete, they delivered all shots directly to Company 3 senior colorist Claudio Sepulveda rather than sending the shots directly to editorial for their review. Sepulveda, working in Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve, added additional facial work to the characters to fine-tune their appearance in addition to handling the color grading for the show.

While colorists such as Sepulveda are often charged with minor “cleanup” and “digital cosmetics” as part of the grading, the work on Firefly Lane was obviously more involved and extensive because it was designed to help sell the de-aging. Doing some of this work as part of the grading sessions also allowed the show’s creatives to help finalize the actors’ looks during the finishing process.

Claudio Sepulveda

This type of work, Sepulveda explains, “is incredibly intricate because faces are usually in movement, of course. So it starts with isolating faces in Resolve through a combination of keying and rotoing and then, within the isolated portions, performing the digital cosmetic work to help with the process of making the leads look the age the characters are in the story. The tracker doesn’t necessarily follow every movement perfectly, so that involves a lot of manual keyframing to ensure the matte stays perfect.” Then he would continue to do add nodes and perform additional roto work around hair using masks and mattes and tracking them all to the movement of the faces.

“We have to pull a more precise key than usual for color grading,” adds Sepulveda, “because it can’t include lips or eyes or hair or anything else. So it’s very narrow.” Then each character must have a separate Power Window and then, when everything was isolated, Sepulveda could make adjustments within those qualifications using several tools that affect detail and contrast. He also made a lot of use of Resolve’s OpenFX Beauty plugin.

“I was able to work with the [creatives] to adjust the strength of the corrections throughout each shot,” he says. “If we have four actors moving in a shot, it can take as much time as a whole lot of shots would if we were just doing traditional color. We ended up doing over 600 rotos for one episode, so the time involved did add up.”

Of course, Sepulveda also handled the series’ traditional color work, bringing more of a golden-yellow look and slight diffusion and mist for the scenes set during the characters’ childhoods. Then the ’80s get more of a “brownish tobacco-y” treatment, and he used Resolve’s tools to narrow the oranges, yellows and magentas into more of an overall brown range. The sections set closest to today are slightly cooler, “with whites that have a subtly blue cast and blue elements in the frame accentuated a bit more than in the previous part.”

Of the facial work, Sepulveda says, “It’s the most complex work I’ve done, but I got into modes:  ‘Now I’m color grading, and now I’m doing VFX work.’ It definitely took more time than I’ve spent on any other episodic TV work, but I’m very happy with the results.”

Once all of the work was complete, Company 3 exported the scenes and delivered them to the editorial team for Friedman and Netflix to review. “This new process,” says Eberhardt, “was something we all had to figure out collaboratively when we started. It took a couple episodes to get things in place, but in the end, it was a well-oiled machine.”

“Everyone involved from Netflix, Company 3 and the editorial team all worked very closely together, and this helped us create the custom pipeline. We all worked really well together in that process of figuring out something new that I don’t think anyone has ever done before on this scale,” she concludes.