When it came time to post Warp Films and Sky Atlantic’s Little Birds, the world was already shutdown due to the pandemic, but that didn’t stop Technicolor London from working on the series remotely.

Inspired by the erotic short stories of Anaïs Nin, the 1950’s set drama series Little Birds follows heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple), who is looking forward to being reunited in Morocco with her fiancée Hugo, an English Lord (Hugh Skinner). When she is not received as enthusiastically as she hoped, Lucy spins down the infamously decadent rabbit hole of the Tangier Interzone, an international zone, which was at the time run by the French protectorate.

Director of photography Ed Rutherford, director Stacie Passon and Warp Films executive producers Ruth McCance and Peter Carlton worked with Technicolor London senior colorist Dan Coles, who employed the FilmLight Baselight, to bring these vignettes to the screen. The team also collaborated with Technicolor sound mixers Gareth Bull and Richard Straker on the Dolby Atmos mix and VFX creative director Gary Brown.

The series was shot on the Sony Venice at 4K resolution using the raw X-OCN codec and most of the post was completed during the COVID-19 shutdown using TechStream, Technicolor’s IOS application for color, sound and VFX review sessions.

“Most of the post was accomplished under coronavirus conditions, so we worked remotely” explains executive producer Ruth McCance. “Our director was in New York, I am in Stockholm, Peter Carlton (Warp Films joint CEO) is in Derbyshire, and none of us could travel. Post producer Michelle Camp and the team at Technicolor reacted very quickly and cleverly to the lockdown and subsequent working restrictions, so we were able to stick to what was quite a tight delivery schedule thanks TechStream and the resourcefulness and commitment of everyone involved.”

“The dramatization of Little Birds was imagined as a vibrant, stylized melodrama from the outset, steeped in a rich dynamic palette that would push its own boundaries and seek to realize an aesthetic of wondrous color and a creative expression of visual stimulation,” says DP Rutherford, who once again worked with frequent collaborator Coles.

Coles describes the Little Birds’ world as a journey of color. “As the hedonism and intoxication of life intensifies through the episodes, so does the color contrast and saturation. Skies were treated and enhanced and sometimes given strips of color just to enhance our strange, exciting and unique world. The raw format gave me lots of scope to really push colors to incredible levels. And with very little filtration used in-camera, Ed gave me the chance to add lots of texture, depth and diffusion as part of the grading process. Grades, vignettes and selective defocus were also used to accentuate our look. I am looking forward to pushing the look further in the HDR grade.”

“We were going for a very particular look that had to suggest the big, bold melodramas from the 1950s that inspired us, yet also feel fresh and modern,” explains McCance. “But we didn’t want an empty pastiche — it had to be emotional and relatable and draw audiences in as well. The last thing we wanted was for the look to be so stylized that it distracted from the emotional world we were trying to create. So it was a very fine and challenging line to find, sustain and develop over six episodes, and Ed and Dan walked it beautifully together.”

Ed points to the excitement Coles took in developing the LUT package during prep. “It was something that I always recognize in his approach and it infused the project from the beginning with a sense of ‘sentiment de lumiere’ — a ‘feeling’ for the light,” says Rutherford. “I encouraged Dan to push our look and he was quickly able to respond with shooting LUTs that were out of the ordinary, with the most exciting rendering of color and contrast I’ve been able to take to any set so far.”

Audio
Technicolor London sound mixers Bull and Straker worked closely with the series’ producers on the soundscape for Little Birds. “The vision was for the Tangier soundscape to be rich and lush with definite moments of near-silence to underpin tension,” says Straker, who navigated the team through Technicolor UK’s first Dolby Atmos Mix.
“Atmos gives us incredible flexibility when creating the soundscape. It means that we’re able to place sounds very deliberately in the listening environment, which mirrors much closer how we experience sound in the real world,” explained Straker. “As well as the extra surround speaker fidelity, we now have ceiling channels, which adds another dimension to the sonic world, enveloping the listener even further into the story.”

VFX
Brown worked alongside Rutherford and production designer Anna Pritchard early on in the production process, consulting and delivering VFX shots for the six episodes. “A lot of our energy went into set piece sequences such as achieving 1955 New York, the transatlantic cruise ship, and a fair bit of technical and creative work in and around the farmhouse finale,” says Brown.

With Technicolor providing full post services, Brown and the VFX team were able to collaborate with Rutherford and Coles in the grading suite to provide a seamless client experience. “Ed and I had many brainstorms about how to achieve the crane shot that establishes the ship after its arrival in Tangiers — whether it should be a drone or crane and what the pros and cons of each were,” explains Brown. “We provided both previs and techvis to help make our decisions and inform the team. We also had many creative chats about both the lighting and the look of the finale in Episode 6. I remember being in Dan’s BaseLight suite with both Dan and Ed getting completely carried away — with the pair of them developing this surreal yet stunning look that director Stacie Passon was after.”

The six-episode series began airing on Sky Atlantic and Now TV on August 4.