NBCUni 9.5.23

Category Archives: production

BBC and 3 Ball Media: Storage for Unscripted Series

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By Alyssa Heater

Unscripted reality series and the sheer amount of footage captured for each episode poses unique challenges, especially when it comes to storage.  

To find out more about how these shows manage all that data, we first spoke with BBC Worldwide post producer Chris Gats, who works on the unscripted series Life Below Zero and its multitude of spinoffs. The remoteness of the series’ shooting locations is a driving factor in its storage needs, and Gats details how tripling the storage plays into the workflow.

We then sat down with 3 Ball Media Group (3BMG) EVP of post Neil Coleman and director of production and operations Scotty Eagleton to learn about storage solutions for high-volume footage series — including one with 28 cameras running 24/7. 3BMG is the force behind reality series including Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend and College Hill: Celebrity Edition. 

BBC Worldwide

It seems like the bulk of your work has been in the reality TV/unscripted realm. What inspired you to go this route?  
I kind of fell into it. I started as a production assistant for the company [Stone & Company Entertainment], that which produced game shows and docu-reality shows like Loveline, The Man Show and Shop ‘Til You Drop. I just grew up through post in that company, and it became my niche.

Tell us about the typical workflow on an episode of Life Below Zero, from shooting to post to delivery. 
Reality shows have a tremendous amount more of everything. A scripted show might go out with one camera and one microphone. We go out with several cameras all filming the exact same thing. One hour of footage in the scripted world is several hours in the reality world. That’s the main difference… more cameras and more microphones on-set. We film it, we archive it to hard drives, then the hard drives make their way down to Los Angeles. The post team take it from there.  

Specifically on Life Below Zero, because the show is so remote, and it is very difficult and expensive to get the crews in and out, we have them make three copies of their footage. It’s on in triplicate, just in case FedEx loses one, a producer’s bag falls into a river, or whatever it could be.

The producer will hold onto one copy, then the two others go to our production hub in Anchorage. Once the footage is handed off, they immediately send one of the hard drives down to post in Los Angeles, and the other one is archived onto their hard drive. So now we have the footage flying to Los Angeles on a hard drive, it’s in Anchorage on a hard drive, and the producer has their a copy. And if we lose one, we’re fine because we have two back-ups.  

Once the footage gets to Los Angeles, we archive it to an LTO tape right away. Once we get it on LTO, we tell production up in Anchorage and then they can wipe their two drives and send them back into the field. It’s always on a constant rotation. In Los Angeles, we also copy it into our computer archive system and send the drives back up. Throughout the whole run of post, Anchorage has a copy of our media, it’s in Los Angeles in our edit system, and we also have it archived on an LTO tape.  

What about storage for the post process?  
For most of the shows I run post for, we use the post facility FotoKem. They supply our offline equipment, and we go to them for some online and audio mixing. They invented an all-in-one, on-set color correction and archival machine called nextLab. It allows us to go out in the field, upload our footage, add our LUT to see what the shots are going to look like, automatically sync the audio, and even archive to LTO right on-set. It can also timecode and distribute dailies.  

It also serves as storage by ingesting and archiving full-resolution media. We have at least a petabyte of 4K media in it now. From there, we take the footage, down-rez it, and shoot it over to an Avid Nexis for editing. So, we have two things: the HD/UHD archive in the nextLab, and the low-res on a Nexis.   

Did COVID impact your storage process with hybrid and remote workflows?  
We kind of lucked out with the Life Below Zero shows. It takes a year to film these. We film three episodes at a time, in part, because of hunting seasons and crazy weather. Also, when we send humans out to these remote locations, we don’t want them to be there too long. The show features four people an episode, so we film at four different locations. It takes a while to film, but as we start to film and stockpile, we then send to post. 

We were in the process of shooting Season 9 when production was shut down. At this that time, FotoKem and BBC got together to figure out a solution. Both bought computers to help facilitate a remote post workflow. We were only down for one calendar week. We kicked everybody out of the office, then the following week, I was calling everybody to come back at a scheduled time frame to grab their computer and anything else they needed to take home. We got everyone set up, and then I got together with FotoKem and we started the remote workflow. The next Monday, post was up and running entirely from peoples’ people’s homes. By the time we were about to run out of footage to edit, the government let us go back to filming.

We were one of the first to get to go back to work because of our remoteness. We sent four people up to film the episodes: a DP, a producer, a DIT/PA-type person, and then we a “safety manager.” The safety manager handles the cooking, and shelter and brings a gun in case of bears or any danger. It’s crazy what they do.

Will you touch on why security played a factor in selecting the right storage solution for Life Below Zero?
Nat Geo is now owned by Disney, and they adhere to the highest security standards. FotoKem dealt with the highest level of security possible from Disney and did whatever they needed to dowas necessary to make our network secure. When editors are working from their homes, they log into FotoKem’s closed network, and are, in a way, using FotoKem’s internet connection to access the footage. Several years ago, we were exploring how to work remotely, and then we expedited it due to the pandemic. Now we’re remote, and it’s working great.

3BMG

Tell us about your experience in the reality TV/unscripted arena and what inspired you to explore this niche within the industry.
Neil Coleman: My background is as an editor. I started editing commercials and music videos at a post house, and one of our clients was the talk show, The Jenny Jones Show. We used a linear editing system, the Grass Valley CMX, and that’s how I learned. I went from there to The Oprah Winfrey Show where I spent 16 years, starting in editorial then moving to project management. When The Oprah Winfrey Show ended, there was not much television, media or entertainment work in Chicago, so I moved out to Los Angeles and started working on The Jeff Probst Show. The post supervisor for that show had worked at 3 Ball Media Group (3BMG) previously and they were looking for somebody to take over their post department. I’ve now been at 3BMG for about nine and a half years. Prior to that, I never worked in unscripted reality, just talk shows, music videos and commercials. The nomenclature is different, but the work is all very similar.

Scotty Eagleton: When I first got into the industry, I started in the music video space but felt it was quickly going nowhere, so I accepted a job with 3BMG. I worked on a few reality shows, then left 3BMG and shifted my focus to scripted and I bounced around as a project manager on various sitcoms for a long time. I wanted to have a role with more longevity, so I went back to 3BMG, helping with deliverables and working with the production teams.

Once Neil and I started working together, and then our production services business, Warehouse Studios, came about, I started learning more about post workflows. That knowledge has really helped me collaborate with Neil and find the types of people required to produce content and ensure our clients’ needs are met.

3BMG works on big reality titles, including Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend and College Hill: Celebrity Edition. Tell us about the typical workflow on an episode of an unscripted TV show.
Coleman: Both of those shows shoot a lot of content, both on fairly concentrated timelines. Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend shot eight episodes in eight days — one episode per day. And they had something like 28 cameras, which was very intimidating for us because the turnaround was very tight. We can absolutely handle that kind of footage, but turning it around that quickly… there is a lot going on. College Hill was also just four weeks, and it had around 28 cameras as well, but they were running 24/7 because they’re embedded in a house, and it’s more documentary-style. There’s just a huge volume of footage.

Our typical workflow, regardless of whether it’s local or across the country, starts with how we receive the footage, which is typically electronically. We use Signiant’s Media Shuttle, which allows us to receive the footage much faster than the traditional way, where everything is offloaded by the DIT onto an external hard drive and then FedEx-ed back to us. For argument’s sake, if you shoot on a Monday, the footage will be ready on Tuesday, and because you’re FedEx-ing it, that means you don’t receive it until Wednesday. If you’re transferring electronically, and your speeds are high enough when you finish shooting on a Monday, then you start receiving the footage right away.

In the unscripted world, media is edited on Avid, then we use AMA (Avid Media Access) to connect to the raw source footage and then transcode for the proxy media. It’s a tried-and-true workflow, but it requires a large volume of people because it’s a linear, single-file workflow. If you have one machine, it does one file at a time.

We use something that’s more enterprise-level: a transcoding tool called Telestream Vantage. Our setup transcodes up to 20 files simultaneously — much faster than an assistant editor’s Avid would. For example, we got 28 cameras in for College Hill on a Monday. By Wednesday morning, the footage was already grouped, prepped and ready for our story producers and editors. So it took around 36 hours total, and those are huge shows.

When we go to online, mix and color, we’ll AMA and consolidate the media. When we are finished with the low res, we’ll create the final 4K or HD media. One of the advantages of using Telestream is when we’re creating the proxy media, we’ll bake a LUT into the log footage so that it looks correct as a proxy. If you AMA it, you have to rely on the Avid to add the LUT. If you’re grouping multiple cameras, that LUT requires processing power just to be able to display it in Avid, whereas in Telestream, it’s baked in, and you don’t need the Avid to do anything.  

What is the collaboration process like with other creatives and stakeholders? Do you have anybody that you’re working with outside of your team, like on the production side? 
Coleman: We’re preparing to begin a show for Hulu after the first of the year. As soon as the show is green lit, we’ll start speaking with the executive producers about what their needs are, how they envision creating the show, what types of cameras they want to use, etc. Those are all very creative conversations about how the DP likes to work. The linchpin of that whole dynamic and interaction is the DIT — the digital imaging technician — who is the point of contact between what is acquired in the field and what ends up being transferred to us. It is imperative to have strong communication and a good relationship with that person, and also for that person to have strong communication with the camera team and the producers out in the field. 

Communication is key for everything. Once we’re in post, we have conversations with the post teams about their needs, how they like to work with graphics, music and all those creative elements that require a technical foundation. We like to cater to those needs while still within our existing infrastructure because we have multiple shows going on simultaneously, and we have a lot of shared resources. We want to make sure that everybody is moving in the same direction yet have some control of their own individual shows. 

Neil Coleman

Do you use the same storage systems across all the projects that come through 3BMG, or does it vary per project?  
Coleman: It varies a little bit per project, and that often has to do with restrictions or mandates that come from the network. For instance, we have to go through a security audit for Amazon when we work on their shows. They have, in a way, set the bar for what we provide for everybody: security in the facility, encrypted drives, ensuring that we have the correct IT infrastructure and beyond. Regarding storage, we primarily use Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS). We also use 45Drives’ NAS and Storinator. We also use the Nexis for Avid, as well as archive to LTO. Then some networks, like Amazon, have us upload directly to their S3 in the cloud.  

Was security a big factor in determining what kind of storage that you use?  
Coleman: With the Amazon security audit, we made sure that everything we are using hit their specs and met their requirements in order to be approved to work on their show. For the most part, everything that we already had hit those specs, we had to just make sure they were configured according to their requirements.  

Has the evolution of hybrid and remote workflows affected your storage needs at all?  
Coleman: I don’t think so. The way we do it here, and the way I understand it, it’s fairly similar to the other unscripted companies. People will remote in from their home locations or wherever they’re working into our facility, into their edit bay here at our facility, and they will work as if they were here in person. Our infrastructure on-premise is the same as if you were in-person or remote.  

Scotty Eagleton

All of our worlds changed when COVID hit and everybody did work from home, but that’s basically remoting in. We really don’t use cloud for much of our real day-to-day editing. We primarily use the cloud or high-speed internet for transferring footage from one location to another and then for MediaSilo or Frame.io or review and approval. 

Do you have anything on the horizon that you’d like to talk about?  
Eagleton: 3BMG owns a company called Warehouse Studios, which Neil and I oversee. It was founded because independent producers who are selling content have a need for reliable production, post and accounting services. Often, a producer who sells a piece of content to a network won’t have anywhere to take and produce it. That’s where we step in to assign a whole team to ensure that they’re taken care of every step of the way. It’s another layer to the services that we offer.  

Alyssa Heater is a writer and marketer in the entertainment industry. When not writing, you can find her front row at heavy metal shows or remodeling her cabin in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Sundance: DP Derek Howard on Shooting Plan C Doc

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The Sundance documentary Plan C, directed by Tracy Droz Tragos, follows Francine Coeytaux and the team who established Plan C — a grassroots organization dedicated to expanding access to medication abortion.

DP Derek Howard

Droz Tragos follows the group as they look for ways to distribute abortion pills while following the letter of the law. Unmarked vans serving as mobile clinics distribute medication to those who cannot get help in their own states.

The doc was shot by DP Derek Howard and edited by Meredith Perry (who will be talking to us about her role in the film in the near future). We reached out to Howard, who got involved in Plan C near the start of production. “I believe there had been just a few research shoots completed before we really got the camera package organized and started getting out there filming,” he says.

Let’s find out more…

How did you work with the Tracy Droz Tragos? What direction were you given?
This was the second project I worked on with Tracy, so we had a little bit of experience working in the field together. Tracy owned the camera package we were using — Canon C500 Mark II with Cooke Panchro primes — so she has a good understanding of the technical side of things. We would agree on a few focal lengths we were going to favor and omit medium shots for the most part. I would have a lot of freedom in terms of composition and lighting, and we would often check in with each other about swapping primes at appropriate breaks. After a few shoots it became pretty intuitive as to when it would make sense to change lenses and go closer or widen out.

Once we got into a good groove, we didn’t have to communicate about these choices so much, and it just started to flow as the style was established. We were lucky to have an incredible editing team (Meredith Perry and Beth Kearsley, who cut on Adobe Premiere). They were putting together sequences throughout shooting so I could review what was making the cut and focus in on the style more precisely.

What about working with the colorist? What are some notes that you exchanged? Who was the colorist?
We graded Plan C using Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve with Brian Hutchings in several remote sessions over Zoom and using Frame io. We would do a quick pass of the entire film, establishing looks at the beginning of each scene, and then skip ahead to the next one so he could work independently once we’d set some parameters.

DP Derek Howard

Then after some days, we’d have another pass, make more detailed adjustments and just build things from there. A lot of the notes were to do with highlight control, color temperature shifts and depth enhancements. We wanted our heroes to have a warm and inviting aura and to lean in to certain seasonal shifts. Often, we’d want to create a feeling of more depth by darkening certain foreground or background areas and helping to direct the viewer’s eye. We would often key specific colors and have them pop in saturation to emphasize certain details, like someone’s nail art or the color of their eyes.

As you said before, you shot on the Canon camera? 
Yes. We shot Plan C on the Canon C500 Mark II with Cooke Panchro/i Classic primes in Super 35mm crop sensor mode. This camera is an ideal choice because it is small and lightweight, can record continuously for long periods of time with minimal battery consumption, and has internal Rawlite. The Cooke Panchro primes are a fantastic pairing with this camera, as they are compact, fast and have a nice softening translation of the image that cuts the digital sharpness and has very pleasing flares and bokeh.

DP Derek Howard

Can you talk lighting?
I took advantage of available lighting as much as possible, positioning subjects close to windows or away from direct light sources. Overhead lighting fixtures would be turned off, and sometimes we would use practical lamps for a little lift in the ambient levels. On very few occasions, I would use some 750-watt tungsten lamps shot through diffusion to key an interview and sometimes some bounce or white cloth to lift faces.

Are there some scenes that stick out as challenging?
The biggest challenge while shooting Plan C was to find creative solutions for filming subjects who needed to remain anonymous. We would return to some of the subjects several times throughout the film, and they needed to have their identities protected, so I had to explore how to film an interview with them and capture their presence and vibe without showing any full faces.

We used long lenses, like a 75mm or 100mm, to film abstract details such as hands, feet, the edge of a face or a silhouette by a window. Over the course of a long interview, it gets difficult to find new angles and compositions, so searching for fresh ways to convey a subject’s presence without actually seeing them clearly was a big obstacle. We were able to overcome that mostly through experimentation and abstraction made possible in large part thanks to the prime lenses we were lucky to have available to us.

DP Derek Howard

Looking back on the film, would you have done anything different?
Of course. With every project, when you watch it, you can’t help but critique your own work and think about different things you would have done. So much time passes from production to premiere that by the time you are watching the final film, you always feel like you have evolved in your style or learned things that you would have applied to the shoot.

With Plan C, I would have liked to have a few portable, battery-powered fixtures, like an Astera tube or an MC Lite to quickly add little accents to a scene. Having compact, battery-powered lights than can produce any color you might need are super-handy and flexible if you need to adjust a scene super-quickly. Often in verité situations, there is no time for lighting, but having these types of fixtures allows for very fast enhancements that can help elevate a scene a lot.

Any tips for young cinematographers?
Pay attention to the content of a scene as closely as possible. Once you are feeling the moment and are as present as possible, you will intuitively operate the camera differently than if you are just focusing on all the technical factors. React to the emotions in each scene; allow your humanness to be a part of your handling.

Be as prepared and researched as possible before shooting, but during filming, turn that part of your brain off and work from the gut. All the prep is still inside you, but I find the best moments come when you put that in the background and let your intuition take the lead. Remember to look away from your monitor or eyepiece from time to time and look around the scene for other details or things that are happening out of frame that might be valuable to incorporate.

 

NBCUni 9.5.23
Flix 6.5

Foundry Flix 6.5: Increased Flexibility, Pipeline Customization 

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Foundry has released Flix 6.5, a new version of its story development tool that now offers increased flexibility and customized workflows. Aligned with releases of Nuke, Katana and Mari in December 2022, Flix 6.5 also has updated support for the VFX Reference Platform 2022, while Flix client now natively supports Apple Silicon.

According to Foundry, Flix 6.5’s new permission system is based on groups and roles, giving teams greater control over how they tell their stories. Admin users can now access, share and manage information with members of the team securely and from anywhere.

Flix 6.5Flix 6.5 allows users to streamline the review and feedback process between teams — from story to editorial, production or external stakeholders — with the upgraded studio-wide Contact Sheets. Now more flexible and diverse, Contact Sheets give users access to multiple templates, allowing them to choose and customize the templates that best integrate into their pipeline.

Users can also now use Flix in their pipeline at any stage of story development thanks to the new versioning system. Flix 6.5 can maintain tracking and versioning whether a panel is ingested in Flix for the first time manually or from editorial, allowing a smoother round trip between departments.

With the new media relinking system, Flix 6.5 also smooths out intersoftware processes within the story department. Users can have their panels automatically relinked in Storyboard Pro and versioned when manually imported for the first time in Flix from apps other than Storyboard Pro.

Additionally, Flix 6.5 makes data management and the review process easier with the introduction of managed source-file support for Storyboard Pro. This feature allows users to store their .sbpz projects in the server and use them as source files so there’s no need to remember their name or location elsewhere.

Extensibility is also significantly improved, as users have easier API access and more comprehensive documentation, and the introduction of the Webhooks System allows users to eliminate repetitive work with the power of custom event-based triggers that automate standard processes.

 

 


A Man Called Otto

A Man Called Otto Director Talks Post and VFX

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By Iain Blair

Based on the New York Times bestseller “A Man Called Ove,” A Man Called Otto tells the story of Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks), a grumpy loner who no longer sees the purpose in his life following the tragic loss of his wife. Otto is ready to end it all, but his plans are interrupted when a lively young family moves in next door.

A Man Called Otto

Director Marc Forster and Tom Hanks on-set.

It was directed by versatile helmer Marc Forster, whose credits include World War Z, Quantum of Solace, Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland and The Kite Runner.

I spoke with Forster about making the film, dealing with all the VFX, and how he handled Hanks’ demanding cat co-star.

Talk about the look you and your DP Matthias Koenigswieser went for, given that there are a lot of flashbacks.
I wanted it to look and feel very real and grounded. We shot in Pittsburgh in the winter, so all the present-day scenes are quite gray, and the colors are not really popping. It’s all very monochrome.

Then, when we go into all the flashbacks, they’re much warmer, with much more color, because Otto’s thinking about his wife and all his happy memories of her. We shot in this cul-de-sac, and in the flashbacks, the neighborhood is bright; it’s spring, and the trees are green. But in the present day, it’s a finished housing development. We found the exact neighborhood we wanted, but since it was winter, we needed a lot of VFX to deal with the flashback visuals.

A Man Called Otto

What about post. Where did you do it?
We did all the post in London. We cut it in offices in Soho and mixed all the sound at the new De Lane Lea studios, which are just incredible… I highly recommend. We had a great sound team — supervising sound editor Simon Chase and mixers Chris Burdon and Gilbert Lake. We did ADR at Molinare. Then, because composer Thomas Newman is based in LA, we recorded the score here in LA.

I’m very involved with sound as it’s this whole other layer that is really half the film. We did a lot of overlapping of sound between today and the past, and there’s so much you can do just with raising and lowering the volume of the sound.

Do you like the post process?
I love post. I love being on-set, but you’re dealing with a lot more pressure and time constraints. In post, you can reflect more on the story you’re telling, and on this film, there was this fine line we had to find between the drama and the comedy. You can show the work as you go, which is very important with this sort of film because often you need to mix a line a bit higher if people are still laughing at the line before, so they don’t miss it. So we were doing a lot of that kind of detailed work in post, which I really enjoy.

Your longtime editor Matt Chessé, ACE, cut this. How did you work together and what were the main editing challenges?
We’ve been collaborating for 23 years now on nearly all my films, so we have this great shorthand. He was based in London, and we sent him dailies from Pittsburgh. He would send me cuts as he was working on the assembly, and I would give him feedback. That way we made sure there were no pickups missing and that I was getting everything we needed. We had this constant flow of data. He was able to send me stuff on my phone while I was on-set so I could see what worked and what didn’t. It’s so much easier than in the old days.

As for the challenges, the big one was all the flashbacks. In the book they all have a chapter, and in the Swedish film they’re much longer. We changed them to be much shorter because I felt the emotional connection between Otto and his younger self was key. But I didn’t want to linger there too much. Instead I just gave enough information and exposition to tell the story and gradually reveal what had happened.

A Man Called OttoThis isn’t an obvious VFX film, but you had many companies (Crafty Apes, Tryptyc, Light VFX, SSVFX, Tempest, Territory, Jamm, Axis and Goodbye Kansas) working on it. I’m guessing that was to do with the current global shortage of VFX artists?
You’re exactly right. It’s a big problem, the lack of manpower, and any place with good tax incentives — like the UK, Australia and Canada — makes it hard to get a good VFX crew now. That’s why we had to use so many companies. We had one company working on the cat, and we had to split up so much of the rest of the work because of our post schedule and release date in order to get it all done in time.

We did have a huge amount of VFX shots in the end – over 1,000 – but the majority of them were weather fixes. The big challenge of shooting somewhere like Pittsburgh in winter is that in the morning it can look like Alaska, but suddenly the sun’s out, all the snow melts and by afternoon it looks like Ibiza. So we had fake snow in the foreground and added VFX snow in the background in a lot of shots.

A Man Called Otto

What was the most difficult VFX sequence to do?
It was the train sequence in the flashback scene when Otto first sees his future wife as she rushes to catch the train. Originally, we were going to shoot it at a real station in Pittsburgh, but we lost the location and ended up having to use an old station in Ohio and needed a lot of VFX to make it work. The buildings are real, but we had to create the whole train and tracks with VFX, and it was very tricky as we were on such a tight schedule.

How early did you start the VFX process, especially in terms of dealing with the cat?
We started fairly early, and the main visual effect I was worried about was the cat. It’s so hard to create a CG cat that looks real, so I felt we should really try to capture as much of the cat in-camera as possible, which we did. But sometimes the cat just wouldn’t cooperate, and it’s so hard to direct cats and dogs.

After the shoot we did a few greenscreen days with the cat because in post we just didn’t have the time or the budget to get the cat 100% right because there were too many shots. That way we could comp the cat into the shots we needed, but it was still a real task. In the end, I think about 10% of the cat shots are totally CG, like the one where its claw hangs in Otto’s trousers in the garage.

What about the DI? Who was the colorist and how closely did you work with them and the DP?
We did it at Company 3 with colorist Sofie Borup. We all go in and set the basic look, and then Matthias and Sofie go off and start color-timing it shot by shot. Then I come back at the end of the week and review what they’ve done and give my notes, and they keep working until we’re all happy.

A Man Called OttoWhat sort of film did you set out to make?
When I read the novel, I was laughing out loud, and I also got very emotional. Then I saw the Swedish film version and felt that Otto is like a Shakespearean character that works in any culture. The story really touched me, and I felt it needed to be shared with a wider audience as this life-affirming film. But it also has a lot of humor and absurd moments when you have to laugh or you’d just cry.

Did it turn out the way you first envisioned it?
It did. It’s what I visualized when I first read the book. I think Tom gives such a great performance and I’m very pleased with how it turned out.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.


Camp Lucky

Behind the Title: Camp Lucky VFX Supervisor Seth Olson

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Seth Olson is a motion graphic designer and VFX supervisor at Camp Lucky, which provides live-action production, editorial, design, animation, visual effects, color and audio for film, TV and advertising. “We help clients bring stories to audiences on any screen or proverbial campfire. Our goal is to make a lasting impression with hard work and a lot of fun,” he says.

Kia

As lead designer of Camp Lucky’s animation and design team, Olson has contributed to commercials for Ram, Yeti, Kia, Frito-Lay, Toyota and JCPenney as well as short films including The Unlikely Fan, directed by his Camp Lucky colleague Sai Selvarajan. Originally from Colorado, Olson studied fine arts at Texas A&M. He worked at the Center for Brain Health in visual development for projects including user interfaces, VR environments and Virtual Gemini, a video game that helps autistic children and adults negotiate complicated social situations and experiences.

Let’s find out more from Dallas-based Olson…

Talk about what being a designer and VFX supervisor entails?
When we tackle graphic needs, whether it is motion designing logos or creating convincing VFX, my job starts with figuring out what our clients want most.  I work to deliver a variety of skillsets to meet as many needs as possible, whether it’s supervising visual effects on-set or designing and animating visuals and graphics for commercials and film.

TGI Fridays

What would surprise people about what falls under that title? 
I handle a lot of tasks that are important but might never be seen, such as removing/adding elements in a scene, rotoscoping, compositing and painting out imperfections. A lot of people outside of the industry assume there are a lot more CG explosions in daily work.

How long have you been working in VFX, and in what kind of roles? 
I’ve been working in VFX and motion graphics for about 15 years. I started out in an apprenticeship, where I learned a ton from Danny DelPurgatorio, Nader Husseini, Justin Harder, Brandon Oldenburg, Limbert Fabian and many more. Every step was a learning experience, and they are still some of my favorite people in the industry.

I’ve dabbled in web development, but I always come back to motion and animation. I’ve been with Lucky since 2011, and it’s been a wonderful environment. I’ve jumped into each role shy of being a producer. Producers are amazing at what they do, and I appreciate their contributions every day. I’ve done compositing, 2D and 3D animation, 3D modeling, lighting, texturing, illustration, photography and typography. I have provided supervision off- and on-set for VFX.

Snapple

How has the VFX industry changed in the time you’ve been working? 
The biggest changes have all been technology-based. Faster computers and internet, software advancements and now AI. I’ve seen various companies try to branch out to VR, video games, 3D animated films and more. It’s been beautiful to see all the various steps of evolution.

There have been stylistic changes too, with the most recent being a “social grunge,” if you will, with minimal polish and lightning speed edits.

How has the VFX industry been affected by COVID? 
“Remote” has become the present and, I predict, the future as well. I don’t think your audience would be surprised by this answer. Why limit your talent’s residence to one city? Why a single state? This is a global, collaborative opportunity to meet your needs instantly across time and space. New demand for the internet has only accelerated the development of tools and technologies that enable collaboration. I have seen economic attrition drag down some companies, but from their ashes arise new and innovative people and solutions. Lucky has strived and thrived on that very kind of change.

Camp Lucky

Dallas Independent Film Festival

Why do you like being on-set for shots? What are the benefits? And how has that changed during COVID? 
Being on-set has always helped put a specialist where their talents can quickly and efficiently make contributions. For some of the shoots during COVID, it was effective for me to be online watching the shoot live so I could make suggestions/recommendations without risking exposure. COVID has required communication to be amplified and backup plans built into every shooting experience.

What I mean is that there is no such thing as too much communication now. You can draw on the screen, make expressions in real time on your camera, record temp VO and email it during a cutting session. You can send PDFs, videos, soundtracks and inspirational links. With all these options, we can and should use them to achieve the desired, beautiful deliverable.

Did a particular film inspire you along this path in entertainment? 
Video games were really my first inspiration as a career, but I fell in love with inspirational work from Psyop along the way. I loved drawing and making digital paintings as a kid, so it was an exciting transition to put my work in motion through After Effects, Maya and Cinema 4D.

Camp Lucky

TXU: Water is Awesome

My colleagues are bringing their inspirations and toolsets to the table as well, like with SideFX Houdini. Once in the industry, working closely with creative directors and designers alike has truly been an exciting experience that continues to drive me.

What’s your favorite part of the job? 
My favorite part is helping people. There are other perks, like fresh work every day, but I am lucky to experience a variety of clients and help them tackle whatever’s going on in their world. I get to help people, and that is really meaningful to me.

If you didn’t have this job, what would you be doing instead? 
I considered a variety of idealistic roles when I was in high school, ranging from pastor to park ranger. I have taught at my alma mater a few times, teaching After Effects and Cinema 4D. It is an idealistic itch that I’m trying to scratch. That part of my personality still exists, and I would lean toward something like a counselor or professor if I needed to leave the industry.

Can you name some recent work? 
Dodge Ram, Intel, Tazo, TGI Fridays, Kingsford  and Firehouse Subs

You’ve mentioned tools already, but what do you use day to day? 
It’s mostly Adobe Creative Cloud and Maxon One subscriptions. There are so many powerful tools out these days, with more on their way. But with these two packages, I have 90% of what I need daily.

Hardware-wise, I use a beefy PC that I remote into from home. I have a Canon 5D Mark IV that I bring to set for documenting and sampling light sources.

Where do you find inspiration now? 
Social media is here to stay, but I don’t like feeding that beast more than needed. I try to fill my feeds with various tool and style-related content. My deepest inspiration comes from talking with inspiring people. My brother, Luke Olson, and our social group are extremely creative people. They are avid gamers and digital creators. They participate in maker spaces, play with AI for fun and build bots to beat each other at card games. I am definitely not the smartest in the group, but it’s fantastic to pick up what I can from them and give back. Put me with people who want to create things and we will make magic.

What do you do to de-stress from it all? 
Video games, photography and painting help me relax. Then I sprinkle in some reading and exercise. Vacations to mountainous areas are my favorite. A gin martini is always a plus. I like listening to open-minded folks talk about the what-ifs and the hows of life.


DP Mandy Walker on Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis: Shooting, LUTs, More

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By Iain Blair

Aussie cinematographer Mandy Walker, ACS, ASC, who collaborated with Baz Luhrmann on his sprawling epic Australia, teamed up with the director once more on Elvis. An epic in its own right, Elvis conjures up the life and times — and rise and fall — of this rock ‘n’ roll icon. Starring Austin Butler as the poor white kid from Tupelo, the film is told from the point of view of Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). And as Oscar season starts up, it’s been getting a lot of buzz. And for her part on the film, Walker has become the first woman to take home the AACTA’s Best Cinematography award for Feature Film in Australia, and she has been nominated for an Oscar in the same category.

Mandy Walker

I spoke to Walker, whose credits also include Mulan and Hidden Figures, about the challenges of shooting Elvis, the cinematography and working with the DIT, DI and VFX.

This is an epic story. How did you approach the look of the movie with all the different eras stretching from the ‘50s to the ‘70s?
We basically divided the story into two parts and used different lenses to tell the story. For the first part, when Elvis is growing up in Tupelo, I shot spherical in what we called “black-and-white” color that’s a desaturated look with pushed blacks. Then, once he got to Las Vegas, we used anamorphic lenses — old glass from that period, with more aberrations. We also had different LUTs for each period.

When Elvis is 10 and running to the Pentecostal tent, we shot it with the black-and-white color look. It was a very considered color palette that we’d researched from the period. Then, by the time Elvis got to Hollywood, it was more Kodachrome-looking, and I had more depth of field, more color in the lighting and more contrast. Then in Vegas, there were bright, garish colors, very ‘70s, with lots of flares.

This is your fourth collaboration with Baz. How did it work on this?
Baz is very good at explaining the story he’s making and the whole emotional journey. Then it’s a matter of me interpreting all that visually. And as he’d been working on this for 10 years, he’d done so much research, and the visuals are so important in this.

Fair to say that initially the camera seems to be constantly moving – right from the carnival Ferris wheel scene at the start?
Yes, we wanted it to fly. But later, when it all settles down and the drama gets heavy, the camera moves far more slowly so you focus on the situation. When Elvis is with his mother, it’s slower. Then later, in his Vegas hotel room when he can’t sleep, the mood is darker, and the camera reflects that.

How long was the prep?
We had a lot of prep on this movie — 16 weeks — and we went through everything meticulously. We were just about to start shooting when we had to shut down for four months when Tom Hanks got COVID, so we had even more time to do tons of testing on cameras, lenses and so on. Baz loves to test and experiment, and we also worked closely with all the other departments – not just costume and art direction, but all the VFX. Really, post is part of prep now on a film like this.

Did you do lots of shot lists and storyboards?
Yes, but not for everything. It was more about making the connections between scenes and sequences. For instance, for the bit when young Elvis runs from the gas station to the juke joint to the tent — that was all storyboarded, as it was all a build.

We also built the Beale Street set and Graceland exterior and interior, all on stages and backlots. That way, we could design all the camera moves and transitions and rehearse stuff physically on the sets before we even shot. Pretty much everything was shot on the biggest stages they had at Village Roadshow in Australia, and we also shot on three backlots for the carnival and Beale Street stuff.

Was there any talk about shooting in some of the real locations in the US?
Yes, early on, but we all soon realized we couldn’t, as it’s all changed so much now. Memphis doesn’t look anything like it used to when Elvis was there, and the same with Vegas. That’s why we had to recreate it all from scratch. There is a bit of archival footage of ‘70s Vegas in there, but that was it.

Mandy Walker on-set

How did you make all your camera and lens choices?
We decided to shoot on the ARRI Alexa 65, and Baz and I decided to go that way very early on. It’s an epic story, so why not shoot on an epic format? Then, when Baz was in LA around August 2019, we met up with [optical engineer] Dan Sasaki at Panavision and went through all these different lens iterations — some on 35mm and some on a 65mm camera — until we got to the right ones that were specially built for us.

I heard you also used a special Petzval lens?
Yes, mainly for all the flashback sequences and drug episodes. It’s based on an old projector lens from the 1800s and has a focal length of up to 160mm. Dan made anamorphic and spherical versions of it for us. It was perfect for helping to create that feeling of disorientation we wanted in those scenes because the focus is on the center of the frame and the edges are softer and fuzzier. It gives you this great vortex effect.

Did you work with a colorist in prep on any LUTs?
I did all of that with my DIT, Sam Winzar, and we began very early on in prep and testing. Baz and I would look at colors and lighting, and then we’d refine them when we got to our location or set. We put together a lot of references for the LUTs so all the transitions would be very smooth from one period to another, and we always knew where we were in time. Those LUTs translated into dailies. Sam and I would go into dailies every night, and if we had four or five cameras running, we’d tweak them a bit to make sure they were all balanced. Then Kim Bjørge, our dailies colorist, also ended up becoming our DI colorist.

Isn’t that very unusual?
Very. It was a big step up for him, but he’d been working on the film the whole time and knew it inside out. It worked out really well.

I assume there was a lot of bluescreen and set extension work, especially for the big concert scenes?
There was a lot, as we built all the stages and auditoriums for the concerts and shows. We didn’t use any real theaters, and the film’s full of big sequences, like the famous ’68 Comeback Special set piece. That was huge, as it was the high stage and backstage area and about a third of the audience. All of that was built, along with the whole studio and control room. So we used bluescreen for the rest of the audience and extending the auditorium.

It was the same for the hayride, the early concert sequence. We had about a third of the audience and built the whole stage and backstage again. We used a lot of set extensions for stuff like Beale Street. We built four blocks, but just one level. So the second story and the rest of the street were all added in post. Everything was very carefully planned out, and we did a lot of tests in prep so we all knew exactly what was in frame and what would be added later in post.

The Russwood Park concert is another good example. We shot all of that on a black stage. I put up stadium lights, and that sequence was all extended as well. All the split-screen stuff was planned too. The VFX team worked closely with us and did a great job of integrating with our in-camera work. I was quite involved in integrating all the VFX and post work with them, and we had a lot of VFX companies, like MPC and Luma, working on it. (Other VFX companies included Method, Slate, Mr. X, Rising Sun Pictures and Cumulus VFX).

We did it at The Post Lounge in Brisbane, and they also handled all our dailies and processing. I did all the sessions remotely since I was in LA on the Warner lot in the DI suite — I could see all the images from The Post Lounge in real time, and that’s how we did it.

We did quite a lot of work, especially adding some LiveGrain to match the older film stocks and for when we intercut with archival footage and for stuff like all the 8mm home footage sequences. VFX also added a lot of artifacts to those scenes. But I do have to say, the finished film you see is very close to how our dailies looked. It really did turn out the way we first pictured it, and I’m very proud of the way it looks.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.


DP Chat: Learan Kahanov on Shooting Kevin Smith’s Clerks III

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New York City-based Learan Kahanov is a 30-year industry veteran, contributing to a wide range of television and feature films. While an NYU student, he got experience working in the grip and electric departments, leading him to focus on lighting and working as a gaffer. A year after earning his BFA in film, TV and radio, he got the call to be the gaffer on director Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy.

Kahanov

Learan Kahanov

In 2000, Kahanov hung up his electric tool belt to focus full-time on cinematography. His DP credits include independent films such as A Perfect Fit, The Insurgents and Reunion and the television series Madam Secretary (check out our interview with him for this show), For Life and Stargirl.

Kahanov recently returned to his roots working with Smith again, but this time as director of photography on Clerks III. We asked him to tell us more about this full-circle opportunity.

Tell us about Clerks III. How early did you get involved?
My good friend David Klein, ASC, who shot the original Clerks movies, was unavailable to do the third and asked if I’d be interested. I said yes, and within two weeks I was at Kevin Smith’s comic book store, Secret Stash, in New Jersey.

Kahanov

What direction were you given about the look Kevin wanted?
Kevin is an interesting director when it comes to visuals. We wanted to honor the style of the earlier films, especially the black-and-white original, but since Clerks III takes place in the present, the visuals needed to reflect that.

How would you describe the look? And can you talk more about how the previous films played a role in developing the look?
I think of the movie as having three looks. There was a certain approach to all the scenes at the convenience store that was a throwback to how the original was composed, but I did “pretty up” the lighting.

Then, there is the movie within the movie; I wanted to ensure we were honoring the first two films while still updating the look. The original was shot in 16mm black-and-white — not even Super 16 — and Clerks III is shot with an 8K large-format sensor.

For the movie-within-a-movie sequences, we matched all the shots to the original. We would have reference photos from the first films on our phones or monitors and match the size and angle in the sequences, which often was a challenge due to the different formats of the original and the new film. While Kevin never really had comments on my lighting, he did have specific thoughts on where the camera was placed and the compositions therein. He is very specific when he wants to be, but he mostly had me set up all the shots after a brief discussion, as we did not “shot list” anything traditionally.

KahanovHow did you work with colorist Ken Sirulnick to achieve the intended look?
Ken and I had worked on a concert film (SUSS – Promise Live) that I produced and shot, and we had a great rapport. When it came time to talk seriously about post production on Clerks III, I suggested Ken, who works at Goldcrest Post in New York City. Dan McGilvray, our post producer and an EP, worked out a scenario where Goldcrest was able to set up a remote color suite in the production office housed in Smodcastle in Leonardo, New Jersey.

Since we started talking about post in preproduction, we were able to test different things before we were even done shooting. One of those involved discussions with Suny Behar from LiveGrain, who showed us how the LiveGrain system could help us. We found that we didn’t need to add much grain to the image at all and liked what we had straight out of the Red camera. We did add some grain to the newly shot black-and-white footage, however.

Ultimately, the tests and prep saved us enormous amounts of time and money, allowing us to dial in a look before the final edit was complete. When it came time, Ken had a couple of days alone to set a base look. Afterward, we were able to sit together for the duration of the color grade and work together to finesse the scenes and make all the different deliverables. Ken has a great eye and knows what I like.

What were some notes you gave to Ken to make sure you got what you wanted?
The look was very natural. Most of my notes were about adding elements to help enhance what we wanted to highlight. Some things were about cleaning up what I couldn’t do on-set (darkening walls or floors), and some was done to clean up some faces, but mostly it was about shaping the image to enhance the story.

How did you go about choosing the right camera and lenses for this project? Why was this the right combination?
I knew we were working with a lower budget, and I wasn’t going to have a full truck of lights and gear, so light sensitivity was a major factor. We ended up testing the dual-ISO Sony Venice and the Red Monstro VV. I make a distinction about the Red sensor over the camera “body” because we ended up feeling that the Red system was the best option, and this is how it all landed.

Our main camera body was the Red Ranger (with Monstro chip), and our B cam was the Red Weapon (DSCM2). The C camera was used not only to film some scenes but also as the on-camera prop for what the characters used to make their movie. I wanted two Ranger bodies because they are all-in-one bodies with all the connectivity we needed, but due to availability, we ended up with the DSCM2 Weapon (albeit the same sensor), and it was a blessing in disguise. We were able to use the Weapon for Ronin gimbal/stabilizer work and whenever we needed to get the camera smaller.

Any challenging scenes that you are particularly proud of?
There was one situation where we had planned on shooting in a hospital chapel, but we had to move the scene to the waiting area outside the ER. We started losing light outside due to a storm, but we pushed through. It actually benefited the sequence because there was a natural progression from when we left the seating area to watch what was happening in the operating room and when we returned to the seating area. At that point it was even darker.

While we were shooting the second half of the scene, there was a lightning strike in the distance outside the windows — it couldn’t have timed out better. Later, in sound design, they added a thunder crack, and it just made the scene so much funnier and more visceral. Some things you just can’t plan.

What inspires you artistically?
I am a firm believer in story first. All cinematographers have their own aesthetic and style. I am not an exception, but I also pride myself on being a chameleon — using my creative and technical expertise to what the story in the script requires while still leaving my mark on the project.

What’s your go-to gear (camera, lens, mount/accessories) – things you can’t live without?
My career has spanned ultra-low-budget movies to major network and premium cable TV shows. I have worked with all kinds of gear and resources or lack thereof. So there is no particular gear I “must have,” but instead I hold on to lighting techniques. So, whether I have a full truck of lighting gear or just a handful, I know how to use the resources to create the emotion on-camera that the project requires.

Podcast 12.4

Marvel and Netflix: How Studio Operations Manage Media

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By Oliver Peters

Large studios once personified by major theatrical releases have given way to modern hybrids with a presence in both the motion picture and streaming worlds. This business model includes companies like Netflix and Disney, among others. Gone are the days of storing film in vaults — replaced by the benefits of nimble access to digital assets. Those storage systems and procedures become the heartbeat of the operation.

Evan Jacobs

Marvel Studios
Under the Disney corporate banner and the Disney+ service, Marvel has been able to create streaming series and films based on the broader cinematic universe of its beloved characters. The logistics are shepherded by Marvel Studios. Evan Jacobs (VP, finishing, Marvel Studios) and Matt Walters (director of production technology, Disney) took time out of their busy schedules to discussed what goes into all of this.

How does Marvel handle the media assets for all these properties?
Evan Jacobs: Marvel Studios is a separate entity under the Disney umbrella. We have our own management team, but we’re on the Disney lot in Burbank working with other Disney departments. For instance, Matt works for Disney and supports our Marvel Finishing Department.

There are a couple of different ways that we approach projects. Marvel Finishing is our in-house DI group, and they handle all of our streaming content. They are a boutique operation — 12 people plus the engineers. The theatrical features go through outside vendors for finishing, with Company 3 doing the majority of that work.

Matt Walters

The conform editorial staff on the finishing side are full-time Marvel employees, but the creative editorial teams on the shows and films are hired on a per-project basis. When it comes to the equipment that the creative teams use, such as Avid Media Composer and Nexis storage, some is gear we own, while some is rented.

How does Marvel handle the media assets for all these properties?
Jacobs: Marvel Studios is the clearinghouse for all of the media that’s created. But first, let me add some background. Marvel started as a production company, just like many others. There was literally a drive array on somebody’s desk with the whole movie on it. As time went on, the consistency of the number of shows we were producing got more reliable. We’re talking the era from the first Iron Man to the first Avengers. The increased workload generated interest in bringing an enterprise level of support to this technology.

We currently rely on fast Quantum storage for finishing. Default storage for everything else is [Dell EMC] Isilon, along with some cloud services. At first, we had Isilon storage with every project on its own node, but as we produced more projects, we had to come up with a different strategy. We would be running out of storage on one show and have extra storage on another. Four or five years ago, we took a hard look at rethinking our storage footprint here at the studio and creating a very robust system for all the Marvel projects.

Moon Knight

Can you expand on that?
Jacobs: There are multiple levels. There’s the main in-production storage, which is fast. Then you have archive storage, because every single show that we’ve done is on spinning disk. We keep everything live because we tell such interconnected stories.

When you say live, are you talking just about the finished, edited version of a movie?
Jacobs: All of it. Today, every visual effects vendor, every stereo conversion vendor, every bit of camera original footage, everything that gets created as part of making one of our films comes to our storage. If it’s a DI vendor like Company 3, we’ll supply them with the elements they’ll need. With our internal finishing team, what’s cool is that we don’t have to move anything because we have direct access to everything here.

Wandavision

Matt Walters: From the final IMF that’s sent to Disney+ to final VFX and all the interim versions to the original plates. I can get Evan shots from the movies [completed] six years ago in a couple of minutes because we know where it is and can pipe it directly to them.

Jacobs: Same with assets. We’re talking about something like an Iron Man CGI model from 10 years ago.

That takes a lot of capacity, right?
Walters: There are different stages. In finishing, we have about a petabyte of fast storage. In Raw Cam, where we keep all the OCF storage of active shows, that will be around 30PB by the end of next year. Right now, it’s at 12PB, and we’re doubling it. Show storage for VFX shots gets into another 30PB for all the past shows. Then you add onto that the disaster recovery and safety copies, which is another whole tier. We treat our storage like a private, internal cloud. We can then make sure everyone has access, wherever they’re at and however they need it.

Moon Knight

On top of that, do you also use LTO backups?
Walters: Yes, we have LTO dual-tier backups of everything, as well. Internally, we have different generations of LTO readers going back to LTO4. So we can read any tape from a past show in addition to having it on spinning disk.

How do you keep all of this straight?
Jacobs: It’s a sophisticated operation that’s very systemized. Unlike a lot of production companies, we have the benefit of doing a lot of the same kinds of things all the time. We are a very VFX-dependent studio, so we’re organized around that principle.

On the data engineering level, there are tools to find things. But the truth is, we’ve automated the way we store things, and we have standards. A show today looks the same as it did five years ago. If you opened it up, you would know where everything was. We don’t have one show organized by date and another one alphabetically, for example. So the organizational standards, coupled with some institutional knowledge, allow us to find pretty much anything you would need.

How does this strategy benefit your workflow?
Jacobs: We use [Blackmagic DaVinci] Resolve as our internal DI solution. We also keep our Resolve database completely live for every single project we’ve done. When we upgrade to a newer version of Resolve, it updates that database too. We can open up a grade from five years ago. We have the luxury of being well-supported by a big operation. So we can do things that other people probably wouldn’t want to do, and maybe wouldn’t benefit from, because all our stories are so interconnected.

She-Hulk

I went back and remastered all of the Marvel films back to Iron Man one. It’s like cutting a tree and counting the rings. On those early films, it’s amazing how little media there was compared to now. When you get to the older films, because we were remastering from SDR to HDR, we would discover things. Shots might be clipped or there might be other things that you didn’t notice in the older formats. With the more modern shows, I was able to go back to the sources, open up those visual effects shots, fix them and put them back into the remasters. It’s awesome when you can do that and not wait a week for somebody to find an LTO tape.

Netflix
Netflix has been on the forefront of elevating production and post standards that ripple through the entire industry. Their specs, such as true 4K (or better) camera acquisition and HDR mastering, are primarily intended for Netflix Originals. But they also influence procedures followed by projects that don’t necessarily stream on Netflix. In order to present these specs in a clear manner, Netflix Studios maintains a Partner Help Center website with guidance on a wide range of production and post workflows. This includes a section on how Netflix expects a producing partner to manage the media.

The Crown

As with any production, all media and data management starts on-set or on-location. Scripted fiction projects will often go through a dailies lab or post facility that is responsible for handling the original media until it’s time to turn it over. In the case of Netflix, this media would be delivered to the Netflix Content Hub at the end of the production.

The 3:2:1 Principle
The key recommendation is to use the 3:2:1 principle and checksum verification. Simply put, this means hold three copies of your original camera and audio files. Store these copies on two different types of media. Keep at least one of the backups in a different geographical location. When making these copies, Netflix recommends drive arrays in a RAID 5, 6 or 10 configuration, but not RAID 0 (except for temporary use). Of course, LTO6 through LTO9 (LTFS format) also qualifies.

Dead to Me

Checksum verification requires that you use duplication software like Hedge or ShotPut, which compares the copy to the original and mathematically verifies that no data has been lost or corrupted. In addition, Netflix recommends a visual inspection, i.e., scrubbing through the offloaded files to check for any issues.

Finally, for scripted fiction production, Netflix expects a complete quality control check (QC) with real-time playback of all camera files. And that QC check should be done at a minimum 4K UHD resolution (3840×2160), preferably in a controlled environment, like a color correction (DI) facility.

Guidelines for Reusing Original Recording Media
For most productions, it’s routine to offload the original camera files (OCF), reformat the camera cards and reuse them for further recording. Under Netflix’s guidelines, this should only happen once the editorial team has signed off on what they’ve received and only when the media matches all camera reports and script supervisor notes. And of course, making sure that three verified copies exist. If the turnaround time doesn’t allow for the editorial team to perform these tasks, then it should at least be cross-checked by the dailies lab.

Manifest

All of this is a process that takes time and care. Maintaining a chain of custody is important should any issues arise. In setting up the workflow, consider things like the speed of the camera cards, read/write speeds of the various devices in the chain and the generation of LTO being used. It is also recommended that the drives you copy to should not be slower than the source. In other words, it’s OK to copy from a slow card reader to a faster drive, but ideally never the other way around. Finally, make sure you have enough extra camera cards to go through the full 3:2:1 process with verification and inspection before it’s time to wipe and reuse the cards.

Oliver Peters is an award-winning editor/colorist working in commercials, corporate communications, television shows and films.   

Podcast 12.4
Smart 5

SmallHD Intros Smart 5 Series of 5-inch Touchscreen Monitors

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SmallHD has introduced the Smart 5 monitor series, comprising the Ultra 5, Cine 5 and Indie 5 touchscreen displays. Including two additional wireless versions of the Ultra 5 (TX/RX), these five compact 5-inch touchscreen monitors are all powered by the PageOS 5 Software Toolkit and designed to fit any production need. 

“The Smart 5 series was designed in response to significant demand for smaller touchscreen monitors with the same quality and functionality of SmallHD’s Smart 7 and Ultrabright Series,” says Dave Bredbury, product manager for CS Cine. “We shrunk the display and increased the overall capabilities. Finally, users have access to our camera-control licenses for ARRI, Red and Sony Venice on a 5-inch monitor.”

The Ultra, Cine, and Indie monitors in the Smart 5 Series represent three tiers of brightness, I/O capability and physical interface options to match a range of on-set workflows. All monitors will come equipped with multi-touch interfaces. The Cine 5 adds a joystick and back button for a new way to use the company’s camera-control functionality. The Ultra 5 offers supplemental, customizable function buttons for quick access to monitor and software functions while wearing gloves. Each monitor is encased in a unibody chassis crafted from anodized aluminum and features multiple mounting points.

Users can choose from three great product offerings. “For example, if someone wants the top-of-the-line 3,000-nit powerhouse with physical buttons and an ethernet port, we have the Ultra 5,” adds Bredbury. “If they want to save some money while still being able to control their Red Komodo with a daylight-viewable touch screen, then the Indie 5 or Cine 5 would be the way to go.”

The included PageOS 5 toolset includes EL Zone exposure assist, best-in-class waveform and false color, look-around camera control, advanced Teradek RT overlays and more. The PageOS 5 UI is known for offering quick and repeatable setups and full control over all parameters and display tools. Individual monitor details are as follows:

Ultra 5 combines touch-screen functionality with a full complement of front-facing physical buttons for maximum control in cold weather. It provides a brightness level of 3,000 nits, two 3G-SDI (I/O) ports, two HDMI 2.0 (I/O) ports, an ethernet port for optional ARRI and Sony Venice camera control, two-pin locking power connector and a locking five-pin USB for Red camera control. Ultra 5 will ship this fall.

Additionally, SmallHD and Teradek have joined forces to integrate the new Bolt 6 wireless technology into the Ultra 5 monitor, creating the Ultra 5 Bolt 6 RX 750 and Ultra 5 Bolt 6 TX 750. These models enable 6GHz connectivity, eliminate the need for additional cables or batteries, unlock full wireless camera control and work seamlessly with a hand-held Teradek RT for full wireless FIZ control. The RX monitors are available with integrated Gold Mount or V-Mount options, and all Ultra 5 wireless monitors are fully cross-compatible with all Bolt 4K devices over the 5GHz band. Ultra 5 RX 750 and Ultra 5 TX 750 are expected to ship in early January 2023.

Cine 5 combines a touch-screen experience with a side-mounted joystick and back button, 2,000 nits of brightness, 3G-SDI (I/O), HDMI 2.0 (I/O), two-pin locking power connector and a five-pin locking USB for Red camera control. Cine 5 will ship this fall.

Indie 5 offers a touch-screen-only interface with a physical power button and sliding touch-screen-lock switch. The most lightweight and streamlined of the trio at just 14.4 ounces, Indie 5 provides 1,000 nits of brightness, 3G-SDI (I/O), HDMI 2.0 (I/O), a barrel power input and a micro-USB port for Red camera control. Indie 5 will ship before the end of the year.

 

 

DP Anka Malatynska on HBO Max’s Pretty Little Liars‘ Dark Reboot

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Born in Communist Poland and now living in the United States, DP Anka Malatynska has worked on everything from shorts to episodics. Her recent projects include HBO Max’s Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and four episodes of Hulu’s Monsterland.

Malatynska has continually sought out and created work that is bold and diverse. When describing her work, she says, “My signature style is slightly heightened. I am a sucker for beauty and visuals that allow me to step into another world and forget about the world I live in.” When she’s not on-set, she’s teaching her craft. She spent a large part of the pandemic teaching remotely from Nicaragua and has also served as a visiting professor of cinematography at Northwestern University in Qatar. Before that, she taught at Northern Arizona University. Malatynska likes to say, “Cinematography is my church and daily bread.”

We recently spoke with Malatynska about her work on Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, which co-creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is billing as a “new chapter” of the original Pretty Little Liars story — and not a reboot. The new chapter also has a different feel than the original. When discussing the look of the show, she says, “It’s much more seeded in the horror genre, both visually and story-wise. It’s a lot darker.”

Let’s find out more…

How early did you get involved in planning for the reboot?
I got involved after they already shot the first two episodes. So while I wasn’t there for a lot of the planning, I was there for about 90% of the execution of the work — which also took a lot of planning.

What direction were you given about the look of the show?
In general, the direction was that we wanted to keep it edgy and push the envelope. We wanted to get really creative shots and think outside of the box when it came to camera placement. We also wanted to use the horror/slasher genre as a pool of active references for what we are trying to achieve and emulate.

How did you work with the colorist? Was there a DIT on this show? Were you working with on-set LUTs?
Luckily, I had just finished I Know What You Did Last Summer with the same colorist (Shane Harris from the Picture Shop), who was our final colorist on Pretty Little Liars. Immediately when I took the show over, he and I were on the phone about what wasn’t working within the structure of the LUT we were using. I felt very lucky that I got teamed up with someone I had just finished working with, whose eye I trusted. This really streamlined the post production process because we communicated directly with each other.

Our DIT was Andrew Pisano, and we had light grade on-set every day, so we were using the show LUT and using CDLs to really dial in the look of specific scenes. When I came in after the second episode, the final colorist and I changed the show LUT a bit. I think the first two episodes were a little too dark for post to deal with, even though those episodes look spectacular. I don’t think the original team did anything wrong; they just really wanted to protect a really dark look.

We changed that a bit so we didn’t run into issues like people disappearing into the background. We were able to change the show LUT without changing the look of the show. The LUT just gave a little bit of protection for the darkest pieces in the frame.

Can you talk about the differences working on TV episodes versus films?
I think one of the biggest differences is that on a film, I typically get to sit in with the colorist for at least a week going through all the scenes. In TV it starts to happen while you are shooting, so that review process has to be a lot more streamlined. I’m not going into a color correction day with a colorist in LA or New York, I’m reviewing these episodes on my iPad and communicating with the colorist from there.

Usually I’m doing it while working on another show late at night. So I think the biggest difference is time. When you are shooting a television show, you don’t want to rely on post production to shape the image. You want to get the image as close to your vision as possible during the shoot because the color correction process is going to have to be a lot faster and a lot more streamlined with a lot fewer hands on the controls.

I’ve run into DPs who say, “We’ll fix in post.” I think to myself, “When are you going to fix that in post? You are already going to be on a different show with no time.” It’s also fun and exciting to rely on the cinematography and the lighting of what you are actually capturing on-set instead of thinking, I will do it later… because there never is a later.

What cameras and lenses did you use for Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin?
We used the DXL2 – Millennium DXL 8K Red Monstro body with Panaspeed 70mm primes. So, large-format lenses on a large-format camera. I had just shot an independent film with the same camera package with some of the lenses, so when I found out what they were shooting on, I thought it was a wonderful gift. I had sense of relief because it’s exactly what I would have chosen. On the DXL, the chip has a very natural curve. It’s very soft in a way. It’s the most natural-looking image, the most filmlike and natural. It has a little bit of texture.

Using the DXL2, we shot in 5K, so it made all our lenses perceptively a little tighter. I love epic, exaggerated wide shots in horror; they give the sense that something is off without distracting from the story. I would jump out to 8K resolution on our camera and our 17mm lens to incorporate a wider iris forced perspective of our Millwood world.

Some examples of that are the Y2K party warehouse in Episode 3, or the hand-held sequence when Mouse is freaking out in her room in Episode 7. There is something off, but you can’t quite put your finger on it — the perspective is forced. We used a lot of wider and closer frames to put the viewer right there in the experience of our Pretty Little Liars. There is an immediacy to this kind of storytelling.

Where was the series shot, and how long was the shoot?
The series was shot in upstate New York in the Catskills. A lot of us lived in Woodstock, so we lived in our fake town of Millwood. We really leaned in to using existing locations in upstate New York, which have that small-town, picturesque and creepy-cabin-in-the-woods vibe.

They started shooting the first two episodes last summer in August and September. Then they took a break to review what they had done and started back in October. We shot all the way to the beginning of May this year. Close to a year in the making.

Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin has a much different vibe than the original series. Did you go back and watch the original series at all for research?
It was 100% on purpose. For those who had a chance to see the behind-the-scenes video that HBO Max just put out, the creators really wanted to lean into the slasher genre with a Michael Myers type of figure. We didn’t want to do a reboot of the same show. We wanted to use the show to create these characters. It’s much more seeded in the horror genre, both visually and story-wise.

I did a little research on the original show and was very excited to be part of this reboot because of how the creators approach the show. It was really highly stylized and dark. It’s not just visually exciting, but the stories are also deep and exciting.

You were the cinematographer on Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and Hulu’s Monsterland, which are both darker shows too. Do you gravitate more toward the horror genre?
As a cinematographer I love playing with darkness. I love pushing to the very edge of how dark I can go, of how dark a studio or network will let me go. I’m very attracted to dark imagery. I love thrillers, horror and sci-fi because those genres really allow me to be very expressive.

However, I’m currently working on a very different show (NCIS: Hawai’i) right now. Very glam and high-key. I’m trying not to pigeonhole myself in one thing. Instead I’m trying to learn new things and expand my palate. But my friends do call me the Queen of Darkness. I think we really achieved something spectacular with Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin. Just how dark and yet how beautiful and glamorous it is.

How would you describe your signature style as a cinematographer?
I would describe it as slightly heightened. I am a sucker for beauty and visuals that allow me to step into another world and forget about the world I live in. I am much more interested in different versions of reality, rather than attempting to be a documentarian. Even when we are trying to make something feel normal, for me in a movie, I am always longing for a sense of magic in the visual.

Is there one piece of equipment that you can’t live without?
A camera. I feel like equipment changes. I feel like lighting has evolved. There are some light fixtures that I really love working with. Specifically, Titans and Helios. Being able to control them on a dimmer board makes all the difference because they are quick and easy. I love those tools.

Are there other tools I can’t live without? Cinematography. It’s not necessarily about the tool; it’s about what you will be able to say with that tool and how you will use it. It’s not the camera that makes a great cinematographer. It’s the mind and the eye and the aesthetic choices of the individuals.

Beast Director Talks VFX, a CG Lion and Post Production

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By Iain Blair

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur has always been drawn to primal tales of man versus nature and the struggle to survive, whether they’re set on top of a frozen mountain (Everest) or at the bottom of the ocean (The Deep, Adrift). His latest harrowing survival story, Beast, swaps ice and water for the savannahs of Africa and pits man against an apex predator, a massive lion.

Beast

Director Baltasar Kormákur on the set of Beast

It stars Idris Elba as a recently widowed doctor who takes his daughters on safari only to find that they’re the prey when a rogue lion — a survivor of poachers who now sees all humans as the enemy — begins stalking and terrorizing them.

The film was shot by Oscar winner Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC, whose credits include A River Runs Through It. It was edited by Jay Rabinowitz, ACE (8 Mile). Visual effects supervisor Enrik Pavdeja (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) led a team of animators from Framestore, both on-set and in post, for close to a year as they created the all-VFX lion.

We spoke with Kormákur, whose credits also include 2 Guns and Contraband, about making the film, creating the lion and his love of post.

Having to create a believable VFX lion was clearly a huge challenge. Did you consider trying to mix some VFX with footage of a real lion?
Yes, we did, and that would have been easier in many ways, but it’s not enough to just make a lion. Lions are all different, like horses or people, so creating the character was very important to me. It would have been difficult to use a real lion in many of the scenes because you’d need to use different lions that are trained for different things. In the end, Universal felt it would just be better to create the lion with CGI.

I had a conversation with Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu about his survival film The Revenant and how he shot the big fight scene between Leo DiCaprio and the bear. He had a real bear on the set, but just as a reference. I thought that was a great solution, so I went back to the studio, and we agreed I could have a real lion on the set for reference. That way, we could instantly compare what we were doing with the real thing and study its movements and nature.

Can you talk about the importance of the CG lion?
If the CGI lion doesn’t look right and you don’t believe it, then the whole film doesn’t work. And for me, when I see VFX movies with animals, it’s all about the gravity of the creature, the weight of it and how it moves. It has to look and feel real, and that was the big challenge. How do we do that? We never wanted the lion doing anything you can’t see in nature. I didn’t want it to be a sort of superhero thing with the lion. So right from the start I worked very closely with my visual effects supervisor Enrik Pavdeja along with a big team of animators at Framestore, and we had a VFX team with us on the set in Africa every day. Then in post, it took us almost a whole year to create the VFX lion and get it right. I’ve worked a lot with VFX on other films, but this was by far the most challenging thing I’ve ever been involved with.

Beast

Director Baltasar Kormákur on the set of Beast with Idris Elba

Did you do a lot of previz?
Yes. Quite a lot with The Third Floor. Then later in post we also did some postviz. It was necessary with a film like this because you have to plan it all out very carefully, especially all the scenes with the lion interacting with the actors.

The great Philippe Rousselot shot it. How did you collaborate?
We really wanted to put the audience right there with the actors, and a big part of that was deciding to shoot it all on location in South Africa. You’re not on a stage somewhere in LA or Atlanta. There’s no greenscreen or bluescreen. It’s all real environments. I wanted it to look and feel realistic, not like some Hollywood version of Africa.

Then I wanted to use very long shots, up to eight minutes at a time, so we had to plan out all the action and movement, every element. I wanted the audience to feel trapped and terrified – you can’t get out of it, and the lion is always coming to you, and it’s always seen from the perspective of the characters. So when Idris looks behind him, the camera turns as well.

We shot with the ARRI Alexa 65 with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. That gave us a great look for the huge landscapes.

Fair to say you had to direct the lion twice — once on location and then again in post in collaboration with the VFX team?
Yes, and it was a very interesting process. The lion was created using state-of-the-art CGI but during the shoot we needed a physical version of the VFX lion as a visual reference for all the actors and crew, so we had a stunt guy with a big hat on that matched the size of the lion’s head.

That gave us a reference for how it moved and what it could do. We’d shoot that and then shoot it again without the stunt guy so we could get a clean version. That gave us the actors’ reactions and emotions, but it’s really weird when you’re doing a scene and there’s nothing there now – not even the stunt guy.

How early on did you decide to shoot the final battle between Idris and the lion in one take, and why?
We decided quite early on because I felt it would be far more frightening and brutal if we shot it all in one long take. Again, there’s no escape. We don’t cut away. It was one of the last things we shot, and we worked on it from prep all the way through the shoot, as it had to be very choreographed. I knew it’d be a big challenge, especially dealing with all the CGI elements in post, and it was a huge amount of work.

Where did you post?
I usually like to do it in Iceland at my company, RVK Studios, but this was all in London, mainly at Framestore for all the VFX. Then I worked with all my usual post guys.

We did the sound with Glenn Freemantle and his team at Sound 24 at Pinewood Studios. It was a great movie for the sound design team and sound editors. They had a lot of fun with all the lion sounds and bush noises. Then we did all the grading at Company 3 with Stefan Sonnenfeld in London. Framestore and Company 3 just merged, so they’re all in the same building in London, which is so convenient now.

Do you like the post process?
I really love it. I love all aspects of filmmaking — the prep, the shoot, the post. I enjoy it all, but especially post, where you actually make the film. You need enough time in post so you can allow the movie to be what it wants to be. We had a year – and this film needed every minute of it for the CGI.

It’s funny because at the start of post, when it’s just a cartoon lion, you watch it, and it works because you have to use your imagination. But then there’s this long period when it’s slowly coming together, but it just seems terrible. It’s worse in a way. You have to be very patient, as all the details – like the way sand comes off the lion’s feet, its breath and so on — come far later.beast

How involved are you in the DI, and how important is it to you?
I love the DI, and it was crucial to the look of the film. Our source format was ARRIRAW 6.5K, and we did the DI in 4K master. All the night scenes were a challenge because there’s no light source in the savannah, and we had to balance that with the naturalism of the rest of it. We allowed the beautiful colors of Africa to speak.

Did the film turn out the way you hoped?
Very much so. Of course things change, especially in post, but I loved the whole process. It wasn’t easy to make this film, but I’m very happy with what we all achieved, especially with the lion.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Dopesick Showrunner Danny Strong on Post and Workflow

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By Iain Blair

Dopesick showrunner Danny Strong began his career acting in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer before transitioning into writing for films (Game Change, Lee Daniels’ The Butler), directing (TV’s Empire) and producing. His latest project, the Hulu limited series Dopesick, examines the true story of how one company — Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family— triggered the worst drug epidemic in American history. The series, starring Michael Keaton, takes viewers to the epicenter of America’s struggle with opioid addiction, from the boardrooms of Big Pharma to a distressed Virginia mining community to the hallways of the DEA.

Strong created, wrote, directed and ran Dopesick, a story he says he was compelled to tell. I spoke to him about making the show, working with Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson and the post workflow.

Danny Strong (in mask) on set.

This is your first time as solo showrunner. Who taught you the most?
I learned the most on the first season of Empire. I was the co-creator and EP, but we also had showrunner – Ilene Chaiken — and watching her and the whole process was a great education. She was my showrunning mentor.

How tough was it directing episodes and showrunning at the same time? And how did you work with Barry Levinson, who directed as well?
It was hard, but having someone like Barry Levinson around was a huge help. He’s one of the greatest directors of all time and one of my heroes, and I could pick his brain, so that was pretty cool. Our other two directors – Michael Cuesta and Patricia Riggen – are also so talented and accomplished, so the shooting was pretty smooth.

What look were you and DP Checco Varese, ASC, going for?
We talked a lot about different looks and templates, and the one that really stuck out was The Insider, as well as The Deer Hunter, especially in portraying the coal town. We shot a lot of locations in Virginia, and we spent probably 80% of the shoot in Richmond and the rest in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We shot with the Sony Venice and used Zeiss lenses, and that gave us a bit of the richness and tone of The Insider — the same sense of mystery and danger. At the same time, it let us switch very quickly to something a bit brighter, with more of a hyper-real look. And we had to move fast, so it was a great package for us.

Tell us about post. Was it a traditional TV post schedule?
It was fairly traditional TV post, but it was also very complicated. We block-shot the first two episodes directed by Barry, we completed them, and he was done. Then for the next six weeks, we block-shot all of Michael Keaton’s work — Episodes 2 through 8 — before we lost him for a movie. So I had one storyline pretty much completed, but then we had to pick up all the rest of the episodes.

So we couldn’t complete an episode until very late in production, except for the first two. That was the most stressful time of the whole process for me, as I was block-directing Michael Keaton, supervising the other directors, and supervising editing and post while on-set of those first two episodes… all at the same time.

There was also the stress of turning in the first episode to the network, who had just spent a lot of money on the show. Expectations were very high, they had notes, and they want you to do those notes. And I wanted to kill it. So post was very demanding. But the moment I saw the first cut of Barry’s pilot work, I knew it was going to work, and working on Barry’s episodes with him was such a great experience.

Where did you do the post?
It was all remote because it was during the height of the pandemic. I bounced around a lot. I did a lot of post in Richmond on weekends, then I was in New York and back here in LA. I’d never worked remotely on post before, but I quite liked it, especially the remote editing, which was way more effective thanks to Evercast. What a revolutionary system for the industry.

We did the DI with Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3. Everyone wants to work with him, and we were able to get him because he and Checco are very close. Barry was also a big part of the DI too. He wanted to push the colors and differentiate the worlds — particularly the coal world, the Sackler’s world and then the investigative world. So getting all those tonal shifts right was a key part of post, and it turned out great.

Let’s talk about the editing. You had three editors – Douglas Crise, Matt Barber and Chi Yoon Chung. How did that work?
They were all in LA working from home. They mostly cut their own episodes. Doug did the first two with Barry, and then Matt and Chi Yoon alternated their episodes. Occasionally, I’d pass off one to another editor to get their ideas and fresh input, and sometimes one would take over another editor’s cut if someone had to leave for another job or medical issue. I like that way of working, as it stops you getting jaded and brings new energy to a cut.

What were the main editing challenges?
Dopesick has so many storylines and different characters, but I think the biggest challenge was the time-jumping. You have all these different narratives, and they’re all in different timelines. I didn’t do that to be clever and show off. It was because I wanted the crime story to be the spine of the show, and it took place in two different time periods. And the crime they’re investigating took place in the past, after those two time periods. So I was stuck with that structure.

Some people said it should have been linear, but the complex structure is what made it work and gave it its propulsive drive with those investigations from the start. And once I stayed for three, four scenes — even a whole act — in one time period, instead of jumping around so much, it began to really flow in the edit.

Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to the show?
I get very obsessive over both, and by the final mix, which we did on the Sony lot, I’m so tense about it. I’m so sensitive to sound and score, and our composer, Lorne Balfe, did an amazing job. But it took a while to figure out the first few episodes, and we played around a lot with the sound design and music. Barry Levinson was a big part of that too. In the end, we used a lot of different genres to tell the different stories — the investigative genre, the addiction genre, the family black comedy one and so on.

There are some VFX. Who did them, and what was entailed?
I’ve directed several TV and film projects with VFX, and while none of them were big action or sci-fi things, I really enjoyed it. They’re so helpful and can add so much tension and scale and scope; they just elevate everything.

For instance, we couldn’t all fly to Connecticut to shoot the big new Perdue HQ building we needed for one episode, so Patricia Riggen (who directed that episode) shot this amazing drone shot into nothing, and then we recreated the building with VFX. In another episode we had a total wig disaster with the Rudy Giuliani character, so we just fixed it in post with VFX. And as it’s a period piece, we fixed a lot of stuff with our vendors that included Mels, Mr. Wolf and Pipeline.

You got a great, huge ensemble cast and landed a big star — Michael Keaton, doing TV for the very first time, as Dr. Finnix. What did he bring to the role?
He’s a beloved legend and a great actor, and he brought all his experience and skill and was so committed to it. Once he came on board, everyone wanted to be in it.

Finally, what made you take this story on?
I was outraged by the actions of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. I was stunned by the deception and all the manipulation and the fact that one family could make billions off the suffering and deaths of so many Americans. The big challenge was how to take this American tragedy, a very bleak story, and turn it into something really watchable? I wanted to document it, and at the same time make it into a crime story that was also entertaining and exciting and a bit of a thriller.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Serv Micro

Teradek Intros Serv Micro WiFi-Based Video Streaming Solution

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Teradek is at Cine Gear with its new Serv Micro, an HDMI-only wireless video and production streaming solution. Serv Micro is a WiFi-based wireless video transmitter system that works with or without an internet connection, a local solution that supports up to 10 local device streams and a cloud-enabled solution that manages and shares live camera feeds on unlimited devices anywhere in the world.

Up to 10 devices can stream on a local network using Teradek’s Vuer app, with iOS, Android, PC and MacOS support. Unlimited devices can access live streaming and instant recordings via the Teradek Core cloud streaming platform. If internet connection is lost, recordings are saved to an SD card for secure upload once connection has been restored. Streams are compatible with MacOS, iOS, Android and web browsers.

Serv Micro also comes equipped with HDMI in and loop-through, ethernet and WiFi connectivity, an auxiliary audio input, USB type A connection for easy connection to cellular bonding options and a built-in L-Series battery plate.

“Serv Micro is built to deliver quality camera feeds and playback quickly and easily with intuitive tools and powerful platforms like Core and Vuer,” says Colin McDonald, Cine Product Manager at Creative Solutions, which makes Teradek products. “It’s an all-in-one integrated solution giving creative stakeholders content visibility at every stage of production, wherever they are.”

Dublin’s Motherland and Event Junkies Join Forces, Add Staff

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Motherland and sister company, Event Junkies, have joined forces to create one company offering production, post and delivery of film, commercials, online content and music videos. Steven Courtney is managing director of the new combined studio.

“We are a hybrid production company,” says CEO Ross Killeen, who founded both Motherland and Event Junkies. “We’re talent driven and have always had craft at the heart of everything we do. Our industry has evolved so much in the past few years, so we wanted to embrace this and build a single entity which is as agile as it is creative. To fully embrace this evolution, we decided to refresh our brand as it really felt like we were bringing something new to the market.”

Motherland and Event Junkies have always worked side by side but as separate companies with two different offers to the market. Motherland is best known internationally for its storytelling and commercials, as well as films such as 99 Problems and Love Yourself Today. Event Junkies has been producing video content for the Irish and international market. Event Junkies’ clients include Google, Dropbox, Jameson and Red Bull. Together, as Motherland, the company will offer content for all screens and all staff from Event Junkies will now work for Motherland.

In addition to its production work, Motherland supplies post production. The company employs full-time editors and VFX artists offering a path from production through to post and delivery. Motherland has recently brought on 20-year post veteran Anthony McCaffery to head post production. He has worked for The Mill, Untold Studios, Brown Bag, Rushes and most recently Raygun. He will manage and evolve the entire post production arm of Motherland.

“We are a production company with a fully integrated post team,” explains McCaffery. “This allows us to support the director and client the whole way through a project. We’re uniquely placed to have an overview of the full scope of a project and its many deliverables. We treat every platform as part of the core creative rather than an afterthought. We apply the same level of care whether the audience is going to see our work on TV or on social media.”

Motherland also welcomes Margaret “Mags” Levingstone as new head of production. She joins from Rothco, part of Accenture Song, where she was head of production for eight years.

Motherland recently produced the IFTA (Irish Film & Television Academy) nominated feature documentary, Love Yourself Today, which screened in theaters across the UK and Ireland last year. They also represent international directing talent such as Rachel Carey (Deadly Cuts, the highest grossing Irish film of 2021), Kathryn Ferguson (Nothing Compares, which premiered at Sundance festival in January), commercial directors Finn Keenan (Just Eat, Discord and Nike) and POB (Sky, Allianz and Jameson) along with emerging talents like Sam McGrath, Hugh Mulhern, Ellius Grace and Tara O’Callaghan.

Our main image: (L-R) Anthony McCaffery, Margaret “Mags” Levingstone, Steven Courtney and Ross Killeen

 

Grace and Frankie

Grace and Frankie’s Final Season: DPs Talk Evolution of Look

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By Randi Altman

Netflix’s comedy Grace and Frankie is coming to an end with its seventh and final season. Initially focused on how two women deal with their longtime husbands leaving them for each other, the series has evolved to be so much more. The audience gets a deep dive on how this modern-day Odd Couple deals with friendship between women, finding love in your 70s and how wacky adventures can make you feel younger. It stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston.

Grace and Frankie

Gale Tattersall

Set in San Diego, the series’ look was originally set in Season 1 by DP Gale Tattersall, a veteran cinematographer who has worked on all seven seasons. We reached out to Tattersall and fellow DP Luke Miller, who started as a gaffer on Episode 1 and graduated to co-DP in 2019. Tattersall describes the show’s initial look as “cinematic, lyrical, believable, evocative and emotional.”

Let’s find out more…

Gale, how did you get involved in the show?
Gale Tattersall: I was chosen to DP the show because of previous work, including House and my feature credits, such as Virtuosity and Tank Girl. I had also worked with Marta Kauffman, our main showrunner on a project called Call Me Crazy, and we clicked immediately.

Grace and Frankie

Luke Miller

How has that look evolved over the seven seasons?
Tattersall: The greatest change of all was for Season 3, when we were able to switch to the Canon C300 MKII.

I also think the show became slicker over the seasons. Our complex lighting techniques became more efficiently employed, allowing us to move faster and thus give the director/editor more coverage, which in a comedy is so important for getting the best out of the script and pacing.

Considering it’s such a long-running show, how do you work with the showrunners/directors to get and keep the right look?
Tattersall: At the start, we had countless meetings for all the shows to discuss the look, so it would be extremely rare for something to happen by accident. Also, after a certain number of episodes, you have created a reference library, so there would sometimes be a reference to something that worked well in a previous episode that could be expanded upon. DPs have to be strong and opinionated on TV shows.

Grace and FrankieVery often you work with really great and well-seasoned directors, and we have been lucky enough on Grace and Frankie to have had many, but once in a while you get a newbie who wants to make an impression, and that is when, occasionally, you have to become a policeman of sorts and protect the integrity of the show by nicely suggesting shots that are more in keeping with the style of the show.

Luke Miller: One aspect of shooting a long-running series is trying to keep the look and feel somewhat consistent over many years and many directors. I like to sit in with our directors in their prep meetings to help develop their ideas in ways that are consistent with the look of the show.

If a director had an idea for a specific shot during prep, I could make sure we had the right tools or plan to accomplish it in the established language of the show. Often directors would come in and reference a scene from a movie that had a feeling or a look they wanted to integrate into their episode. We would take that influence, put it through a sort of Grace and Frankie filter and translate it into our show.

Other times, directors would point to previous episodes of Grace and Frankie for inspiration. While prepping Episode 715, “The Fake Funeral,” director Alex Hardcastle referenced a shot from one of the episodes he directed in Season 4 called “The Expiration Date.” We were talking about how to approach the final scene, and he told me he wanted to match the somber feeling of a specific shot of Frankie sitting in front of a painting at night. That gave us a great starting point, even though this was a day scene and needed to look different. We developed the lighting and lens choices with the mood of that shot in mind. It’s a short scene, but it caps the episode so beautifully and is one of my favorites in the series.

Were you using LUTs on-set? DITs?
Tattersall: We didn’t really use LUTs other than a generic Rec. 709. We didn’t use a DIT on-set either. I hate it when there is a desire to try to create the final image on-set. Personally, I love the progression. I’m a traditionalist. I started as a DP when nobody actually knew what I was doing until the next day or evening when rushes were available. I don’t need to display what the final image is going to be until it is created in final color with the colorist based on what I had in mind. I personally feel that video village and video assist should be used purely to judge framing, focus, performance and nothing more. That is why you should trust your DP, who needs to be on the same page as the director and showrunners.

Miller: We had auditioned some specific LUTs that we had our colorist create for basic day/night interior/exterior circumstances during Season 3, but we ultimately just used the standard Rec. 709 LUT built into the camera for on-set work. We found this was a very safe LUT that kept us in a controlled range on-set and allowed for a lot of room to play in final color. Alongside that LUT we had a high-end Canon reference display on-set that gave us a consistent picture to work from.

Speaking of the colorist, can you describe that relationship?
Tattersall: It is a gift having a great colorist such as Roy Vasich from Picture Shop Post. Even on a show as expensive as Grace and Frankie, everything is budget-driven. Time in the color suite is costly, so it’s important that Roy nails his first pass so we don’t have many corrections to make when we come in for final color.

It pleases me enormously when our showrunners and producers come by for their session and don’t change a thing! I’m also in touch with our dailies colorist, John Allen, every day I am shooting, giving him a heads up as to how the day went and what problems concerned me. So he is the first to get his hands on the first interpretation of our raw material.

Grace and FrankieMiller: Colorist Roy Vasich has been with the show since Season 2, so he is very familiar with the look and feel of the show. When an episode is completed, Roy takes a pass at it on his own and gets everything very close to the final look. Then I spend some time in the color suite with him and go through it shot by shot and make final adjustments.

When setting up a shot on-set, we spend our time making sure the lighting on the actors’ faces is perfect, but often we need to just rough in something in the background or the back of a shoulder in the foreground. Then when we get into the color suite with Roy, we can easily address those things with a Power Window or a gradient. Our show was an early adopter of finishing in Dolby Vision HDR, and Roy was instrumental in helping make that a smooth transition.

How much greenscreen is used on-set? How does that affect your workflow, lighting, etc.?
Miller: The entire beach backdrop outside the beach house was bluescreen, as was everything outside of Nick’s penthouse and the outside of Brianna and Barry’s house. All the interior car work was shot on greenscreen.

The nice thing about all the greenscreen is that it’s fast and flexible. We can decide on a scene-by-scene basis what the weather on the beach might be. The disadvantage is that it’s not much to look at for the actors on set, and you have to create all the lighting effects from your imagination.

On one occasion we were shooting a romantic night scene on the beach patio, and the giant bluescreen just didn’t have the magic of the night sky, so I projected an image of a full moon on the bluescreen to give a little mood to the stage. It brought out lots of smiles, grateful comments and, hopefully, it helped the actors get lost in the scene just a little bit more.

Tattersall: Bluescreen and greenscreen are a necessary evil, and we used our fair share. I am hoping these new multi-panel real-image displays will become more available and more affordable, as they are not only much better at creating a feeling of “being there” but can double as amazing, infinitely variable and interactive light sources. I admit that, like many productions, when doing “poor man’s” car work, for example, blue/greenscreen tends to lend to some bland or generic lighting because you have no idea what background plate will eventually replace the screen, making it impossible to light in sympathy with the chosen background plate.

You mentioned the Canon camera earlier? How do you pick what to shoot on? Did Netflix’s requirements play a big role in that choice? What about the lenses?
Tattersall: There are so many factors that go into making a show and choosing equipment. In some ways, the more successful you are as a show, and the more seasons you do, the more you paint yourself into a corner. Your unit production manager never stops to whittle down the budget in every single area.

Initially, when we were looked after by the wonderful guys at Keslow Camera, the only way they could make the show work financially from season to season was to hope that we would run with the same equipment we had used in previous seasons. But after all this time, we began to feel the Cooke primes and the workhorse Angenieux zooms were feeling tired and wanting, and they are just so enormous.

We ended up having to do our final 12 episodes post-pandemic with Alternative Rentals, who were wonderful. They could make these changes work for the budget that was unmovable, as they owned a lot of Canon camera gear already. I also believe in the harmony of a system working together. Canon makes their own cameras, electronics, sensors and lenses, and I believe there are times when the “purity” of one system working in harmony shines through.

Luke Miller on-set

Miller: We started out on the Red Dragon with Angenieux Optimo zooms and Cooke S4/I primes for the first two seasons, with the zooms on the cameras most of the time. Then we switched to Canon cameras in the third season. As new cameras were released, we changed between models in the Canon line as the seasons went by. The C300 MKII for Seasons 3-5, the C700 FF for Season 6 and some of Season 7, and the C500 MKII for the final 12 episodes of Season7.

In Season 7, we changed our lenses to Canon zooms (17-120 and 25-250) and Canon Sumire primes. I primarily used the Sumires with the camera in Full Frame mode for my episodes, while Gale relied mostly on the zooms in S35 crop mode. Netflix’s requirements were a big factor in our initial camera choices.

Back in 2014, when we were first getting started, the requirement of a 4K camera had us choosing from a shortlist of allowed cameras. Red Dragon, Sony F55 and a Canon C300 with an external recorder were tested. We liked the look of the C300, but the external recorder that was needed to record 4K at the time was too much hassle to deal with. When the C300 MKII was released and allowed for internal 4K recording, we made the switch. We were drawn to the sensor inside the Canon cameras. They produce great skin tones, have excellent latitude and create a soft, photographic feeling, even though they were recording 4K — or in the case of the C500 MKII, 5.9K.

The Angenieux zooms were basically an industry standard for television when we started in 2014, and many shows still make great use of them. And as Gale mentioned earlier, we found we were fighting against their sheer size, especially the 24-290, which was always on our B camera. For Season 7, we tried the compact versions of the Optimo zooms for the first four episodes, but while we were shut down for COVID, Gale tested the Canon zooms that we switched to. We found them to be much smaller than the big Optima zooms we had been using, and optically they offered improvements in some of the areas that the Optimo struggled in.

The 24-250 also offered a very interesting built-in 1.4x extender, which not only gave a much longer lens at the flip of a switch but also allowed it to cover full fame along its entire range. In Season 7, with the Canon Sumire primes, we generally lit to about a T4, where these lenses would give a neutral look that didn’t call attention to the lens. But for some scenes, we would shoot wide open, which is where the Sumires totally change into a soft image full of character, with a gentle roll-off to a bokeh with really interesting shapes. I used this look in a scene at the end of Episode 715 with Frankie in her studio and in 712 for a scene with Bud in his office at night.

What about the lighting?
Miller: The lighting on Grace and Frankie was really quite unique. To start with, the level of light we used is really high. We rated our cameras at 400 ISO and generally lit to a T4. A typical show today might have a camera rated at 800-1600 ISO and light to a T2 or wider. On average, that means we are using eight to 16 times brighter light as a starting point for a scene. Our primary objective was to light the cast as beautifully as we could while maintaining some shape and keeping the backgrounds interesting and natural feeling.

We covered every bit of the set that wasn’t in frame in white muslin and bounced light off it. We tried to have the actors’ light coming from every direction. Then we would balance the levels of the different areas of muslin in the same way you would balance a traditional key and fill to give the light some sense of directionality, even though it was coming from everywhere. In a way, the result was as if the actors were sitting for a portrait in each shot.

Tattersall: We had senior actors with pages of dialogue to get through. It was important to have a deep stop so that we had less chance of having to go again for focus issues. Also it was really nice not having to do mini focus pulls back and forth with the dialogue to achieve the two magic shots — action and reaction. Sometimes we even racked up an 11 stop just so that we could, for example, hold Jane and Lily both in focus even though they were at significantly different distances.

There is a bonus in shooting with bright light — the iris in the actor’s eyes shuts down to compensate, which means you get more color in the actor’s eyes rather than dark pupils. Subtle but true! We did wrap right up to the edges of the shot with white muslin, which sometimes we lit and sometimes we just used in the ambient light.

I love to use Leko lights (what I call Source Fours), as it’s the quickest way possible to throw up a piece of card that needs minimum rigging to create a very fast hairlight/backlight, for example. Our foregrounds tended to be flatly lit to be as cosmetic as possible for Jane and Lily, so we very often created harder shape and contrast in the background to create a balance and depth.

Any happy accidents this latest season that you can talk about?
Miller: In a way, COVID resulted in a happy accident. As a result of being shut down for a year and a half, we had to relocate the sets from Paramount to Sunset Gower Studios. Because they all had to be rebuilt, we were able to make several strategic changes to save time and give us more options for camera placement. Another challenge due to COVID: We were in the middle of shooting Episode 705 when we shut down. So half of the episode was shot before and the other half after. It’s probably a record for the longest shooting schedule for an episode of television.

Tattersall:  I felt so many things were happy accidents. Getting Luke accepted into our Local 600 union so that he could become my co-DP was a major one. Being lucky enough to pay homage to Stanley Kubrick and DP Geoffrey Unsworth, BSC, by “borrowing” the White Room from 2001: A Space Odyssey as inspiration for our heaven scenes in Episode 716.

Now for some more generic questions… How did you become interested in cinematography? 
Tattersall: I started with a love of photography from an early stage and was lucky enough have access to a great darkroom, where I developed and printed for hours on end. I learned about composition and shape and contrast — something I think is a shame for new aspiring DPs never to have experienced, given the instant gratification of digital media.

I made a simple documentary about Buckminster Fuller when I was 17. It was my first foray into cinematography, which inspired me to go to the London Film School, which is where it began in earnest.

Miller: I attribute the beginning of my love of filmmaking to a show I watched on the Discovery channel growing up called Movie Magic. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the show was basically a promotional tool disguised as a behind-the-scenes peek at how effects and stunts were done. I loved seeing the equipment and tools used to make movies, even though I had no idea what a cinematographer was.

After a year of being uninspired by studying computer science, I transferred to Columbia College Chicago and fell in love with their fantastic cinematography department. I knew then that cinematography was the area of filmmaking for me. I enjoyed using light and lenses to create the imagery, but what surprised me was how much of cinematography was about solving new problems in different ways. That sort of unique problem-solving while storytelling is thrilling for me.

What inspires you artistically? 
Tattersall: I was lucky enough to have come up through the business in London when Tony and Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Adrian Lyne were all directing commercials for television. As a young camera operator, I got to work with so many great DPs…David Watkin, Michael Seresin, Alex Thompson, Nick Roeg and many others who were all a great inspiration. Later on, working with excellent directors was such a blessing.

Grace and Frankie

The crew

Miller: I’m inspired by movies that stand the test of time. There is something magical about a film that was made 20, 40 or 80 years ago that can still move an audience. In short, I’m inspired by films that are timeless. I strive to keep longevity in mind when I’m creating — to shoot in a way that allows a project to be enjoyed today or 50 years from now.

I’m also inspired on a daily basis by the directors I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I see my job as one that is less about coming up with my own ideas and more about listening to the director’s ideas, then developing, supporting and finding the right way to execute the director’s vision.

What new technology has changed the way you work (looking back over the past few years)? 
Tattersall: I think the speed and advent of LED lighting has been phenomenal. The flexibility to change color in so many LED fixtures is just amazing, plus the huge drop in power consumption and heat while still maintaining the same light levels.

Initially, I felt that the move from celluloid to digital was premature and represented a huge quality drop. Now, however, I feel the playing field is more even, and you certainly have to take your hat off to the flexibility of variable ISO settings and false color, which I love in terms of putting my exposure to catch the absolute maximum amount of image information.

Miller: I agree. LED lights are probably the most noticeable change in the last few years, especially ones that can be powered with batteries. On Grace and Frankie, we primarily used traditional incandescent lights for lighting the actors and sets, but we did incorporate some newer lights.

We were one of the first shows to incorporate Mole-Richardson’s Vari-Space LED space lights back when they first came out of the prototype phase. Those lights allowed us to change the color temperature of the sky in a second, which previously would have taken hours to gel all the traditional space lights. That ease of use and flexibility is now offered in almost every type of light, which gives more room for creativity without added expense and time.

What are some of your best practices or rules you try to follow on each job? 
Tattersall: When you are on a show, you spend more time with your crew than you do with your family at home, so you better be sure it’s a pleasant environment. I believe in kindness on-set; I get excited to see people grow into their shoes and develop their talents, but if I had to choose one thing, I would say kindness.

Miller: Yes, I agree. I aim to treat everyone with respect. I don’t believe in yelling at anyone on-set.

Grace and Frankie

Explain your ideal collaboration with the director or showrunner when starting a new project. 
Tattersall: I love the collaborative relationship with a director. I always, without a pause, keep my eyes open for special shots that a director might not notice, even if he or she has thoroughly done the homework. If I can pull a shot out of nowhere that is fun and will help the edit, it makes me very pleased.

And I never get offended if a director decides not to entertain an idea of mine. It’s a delicate balance running an idea up to the showrunners without running it by the director first because they could feel that their DP is being too pushy. Sometimes ideas can be run up the flagpole during a production meeting rather than in the heat of battle, when you are shooting and time is very precious.

Miller: An ideal collaborative relationship for me would be to work with a director or a showrunner who has an idea for a new project that exists in a whole new world. The director would have a strong grasp on this world but would still have some details that need to be discovered. I think the discovery process is a fun thing to go through together with a director and can inform so much about how a project should look.

What’s your go-to gear (camera, lens, mount/accessories) – things you can’t live without? 
Tattersall: Just one thing: a great sensor that allows me to feel that I am not losing something by not shooting film.

Miller: I’m a huge fan of using an optical director’s finder. I still use a viewfinder app when necessary, but looking with your eye through the actual lens is an important part of the ritual for me. I also think it helps connect the director to the shot early in the process.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for 25 years. 

apprenticeship program

Warner Bros. Leavesden Launches Studio Apprenticeship Program

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Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in the UK has launched Reach, a studio apprenticeship program. Offering a start in the world of film and TV, the program aims to provide a route into the industry, offering valuable experience from experts in the field without needing a specialized degree.

Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden (WBSL) is offering apprenticeships across five key areas of the studio: client services, plumbing, virtual production, set lighting and rigging and post production at Warner Bros. De Lane Lea. Through the 18-month apprenticeship, candidates will receive a Level 3 college qualification.

Emily Stillman, WBSL’s SVP of studio operations, says, “We are very proud to be delivering our new apprenticeship program, WBSL Reach, creating a pathway for new entrants supporting production in the film and TV industry. With a focus on applicants from underrepresented groups and the local community, WBSL Reach seeks to open the doors into our industry and foster the culture of sustainable inclusivity and equity, allowing new career opportunities to develop and grow.”

With the demand for production in the UK reaching new heights, the program has been well-received in the industry. “The demand for content has never been greater. Programs like this directly contribute to the UK skills pipeline, which, alongside an equally essential expansion of UK stage space capacity, ensures that our world-class film and TV industry can continue to meet that demand now and in the future,” says Samantha Perahia, MBE, head of production UK, British Film Commission.

WBSL is a purpose-built film and TV studio incorporating Warner Bros. Set Lighting & Rigging, Warner Bros. De Lane Lea and Warner Bros. Leavesden Park. The studio sits on a 200-acre secure site and has a quarter of a million square feet of stage space, one of the largest heated underwater filming tanks in Europe and a clear-horizon, 150-acre backlot.

WBSL has some of the largest sound stages in the UK, including a virtual production stage, and provides services from initial preproduction prep all the way through to delivery of the final film or TV show.