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WEB SERIES www.postmagazine.com 23 POST SEPTEMBER 2018 highlights so it felt more filmic," says post producer Peter Chomsky. "I was super-impressed with its abil- ity to create beautiful, film-like imagery. Adam also chose rehoused lenses from the 1950s, which along with Panavision standard primes, super speeds and ultra speeds, were all customized to a one-of-a-kind look by Panavision's Dan Sasaki. "Once Adam decided to give the DXL a try, we figured out the workflow from there," he contin- ues. "We needed to deliver a 4K master to Hulu, and it was nice that the DXL records simultaneously 2K ProRes LT proxy files and 8K R3D files on the same magazine. Having the proxies, which were recorded as log files, meant that the same CDL and LUT used in on-set monitoring could be applied to the log proxy ProRes files for faster dailies processing. In addition, that same color metadata was embedded in the Avid bins so it could be passed down into the VFX and online finishing platforms." Light Iron in New Orleans provided its Outpost near-set solution for dailies with Light Iron dailies colorist Justin Steptoe grading the dailies. Avid editors Jeff Werner and Jonathan Alberts in Los Angeles were sent 1080 DNx36 files overnight. The 8K R3D files were QC'd then backed up on two sets of LTOs. One was shipped to Light Iron's LA facility to ingest into its SAN for assemblies later on in the post process; the second set was sent to Light Iron in New York for archiving. "Color was done from the original 8K camera media, which was debayed and scaled to 4K on the fly for viewing purposes," Chomsky explains. The DP was in LA prior to starting the color passes to set the looks with Light Iron final colorist Jeremy Sawyer who worked on DaVinci Resolve. Stone su- pervised while Sawyer graded the first two episodes then submitted notes from location for the rest of Season 1. "Adam is a terrific DP," says Chomsky. "The skin tone and practical lighting ratios all looked amazing so it was a matter of balancing them and dialing in the final look of the show. Jeremy opened up the capsule interior a bit from the way it was shot and worked to get continuity in color from real NASA photos of Mars and the CG Mars plates." A large roster of VFX studios worldwide created the show's photoreal spacecraft, launches, environ- ments and even the futuristic glasses people wear to watch videos and make phone calls. "Certain shots were done from the full 8K files, but generally, VFX was a 4K process," notes Chomsky. Shade VFX in LA crafted the lensing and look of the glasses plus the Mars drill sequence and matte paintings of the Vista facility; Scanline in Germany and Atomic Fiction in Montreal created the rockets, spacecraft and space shots; Folks VFX in Montreal supplied all the reflective glass for the as- tronauts' helmets; El Ranchito in Spain did the under- water neutral buoyancy lab scene and crafted some CG cicadas and in the fifth episode. Lola VFX in Los Angeles made Sean Penn look 20 years younger. Digicore in India handled roto, clean up and provided all the monitor comps for Mission Control. A small in-house team in LA did rig removals. "The trickiest part was that our VFX supervisor, Karen Goulekas, liked to look at all the 4K rendered files for approvals. So we opened our bandwidth as big as we could to do that, but we got clogged up at first," Chomsky recalls. "We had a lot of meetings — were we running into firewalls? Was it a speed is- sue at one end or the other? We seemed to unclog the speed but were still faced with the challenge of the sheer number of shots and the need to review them with the producers." Willimon's producing partner, Jordan Tappis, acted as music supervisor with the mandate that music was expected to be another character in the show. Composer Colin Stetson created an instru- mental score that Chomsky calls, "a signature — it really stands out. I'm still blown away by it." Atomic Sound in LA partnered with Roundabout for sound mixing with Keith Rogers handling dialogue and music and Scott Lewis the sound effects. The primary sound supervisor was Brian Armstrong; sound designer Patrick O'Sullivan craft- ed the sounds of the futuristic glasses, electric cars and launches. Chomsky gives kudos to Panavision and Light Iron for being "really flexible and forward-think- ing with creating the workflows so it was pretty seamless." He points out that Hulu required a 4K master while Channel 4 in England needed a 25p HD broadcast deliverable and international distri- bution a 23.98 HD master file. "After we made the 4K master for Hulu we had to go back, reformat and adjust the specs for the other masters," says Chomsky. "Thanks to the strong post team I was able to assemble, including associate producer Collin Cates, VFX producer Eddie Bonin, post super- visor Bradley Ramirez and post coordinator Jennifer Wells, we delivered 24 masters for eight episodes." Joseph Incaprera was the producer on the production side of the series. Co-producers Julian Chavez, who also designed the main title, and Zachary Guglin, worked closely with Willimon and Tappis. "Everyone worked at feature-level," Chomsky reports. "And because we had few differences of opinion about how things should look and sound we could focus on fine tuning rather than re-doing [things] over and over again to bring the show to life." MANIAC Maniac is a new limited dark comedy series for Netflix based on a Norwegian TV series of the same name. Written by Patrick Somerville, directed by Cary Fukunaga and starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, it follows two strangers participating in the late stages of a mysterious pharmaceutical trial whose sequence of pills promise to repair the mind and heal everything from mental illness to heart- break. Its 10 episodes were shot in New York City. Post producer Jessica Levin and post associate producer Mick Aniceto had worked with Fukunaga on HBO's True Detective so they had "a good sense of his expectations, creative parameters and filmic style," Levin says. "We understood how to build in flexibility around his evolving creative ideas. There's no fixed aesthetic to Cary's work, which differs on every project, just a striking photorealism and push- ing of boundaries which makes him one of the most Light Iron in New Orleans provided its Outpost near-set solution for dailies.