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Y: THE LAST MAN www.postmagazine.com 16 POST SEPT/OCT 2021 the DPs are happy with, then we screen it for the showrunner. They've been working very close- ly with the DP, so they don't have a lot of color tweaks, really." The showrunner, instead, uses the color grade as an opportunity to call out story points. "The showrunner has been really good about story points that I may have missed," Hussey re- calls. "Something like, 'bring out this book' or 'bring out that phone' — points that the showrunner would know more than I would." Hussey works on a Linux-based system running Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve, a tool he's been using since its infancy in the 1980s. "I started working on DaVinci back in 1986, so I'm pretty much a Resolve guy," he notes. "I'm much faster on Resolve than any other system. I think for colorists, they pick the system they enjoy. "It's hard to believe, really," he says of DaVinci's evolution. "I started my career in Toronto in the early '80s. When we first started using DaVinci, it was all analog. Things drifted and we were working off of film. Is a completely different world! We had no pow- er windows, no noise reduction. We had very little to work with. There was basically just three joysticks." Today, he praises the system's unlimited power windows as well as Blackmagic's business plan that allows even casual users to download a free version of the application. "Because Resolve is so popular and people can download the basic [features] of Resolve, people have a little more knowledge of what I can do. And they can speak my language a little bit easier because a lot of people have played with the soft- ware and know how to ask me for something." Hussey is often working with incomplete epi- sodes, where visual effects shots are coming in later in the cycle as the deadline approaches. He can get through a general color pass in about 12 to 14 hours before showing it to the DP for feedback. An episode will ultimately take 30 hours of his time once feedback has been implemented. "I may color a VFX shot and, a week later, I'll get an update of that VFX shot," he explains. "You may end up coloring the same shot several times be- cause it's constantly being updated and changed." All of his work on the show took place this past spring in his suite in Santa Monica. "We're in a very big facility, so it was easy to social distance," he states. Beyond Y: The Last Man, Hussey has a number of projects forthcoming, including The Afterparty, from writer/director Christopher Miller. The upcoming Apple TV+ series retells the story of a high-school reunion through the eyes of a number of different characters. "The color is completely different, depending on who the character is," says Hussey excitedly. "And in the final episode, you have a mixture of all eight points of view — all mixed together." Muse VFX created this entire explosion digitally. The show was shot using Arri's Alexa. Muse VFX's creature work included this swarm of rats.