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September/October 2021

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ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING www.postmagazine.com 18 POST SEPT/OCT 2021 single-strip film," he explains. "Traditionally, people had been using the Technicolor process — a three- strip process. And then Eastman Kodak had come up with a single-strip process that was more cost effective for the studios." All of the looks that Jencks develops come from his own experimentation, as well as the color sci- ence team at PostWorks, and color scientist/Efilm founder William Feightner. "I work with those guys and have a library of different looks that I have built over a very long period of time," Jencks explains. "Each film that I do, I do look development. Some of those looks are built using something that I have built from scratch, and some of them are built by profiling a particular type of film." Only Murders in the Building was shot using Sony's Venice. In the past, Teague and Jencks have worked with 16mm, Arri's Alexa, Red and even a Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera. "Pretty much every format," says Jencks of their past collaborations. "The way that he approaches, choosing a camera is definitely not based around allegiance to a single manufacturer, but by looking at what's going to be great for this show — and the Venice is a pretty amazing camera. We shot most of the show rated at 2500 ISO, and it's super clean, which is not something that you get from a lot of cameras — to be able to shoot that fast of a speed with very little noise and very high resolu- tion sensor." Almost all of the show was shot on a stage. The various window exteriors were green-screen composites. "There's a pretty large number of VFX — people passing in front of the windows, of course, the hair, and all the different types of things that can be troublesome with green screen. Having that fidelity in the negative was really, reassuring." Jencks builds the LUT prior to shooting. It's then loaded into the camera and also used for dailies. "I always think it's really useful for the whole team to be able to have that look in-camera, so that the creative team, the director, the show run- ners can see it as Chris is imagining it. [Doing] that look development in advance, I find to be tremen- dously helpful." Jencks used DaVinci Resolve Studio for the color grade. DaVinci Resolve 17's new HDR primary grad- ing palette has customizable, zone-based exposure and color controls, along with perceptually color constant image processing for enhanced control over HDR grades. HDR, says Jencks, presents a new set of chal- lenges for material that's lit on a stage, particularly comedies, which often have broad lighting. "HDR removes the barrier between the viewer and what's in front of camera. Often that's great, but it also can make the lighting feel more artificial, which takes the audience out of the experience. The zoned toolset allowed me to control highlight roll off correctly using zones applicable for the whole scene, rather than a more individualized ap- proach with luminance keys, which saved time." While a LUT was established for the produc- tion, and can often carry through to post, certain tweaks are still implemented later on by Jencks. This might have to do with how quickly production is moving forward and if Teague is keeping up, knowing that Jencks can handle any soft of correc- tive measures later on in post. "Every project is different," he says of the grad- ing process. "For me, getting that pre visualization done in preproduction can be so useful…In some situations, if [Chris] can make the lives of every- one easier on-set by doing something faster and getting to where they need to be a little bit faster, because he knows that I can do it later in the DI, then that's just a win for everyone. But, he has to be totally confident that he's not painting himself into a corner by thinking, 'Oh sure, we can do this in the DI', and then find out that we can't. So that's where it's really useful to have that kind of short- hand between us." A lot of the tweaks are refinements in color, as opposed to a reinvention of it, with Jencks giving it "a nudge" to make it look a bit more cinematic. "Chris might expose the neg a little bit more brightly and broadly than he is targeting for the final product, knowing that we can adjust that after the fact." Jencks completed the series out of PostWorks' 110 Leroy Street location in New York City. He sent a calibrated monitor to the set for the creative team to see his work, and Teague had a calibrated monitor at his house, as well. The creative team was also able to use iPad Pros for reliable review at their convenience. While PostWorks is home to both DaVinci Resolve and FilmLight's Baselight grading systems, Jencks says he uses Resolve on most of his work. The studio's Linux systems are great for what he defines as "heavy lifting" on jobs that require intense computational power. The Mac systems, he feels, are a bit more nimble for other tasks. "We have a whole fleet of both Mac and Linux systems, and we use them concurrently on the projects, and choose whichever one is right for the job. I have some plug-ins that I like to use that are Mac-only, so I often end up end up on the Mac." While the time he spends on each episode var- ies, he estimates it falls between one and two days. "Of course, I'm jumping back and forth between episodes," he explains. "We're doing an HDR pass. We're doing an SDR pass. We're doing Dolby Vision, so all of those tasks get kind of mixed up." The multiple formats are designed to fu- ture-proof the show, should it extend its delivery beyond Hulu. "We are mostly just delivering a single file on a show like this," says Jencks. "The primary deliv- erable piece is a Dolby Vision IMF, which has the capability to generate both the HDR and SDR version…I'm making sure the HDR version is good, and I'm making sure that the Dolby Vision SDR metadata, which generates the SDR version on the fly from the HDR version, is all doing what we want and reflecting our creative intent. The ultimate file that we're delivering is fairly simple in that is a sin- gle file, but to get there, we still have to look at it and look at the different versions of it to make sure that they're all in line with what we wanted." EDITING LA-based editor JoAnne Yarrow, ACE, is one of three editors that cut the series, which was shot using Sony's Venice, along with the Phantom Flex 4K for slow-motion work. Matthew Barbato and Julie Monroe also handled editing duties. "There are various moments throughout the sea- son where we go into more of a surreal moment, and this was excellent for that," says Yarrow of the Phantom camera. "GoPro was a stand-in for webcams and phone cameras, while driving plates were primarily shot on Red Ones and Red Scarlet." Yarrow, who cut Episodes 2, 5 and 8, used Avid Media Composer 2018.12.15 for the edit. "I would use Adobe Photoshop to tweak some elements we had," she adds. "I find the combo of Jencks Waters Yarrow

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