Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/115625
the course of a year. Last year Biljan was colorist on Buzkashi Boys, an Academy Award nominee for Best Live Action Short Film, which tells a coming of age story set in Kabul, Afghanistan. It was shot with a Red camera, directed by Sam French and produced by Ariel Nasr. "Lustre works best natively off DPX files, so we take footage and transcode it to DPX with Scratch in our lab. That's done in the background; then the files move over to Lustre," he explains. "When I got the footage and saw how epic the locations were, I really went to town on it before the filmmakers came in," he recalls. "They had shot in a remote location with a minimal lighting budget. They relied on me to give the footage shape and texture wherever possible." So Biljan "took the Red log footage and put Lustre film print LUTs on it, which you can use to see how it would look printed to film. But I use it as a tool — it gives an awesome look. I came up with the richest, most organic film print look and used many secondary windows tracked onto faces, skies, walls and ground. It was like Photoshop on steroids. When the filmmakers came in to see it, they loved the direction I was taking and let me run with it." Lustre proved a good match for a quite different film, Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth Post0313_018-21_DIRAV7FINALREAD.indd 21 installment in the hit franchise. It was shot on Red. "We have three Flame finishing suites," says Biljan. "Lustre and Flame talk to each other and are on the same SAN storage. When we conform in Flame, the timeline is saved and imported into my room." RE5 was transcoded to DPX in Scratch and then these pulls were conformed in Flame to create the timeline. "There were 800 VFX shots in the movie and these needed to be continually updated on a daily basis. Editorial changes to the reels also kept coming right up to the last days of the color session." Thankfully, Biljan "could click on Change Cut in Lustre and it updated the color correction on my old timeline with the new timeline so I didn't have to do any organization. Instead, I was done in minutes because all the changes were done in Flame." Since RE5 was shot in stereo 3D, footage went through a separate early morning pass with colorist assistant and convergence specialist AJ Mclaughlin doing the convergence with DP Glen MacPherson. Then Biljan began his long daily color grading sessions with the cinematographer. "Color correcting 3D feels like running in water," he quips. "You're always checking the left eye versus the right eye for proper color match. Applying a secondary window to an object usually requires an offset for each eye. Things take more time in 3D." After a first 3D pass he calls "a painful, boring eye match," Biljan could begin more creative work on the feature. During the process he was sending out color graded shots to meet Sony Marketing's numerous requests for trailer material and promotional stills. "Since Sony Colorworks has Lustre too, when I was busy I could take Lustre's Grade Bin settings, send them scans for the trailers and the Lustre metadata and their machines would recolor raw shots with my color correction," he explains. "It saved us a lot of time." The Oscar-nominated Buzkashi Boys got its color grade at RedLab. 3/4/13 1:30 PM