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POSTING FALL TV www.postmagazine.com 28 POST SEPT/OCT 2019 A B C ' s M I X E D - I S H ABC had a hit on its hands when it premiered Black- ish, a sitcom about an African-American family living in the suburbs, in 2014. The show (which stars Anthony Anderson as Andre Johnson and Tracee Ellis Ross as his wife Rainbow Johnson) has gone on to score multiple awards, including Golden Globes, BET, AAFCA and numerous Emmy nominations. It even produced a spin-off series, Grown-ish on its sister network Freeform, following oldest daugh- ter Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) as she navigates her way through college. The network now brings yet another addition to the "ish" franchise with the Fall TV premiere of Mixed-ish, which looks at mom Rainbow Johnson's life as a child of bi-racial parents in the 1980s. The Foundation (http://thefoundationpost.com/), located just minutes away from ABC Studios in Burbank, CA, and providing post production picture services and workflows in HD, 2K, 4K, UHD, HDR10 and HDR Dolby Vision, has been responsible for fin- ishing both established "ish" series and was recently tapped to complete the finishing for the new sitcom as well. The dailies for the show are presented as DNx36 low-res material to the editor, because the creative editor really needs to be fast and fluid with the editorial work. "The way I explain the finishing process is that the creative editor, working from dailes, is really fo- cused on telling the story and making it as impactful as it can be but not really focusing on the technical aspects," explains Barry Goch, senior finishing artist at The Foundation. "That's where I come in. I take the creative edit and I apply my technical lens to it and I make sure that there are no oversights that would cause the program to fail QC, like somebody does a reposition and they push it too far that it adds black to the edge of the frame or if there was some fluid motion retiming in the Avid. Fluid motion timewarps sometimes can look really okay in low-res, but when you look at it in high-res on the ungraded material, there's sometimes issues of artifacts that have to get painted out. There's also temporary effects that aren't necessarily so com- plex that they would go to a visual effects artist, like a simple split screen, and a lot of those things that get taken care of in the online conform. It just depends on the complexity of it." Goch explains that the pipeline at The Foundation is well established. On the front end, before he passes a file to the colorist, he makes sure that the show is technically correct and doesn't have any issues. Once the color is finished, the file comes back to Goch, and that's when he'll complete titling sessions, cut in visual effects and then make sure there are no VFX or sync issues. "The TV industry is moving so fast that some- times things slip through the cracks and we are oc- casionally sent the wrong version of shots or there's some other discrepancy, so I'm sort of the gate- keeper. A lot of things flow through me, in terms of coming into the facility when the picture is locked, sending it to the colorist, an then the colorist does his or her work and then it comes back to me to add the final titles and build the deliverable file." Gareth Cook, colorist and managing partner at The Foundation, works collaboratively with Mixed- ish DP Troy Smith in helping establish the show's overall 1980s style and vibe. "Bringing back the '80s is very specific in tonal- ities, color choices, contrast levels and luminance levels," he says. "You have to think back to the '80s and what it looked like at that time. TV shows back then looked very different than they do now be- cause, for one thing, they were shot on film and not digital video. You also have to think about the show from a lighting standpoint, as well as from a color correction standpoint. It's really about looking at The show is finished in Autodesk Flame. Mixed-ish has a 1980s color palette. Mixed-ish is finished at The Foundation.