Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540216
BITS & PIECES CHAD POWERS: CREATING THE LOOK OF THE NEW HULU SERIES SANTA MONICA, CA — Hulu's Chad Powers is a half-hour comedy series that follows hotshot quarterback Russ Holliday as he tries to resurrect his football career by disguising himself as Chad and walking on at the struggling South Georgia Catfish. The show stars Glen Powell as Holliday, along with Perry Mattfeld as Ricky, Quentin Plair as Coach Byrd, Wynn Everett as Tricia Yeager, Frankie A. Rodriguez as Danny, and Steve Zahn as Coach Jake Hudson. Harbor colorist Todd Bochner recalls talking with cinematographer Mark Schwartzbard as far back as July of 2024 about the look of the series, which would cut between two very distinct visual styles. The series' main story was to have a filmic look, while its game broadcasts would emulate ESPN's live cover- age. Season 1 spans six episodes and was initially going to be completed earlier this year, but was pushed several times, bringing it closer to its late September premiere date. "I was friends with a couple of the producers of the show, and that's where I met the EPs and our DP — through them," Bochner recalls. "I did some early tests with them, and we really hit it off." The show's main coverage was captured with an Arri Alexa 35, and the football broadcasts used the same Sony cameras employed by ESPN for their game-day coverage. "I set up a color correction based on our references of '90s ESPN footage," Bochner shares. "We found something we really liked. They shot multiple cam- era tests with different uniforms at two different fields. We got the grass where we liked it. We got the main uniforms where we liked it. We got skin tones where we liked it. I basically gave them a LUT of a color correction that they could shoot through with the camera so we were in that world. Once it's all assembled though, all bets are off because of lighting changes and shifts and that kind of stuff. But we were in the world, which was important because they really wanted to pre-visualize it as much as possible. There's still a lot of work to be done, but that gets you the closest." Bochner color graded the show using Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve software (Versions 19 & 20), working with nearly-complete edits that allowed him to grade episodes from beginning to end. "Everything is cut in, including the broadcast footage," he says of the ma- terial he worked with during grading sessions. "They really wanted '90s NFL Films footage — an accurate look of what that looks like. And looking at that footage…it doesn't look as old as you would think it would look. You're like, 'Oh, it really nice!' So we kind of designed it to look something like that. Our broad- cast footage is designed to look as close to ESPN footage as possible." Bochner points to a number of Resolve's grading tools and plug-ins that he called on during his sessions. "I found a Color Compressor worked a lot for the uniforms," he shares. "It really helped me because we like to keep a deep, rich color on one of the uniforms. The main uniforms are yellow, and to get them, we really wanted to build them exactly to a certain palette. We knew what the reference was. Then I was able to bring that in with a tool called ColorSlice on Resolve, which allows you to isolate certain colors and just richen them or lighten them. I was (able) to get us a really good look. That was a big help. Other than that, I use printer lights. I used primaries, lift, gamma, gain — a little bit of everything." Grading on the series began in February and wrapped up in September. Bochner typically works out of the same suite at Harbor's Santa Monica, CA, location, but also has color bays available to him in Hollywood and Culver City. In addition to DaVinci Resolve, his suite is outfitted with an Advanced Panel, a Sony X300 reference monitor, a 30-inch LG display for monitoring SDR output, and a larger Sony A95 client monitor positioned up front. "Traditionally, I'll get a lock of a show," says Bochner of his workflow. "I'll go through it. The DP will have notes. The EPs will have notes, and we'll move on from there. Visual effects will get dropped in. The mix will happen elsewhere or here. That's kind of the process. This was left open for a while, so there were a lot of changes. We kept working on it for a while." The look of the show evolved over time. Episode 1, for example, opened with a game, which set the initial vibe of the series, but as more episodes came in, there were changes to the overall look. "As the other shows came online — be- cause Episode 1 was done first — not a lot of the stuff really lined up to where we wanted, even matching it to show 1," he recalls. "We decided we wanted it to go in different directions on some of the game footage, even though it was not 100 percent accurate to what we had in (Episode) 1. During the inner cutting between both different styles, it just worked better. So that was kind of stuff we adapted to as we went on." – By Marc Loftus www.postmagazine.com 6 POST SEPT/OCT 2025