Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/28735
On-Set Post rection so when the client did come in, we were at a good starting point.” Clients can also be very specific about how their dailies look, he adds.“When they do presentations for their client, they want everything to look as good as it can.You can start set- ting the looks and LUTs for their dailies so their offline presentations are looking phenomenal.We are in the digital age now, and some clients aren’t used to that. They are a little nervous or Nice Shoes’ Ron Sudul was on-set with his color rig for this Moe’s Southwest Grill shoot. “One of the reasons to bring out [the rig] is to make sure the lighting and what they are doing on set is going to match what they are going for with their final look,” Sudul ex- plains. He cites a recent job that made use of Nice Shoes’ on-set color services — a commercial for Moe’s Southwest Grill that used the Phantom camera to capture ex- treme slow motion footage of food. “The director couldn’t make it to the final transfer,” Sudul recalls.“He wanted to impart his look on everything and make sure everything was heading in the right di- apprehensive, and being on-set, you can start showing them how it’s going to look — that it still looks beautiful, kind of like film, and ease their fears a little bit.” The Baselight set-up allows Sudul to work with native files, be it from Red,Arri or the Phantom camera. “[There’s] no transcoding. If they want color corrected dailies, you can start doing your dailies, con- versions, transcodes and final color right then and there.They are large files, but we are able to work with proxies or down-res them to half-res 2K files. Normally I just work with the proxy files.” In the future, Sudul says Nice Shoes has given thought to going on set and working more closely with the DIT, where they might all work off a shared SAN system and eliminate the need to physically trans- fer camera files. The breadth of Nice Shoes’ on-set ser- vices will vary, and occasionally, they will handle final color work as well,“which is re- ally nice,” he says. “The clients will come in the room and 90 percent of our work is al- ready done.We are at an excellent starting point, and when the clients come in,we are usually just doing minor tweaks and re-re- viewing what was already done — seeing it on a large monitor, and a little faster in a nice environment.” Editorial will normally be performed at another studio.The job will come to Nice Shoes, where the native files are loaded in for color correction.The color corrected files are then sent on to the online facility for the conform, graphics,VFX and titling. In addition to the Moe’s project, Nice Shoes has been working on an in-house stereo 3D project with a few of its creative directors. Sudul worked on-set for “Verses,” for which the studio is handling end-to-end services. “Verses” is a pair of stereo films based around poetry. Heartbreaker and Found were conceived and realized by creative directors Aron Baxter and Brian Bow- man, respectively.The studio plans on showing the finished shorts this month. MONKEYBUTTVFX Los Angeles-based Craig Mumma set up Monkey- ButtVFX (www.monkey- buttvfx.com) approximately five years ago after experienc- ing the complications that can occur when working with digi- tal acquisition formats on set. Today, he offers a well- equipped mobile unit that can provide back-up of digital film files, data management, data distribution and on-site dailies. “My background has been in feature films,” Mumma ex- plains.“I have been a visual ef- fects supervisor and still am. I was the visual effects supervi- sor for Where the Wild Things Are.” Mumma says the film re- lied on a digital workflow for 34 Post • April 2011 www.postmagazine.com