Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/455278
www.postmagazine.com 6 POST JANUARY 2015 ENCORE DELIVERS COLOR, CONFORM, DAILIES, SUPPORT VFX & MORE FOR NETFLIX'S MARCO POLO SERIES NEW YORK — Nefl ix's new 10-part original series, Marco Polo, which premiered in December and stars Lorenzo Richelmy, Benedict Wong and Chin Han, is an epic drama that looks at the early years of the renowned explorer and follows his travels through the "Silk Road" trade route in the Asian continent as well as his encounters with Kublai Khan. Compared to such acclaimed shows as Game of Thrones, the series follows some of the challeng- es Polo faced, such as navigating his way through Khan's colorful-yet-corrupt world. To create the new series, produced by Netfl ix in conjunction with The Weinstein Company, the production team — headed by Stuart Burkin, VP post, The Weinstein Company and Robyn Feld- man, series co-producer — relied on Encore (www. encorepost.com), a Deluxe Entertainment Services company, to provide dailies, conform, color, sup- port VFX and more. "We knew right from the start that this was go- ing to be a vast undertaking," says Domenic Rom, GM, Deluxe/Encore NY. "They were shooting in 4K in Venice, Kazakhstan and Malaysia. Then there was the post, which was going to be done in New York, plus international distribution, Blu-ray, and a whole slew of services. But we knew we could off er all of those services, from start to fi nish." From the fi rst day of shooting, the Encore team was on-location in Venice with its proprietary near- set mobile dailies system, Mobilabs, immediately increasing its capacity because of the 4K format. Russ Robertson, SVP sales, East Coast, Deluxe/En- core, explains that there were two systems, one in Venice and the other in Kazakhstan, and then both ended up in Malaysia. "We did all the capturing of on-set dailies, and the LTOs that they created on-set were sent to New York so we could verify everything," explains Rom. "They were out in Kazakhstan, and I think it took them four hours to drive to set and back. So, before they left, they wanted to make sure things were good. They did a phenomenal job on-set. The post team was sta- tioned here at our location in New York, the editorial team was across the street at Pivotal Post, and all the post producers and executives were here at Encore where they did their cut and we did the online, the color correct, some VFX work, all in 4K. All the work we did was in 4K, except the VFX work, that was 2K. Then, once we put an episode together, we literally piped it down the hall to our sister company, Digital Media Services, and they did encoding for Blu-ray, international versioning, and I think 10 diff erent lan- guages. Everybody always says, 'from soup to nuts,' but we really did everything from start to fi nish." The team relied predominantly on a Smoke/ Lustre platform. "Full conform was happening in Smoke; color correction in Lustre," says Rom. "We just felt that given the time turnaround and working in 4K, it was the most fl exible workfl ow for the project. Martin [Zeichner], our colorist, is very well versed in Lustre, so we felt it would give him the greatest freedom. As for VFX, we threw every tool we had at it. I don't think there was any tool in the facility that we didn't use." Robertson adds that in all, the team had more than 120TBs of data it had to manage throughout the entire process. Rom says that one of the biggest challenges they faced was the timeline. "As you know, Netfl ix premieres everything at once, so we really had to turn this around very quickly to get it to Netfl ix," he says. "It was a fairly compressed post schedule, from fi rst frame of production to the end, and it was all 4K, moving the data around, there were changes constantly." "Also, there was a huge amount of visual eff ects that were coming in from vendors all around the world," adds Robertson. "We were constantly drop- ping in shots, updating color, updating cuts — it took a lot of management. More than a traditional series would." In the end, both say they are pleased with the fi nal result and the eff orts of their team. "We sort of broke new ground with the com- plexity of the show, the wide-reaching length, how long the show took to shoot, where it was shot, but mostly I think our pride comes from the fact that we did it as one company," says Robertson. Rom agrees, "We're very proud of the series, the way it looks and the work we did on it. When the client said, 'You guys made a lot of promises in the beginning, but you actually lived up to them,' it liter- ally gave me goose bumps. It felt so good to hear. It really was a collaborative eff ort. Our team felt a big part of this. It was a great experience." — BY LINDA ROMANELLO BITS & PIECES Encore used Autodesk Smoke and Lustre to complete this Netfl ix series.