Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/724677
PRIMETIME www.postmagazine.com 10 POST SEPTEMBER 2016 MC's six-part series The Night Manager is set across sever- al international locations, including civil war-torn Egypt, the mountains of Switzerland and the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. The show centers on Jonathan Pine (played by Tom Hiddleston), who serves as the night manager of a Cairo hotel. There, he discovers one of his high-pro- file guests is connected to an interna- tional arms dealer. The show also stars Hugh Laurie and Elizabeth Debicki. The Night Manager is nominated for 12 Emmys, and underwent numer- ous post processes at Deluxe's Encore facility in London, where colorist Jet Omoshebi worked to define a specif- ic look and feel for each international location. The series was directed by Susanne Bier and shot by Michael Snyman using Red cameras. Here, Omoshebi, who is a senior colorist at Encore (www.encorepost.co.uk), details her work on the program. How did you get involved in The Night Manager? "I met up with the director of photog- raphy. He's based in South Africa and he wasn't going to be around for the grade. We were in the great position of having all six hours of the series. It had been shot with real continuity and real purpose of vision, which you don't always get. So we had all six episodes to look at before we started. We spent a couple of days looking through the footage and talking, really about the show and about the different locations, and how we could guide the viewer through this story. It's a complicated story. There are flashbacks, and differ- ent time zones, different locations, lots of different characters, and we wanted to find a flavor for every location — every time zone — so the viewer would get a little help in understanding where they were." Were you working with the edited show or just raw footage? "We were lucky to have rough assem- blies of all the shows. It was kind of like a rough cut, where we had key scenes of each location." What services did Encore provide? "We did strictly the color grading, the sound and the online effects, but not the visual effects. It's not a very visual effects-heavy show. Most of it was actually captured in-camera. The DP and director both come from a fea- ture background. I think they brought with them that very sense of scale and building up a story. As storyteller, having six hours to tell a story is such a great luxury. I think the success of the show is that you are with the characters — you get to know them. They are very three dimensional." Do you follow a specific process? "The first thing I do in any job is sit down and try and work out what is in the DOP's head. What their taste is? What's important to them? How dark they like things to be? How bright? "We talked about texture and colors. There's a lot of night stuff. My client has very specific color for night. He did not like that kind of 'blue' night. He liked that green/silvery light. Your initial talk with a DOP is really finding out what is their taste and what is important to them. Then we talked about grain — whether or not we were going to add any grain to add a slightly more filmic look?" Is that because it was shot using a Red camera? "That's right. And, in fact, we did in- troduce grain over the whole show in the end. We spent three days together looking through the footage and just talking about the emotion he wanted to convey with the pictures…Looking at skin tone. It's all of those kind of things where you are trying really hard to un- derstand what's in the head of a DOP, and catch up on all the decisions that were with him and the director before you were involved. The colorist is really last in the chain. Then we decided that we would make all of the locations look very different and have a distinct look." In the pilot alone, you have Egypt and Switzerland — two very different places. "There are a few more — there's Turkey, Istanbul. A lot of it is in Spain, which is the baddy's lair. All of them have a very distinct atmosphere. One of the most AMC'S THE NIGHT MANAGER BY MARC LOFTUS ENCORE REFINES THIS AMC SERIES' INTER- NATIONAL LOOK A Encore London's senior colorist Jet Omoshebi graded the series using a Digital Vision Nucoda Film Master system.