Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/869840
www.postmagazine.com 15 POST SEPTEMBER 2017 been with Ben, who had a huge task ahead of him. We found that by day two, we got ourselves in the ballpark of where we wanted to be on the grade and then carried that through. What we wanted was for the show runners, Hulu and MGM to see what we were thinking right from the get go, so there would no surprises later down in the pipeline. The show didn't change its look much, if at all, from the onset to the color palette. There was just a lot more finesse — Bill added his touches as we went along." Watkinson explained that the show was shot on Arri Alexa cameras in 4K, knowing that Deluxe would take it to HDR in the grade. "We chose particular lenses for the show," he says, "and it was important to preserve that look." It was key for Ferwerda to maintain the look that had already been established by the time he came on board to the production. "Bill didn't come on until a few weeks in," explains Watkinson, "so we already set ourselves up fairly strongly. That was a hard task for Bill — we had to find some- body who could come in when we already had our strong decisions already made. So we didn't want somebody to reinvent it for us, just somebody to grab hold of it and run with it. That was Bill's challenge, and he did a great job. He sat down with Ben, went through everything we had done already and luckily he liked what we did. So we had a great relationship…he just carried on to the end." According to Ferwerda, "Colin did a beautiful job with the lighting. It was really amazing to work with his material — out of the gate — it was amazing. They already did a lot of work on-set. They had a clear vision of where they wanted this to go. They took advantage of mixing different colors in on top of the image. It wasn't just blacks are blacks and whites are whites in a nicely bal- anced image…it was layers upon layers of color and they used colors to their advantages and cer- tainly had colors representing certain worlds and certain scenes and moods and feelings. The color is definitely a character in the whole series." He continues that in the HDR grade, which he completed on DaVinci Resolve, "We took the muted look and keyed back the red and cyan to accentuate key colors. We would also emphasize an object art-directed in the shot — a vase, or a flower for a punch of color." He said that they also paid careful attention to Offred's eyes. "Elizabeth Moss does a lot of acting with her eyes. We paid special attention to that, making sure her eyes are always visible and bright." About the overall look, Ferwerda said, "It's very painterly and velvety. Colin's lighting and mood were just gorgeous. Out of the gate it looked fan- tastic — you can stop on just about any still and it feels like a painting. It's really an unusual look. So in HDR, if anything started to feel too real; too normal, we worked to inject different colors into the blacks or highlights. Blacks floated a bit high- er on this show than they normally do." Ferwerda remembers a scene of Offred in the kitchen and thinking it looked so much like an old Dutch painting. "It had this beautiful feel to it," he says. "They weren't always hard contrasts, but rather it was a softer contrast. It just looked so beautiful." After testing the pi- lot episode by grading in SDR first, Ferwerda then followed the full Dolby Vision CMU workflow for the show, starting the grade in HDR and deriving SDR from that. "Dolby Vision allows you to control both environments. When you map SDR from HDR you have trim functions to match. We just respected all SDR boundaries when we worked in HDR. There's plenty of flexibility to take a look as far as you'd like or to keep it dialed back." Watkinson concludes, "Bill and Ben did their homework around this new format, and they ensured the look and intent were perfectly preserved. Everyone involved in making this show put their hearts and souls into it." Deluxe's Bill Ferwerda graded in DaVinci Resolve.