CREATIVE REVIEW MASTERCLASS
Born In The Wild Splice had to bring together various formats to achieve a unique look for each episode of the doc series
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ORIGINAL
GRADED
IN-DEPTH
orn In The Wild was shot on a variety of cameras including Red, Sony F55 and PDW-F800, Canon 5D (below) and GoPro. It also required an eclectic mix of archive. Splice head of grading Chris Rodgers found the challenge in the grade was working to the strengths of each format, while matching them as closely as possible. He used various techniques to give each episode its own distinct look and set a colour palette for each location and animal. For example, in the elephants episode, he used a film display rendering transform when converting from Sony S-Log to Rec709 to avoid the vivid colours he felt were associated with video. This shifted the primary colours so that electric green grass swung towards yellow, and royal blue skies became more cyan. For the orangutan episode, the challenge was to retain detail with material shot under jungle canopy. Although there was bright sunshine, only dappled light made it to the ground, which meant the location was difficult to expose. Rodgers decided to grade for the subject of the shot, but in doing this the highlights would burn out. He then recovered detail in the highlights using Baselight’s compositing features; isolating highlights and then reintroducing detail from the ungraded image if necessary. The multi-paste function in Baselight was invaluable because it allowed Rodgers to copy and paste grades from Channel 4’s version to the PBS version, or vice-versa,
reducing the time needed to grade the two. Adam Dolniak completed the online edit using Avid DS. One of his tasks was to stabilise the cinematic drone shots and wire camera shots. He achieved this by using optical stabilising in the Boris image restoration toolkit to smooth out bumps without compromising the movement of the camera. Sapphire Rack Defocus blurs were used to complement light leak transitions into and out of GFX, maps and archive. The archive used was at various frame rates, which created noticeable duplicated and dropped frames when completing conversions in Avid Media Composer. To reduce the artefacts, the footage had to be run through a Carbon Coder.
‘Each episode was given its own distinct look, and a colour palette set for each location and animal’ Dubbing mixer Joe Cochrane crafted the mixes in ProTools 11, building the environment for each location using supplied wild track sound, which he layered with extra background atmosphere. The show featured male and female narrators, so it was vital to get a good balance between the two to ensure a transparent mix. ProTools 11 offline bounce features were essential in recutting and reconforming the material for the US.
Post Splice Client Windfall Films Brief Complete the picture and audio post-production of the four-part documentary series about the weird and wonderful births of elephants, kangaroos, dolphins and orangutans for Channel 4 and PBS. Key people Colourist Chris Rodgers; senior online editor Adam Dolniak; dubbing mixer Joe Cochrane; post producer Romana Waliczek TX June, Channel 4
July/August 2014 | Broadcast TECH | 17