Finding the Perfect Finish for ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ 

Thanks to Digital Media World for this coverage of Colourist Eric Whipp working remotely with his team between LA, Toronto and Sydney to build the looks on Baselight that tell the story of the new Mad Max film, Furiosa, in ACES!

https://www.digitalmediaworld.tv/post/finding-the-perfect-finish-for-furiosa-a-mad-max-saga

“George likes the term ‘rolling DI’, implying a tight integration between departments so that the grading process happens alongside all the VFX work,” Michael said. “Having the remote working ability between Spectrum and alter ego meant that Eric didn’t have to spend weeks over in Sydney – and George could review everything from the 4K DI theatre at Spectrum.”

The Spectrum team worked entirely in ACES and frequently used Baselight’s ability to switch between colour spaces to compare the colour in different viewing conditions. They could also use it to quickly switch formats, which was often necessary to compare 4K, HD and UHD against the various references.

(Eric) used the new Chromogen tool in Baselight 6.0 to support look development…”I made look strips in Chromogen that pushed the sand colour in a richer direction and deepened blue skies by twisting toward a nice cyan-blue colour. In some scenes we needed the greenery to pop, so I created look strips to open up the greens.” The strips are sets of parameters that represent different effects such as grading operators, transforms, filters and so on. When a strip is selected, its settings or parameters are selected as well. In all, Eric ended up making approximately 20 look strips that he used for different scenes.

“All of these helped with the overall look while not being too destructive to the overall image,” said Eric. “I converted them all to look strips so I could slide the amount of each effect shot by shot. As we graded this film in ACES, a show LUT wasn’t really needed. Working with look strips essentially does the same thing anyway, but with the advantage that everything is colour space aware, which made it easier to transition to HDR and rec.709.