It was late on Friday night and I was finishing a TVC grade at the Chop Shop in Brisbane. I got a call from Kanta Yamaguchi of Green Leaf Films, asking if I could color a TVC next Wednesday in Tokyo. I had already committed to a half-day grade on Thursday in Brisbane, so the chances were looking slim. “I could do a Tuesday grade?” I offered hopefully. To my surprise they agreed and were already looking for flights. I only realised afterwards I had not even asked about my $$$ rate. But Tokyo is a great city so I was more than happy.
The commercial was for an Android TVC, produced by Monster Films. I got to see an offline Saturday morning, and soon realised I would be working with a number of camera formats, not unusual these days.
Monday morning I flew from the Gold Coast direct into Tokyo. I was met by a limo driver wearing a hat and white gloves, sure beats the bus!
The next day Fui Hirohashi from Monster met me at the hotel and we went to the Post House Digital Garden. The assistant Colorists were conforming the project and adding the animation while making some last minute changes. They wanted me to check over the set up before the clients arrived at 1400. Fui had the mood boards and reference material from the director. They showed me x2 grading TVC references. One of the references I knew could work with their footage but I was not so sure about their second option, which had a slight chocolate filter look.
The guys kept prepping the Resolve project so Fui took me for Sashimi…fine by me, not a big fan of conforming
I started the session by watching the 60sec TVC 3 times. Every time I noticed something different, either a potential grading problem or a feature I could highlight a little more. The producers were in attendance at this stage, no DP or director; they were coming in later and wanted me to spend 2 hours setting some style frames.
As a colorist you are in the chair to put the director’s vision on the screen. Occasionally you can deviate from what they want, taking the TVC away from where it was in the offline or what was approved. Having seen the ref images and mood boards, I matched 4 key shots using the references. I saved the looks, then proceeded to add some more contrast, saturation in the mid-tones and generally warmed things towards their chocolate reference. I then compared the two grades on each shot and decided that in this case my initial grades were more suited to the TVC. I then saved out 10 stills that were sent to the director.
We drank coffee and waited…
After 30 minutes word came back that the clients loved the look, great.
My next challenge was to make the look work across the whole commercial, considering the different camera formats used; a Sony F55, Canon 5D, HD tape archive, and a GoPro, this wasn’t going to be easy. The fact that the TVC is made up of lots of different scenes intercut with animation made this a little more manageable.
The DP of the Tokyo shoot Tetsuya Kondo arrived, great timing, but he seemed very reluctant to comment on the shots I was grading. After some interaction with Fui this was because I was grading the NYC shots, not the Tokyo shots that he had filmed. He didn’t want to comment on someone else’s work. Once I knew this I made him feel welcome, sitting him up the front with me. We started tweaking some Tokyo shots before moving back to the NYC material. Between us, we finished the TVC matching all shots to the clients approved look.
We then e-mailed all stills to the director and I sat back and awaited more comments. There were none they loved it so off for more Sashimi and SakiJ. No rendering or versions here, their team of guys stepped in to finish this.
The following day I did some Tokyo sightseeing before grabbing a red eye flight back to Australia just in time to get to my re arranged Chop Shop grade on Thursday morning.
Production Company. Monster Films
Post. Digital Garden Inc
Director. Hideyuki Tanaka
DP. Alex Disenhof, Tetsuya Kondo
PM. Misayo Baba
Producer. Iwao Noritomi
Grade. Warren Eagles
