“Such is Life”
The troubled times of grading Ben Cousins by Warren Eagles.
Ben Cousins is a very famous Australian Aussie rules footballer who has had a very traumatic career on and off the field.
I got involved with the Cousins project just 3 weeks before the on air date. Channel Seven had just bought the show from Mushroom Pictures so the pressure was on to finalise the edit, grade and finish the film. Peter Millington, MD of Blue Post in South Melbourne called me and asked if was I prepared to split the grade, half in Melbourne and half in my Color correction suite in Brisbane. Blue Post are a Melbourne-based facility specialising in series and documentary work. I have previously worked with them on episodic shows such as “Rush”, “Bed of Roses” and “Offspring”. My own documentary experience included some big-budget docos finished in London, notably “Meeting People is Easy” the Radiohead film and, having previously enjoyed the challenges of these jobs, said I would be happy to help.
I arrived in Melbourne and sat down to watch the documentary. I normally flick through sections, getting a good idea of the camera work, picture quality and of course the story. I am a firm believer of the more you are involved with and understand the project you are working on the better results you will produce. For “Such is Life” I didn’t flick, I watched the whole 90 mins straight up. The pictures had come from everywhere! Different cameras, formats, DPs, locations, lighting conditions, I had 4 days to grade the show and my first impressions were that I would need every minute of them.
The workflow for “Such is Life” was to conform in Final Cut Pro and grade in Apple Color using the Tangent Wave control surface. Mini DV, Sony EX1, RED, P2, and 16mm film pictures had to be matched with SD DVD game footage, and archive stills.
The general quality of the footage was good, I just needed to take all those formats and smooth them together.
Director Paul Goldman (Feature Suburban Mayhem and numerous TV commercials) and myself sat down and discussed his vision for the show while we watched the doco. We spent 3 hours going through all the different interviews and game footage setting an initial look for each one. I then jumped on a plane back to my Brisbane base with the whole show on a Hard Drive and the Apple Color project I had started at Blue Post.
Back in my own grading suite which is mirrored and calibrated to Blue, I opened the same “Apple Color” project and continued where I had left off matching the interviews and slowly piecing the show together.
When grading a commercial, drama or Movie, I have limited time so I always start by grading the worst shots. The shots that are underexposed, have mixed light sources, or have transfer issues. Make those look good then the rest normally falls into place a lot easier. The hero interviews in “Such Is Life” were all graded and balanced to look normal. Vignettes were used to bring the person out of the background, darken areas and to mask bright distracting colours.
It was never a case of just setting a look then re-applying everytime we saw that person, especially in case of the interviews with Ben and Brian Cousins where the daylight outside kept changing, every shot had to be re adjusted slightly differently.
The AFL slow motion footage of Ben at the Tigers was shot on RED, this had been transcoded to ProRes and appeared quite dark before grading. I applied more contrast and muted the Color slightly so giving it a very different look to the standard AFL TV off air look we are used to. Tracking shapes were used here to bring Ben out from the background also darkening the other players and crowd. The shots of Ben training were pushed a little harder this was one of the places in the doco where I felt we could add a slightly different look to the film although we never wanted to do anything to the pictures that would detract from the story
The Mini DV footage was in no way enhanced or grain reduced I resized some shots and increased grain to make them look very real and raw. We in fact increased the DV look.
The 16mm surfing material looked beautiful all I did here was up the overall contrast and make the ocean and beach colours match the same time of day as the digital material.
All the TV news footage and game material came from a number of sources; DVD, Digibeta, and QuickTime files. Lots were SD and had to be up converted to HD before it could be graded. I was very impressed with how these looked as a lot of it had also been resized from its original 4×3 aspect ratio.
I spent 2 days in my grading suite before returning to Melbourne to review the grade with Paul. Now 5 days before transmission our focus was on the stills and the new footage that had just arrived. These 50 or so still pictures all had dynamic moves on them so I had to match these moves with my windows and vignettes always trying to subtly make Ben the centre of the frame.
Finally we sat back and reviewed the whole show mainly checking to see how the newly graded stills sat back into the main programme, tweaking a few shots as we went.
I was very pleased with the final outcome. Being able to grade at two locations in Melbourne and Brisbane saved time and enabled us to make our deadline. The biggest challenge in grading “Such is Life” was keeping the grade consistent for 90 mins across so many different cameras and formats. The key to success is in the online making sure all formats have been captured or transcoded at the right resolution and colorspace. Sonia Cook at Blue Post did a great job with this, leaving me to concentrate purely on the fun bit…… the Color Correction.
“Such is Life”
The Troubled Times of Ben Cousins
Executive Producer Michael Gudinski for Mushroom Pictures
Director Paul Goldman
Producer Craig Griffin
Online Blue Post
Colorist Warren Eagles
