While running the recent ICA “Warren’s Looks” class last month in Singapore I got an e-mail from Andy Ho post producer at Digipost Vietnam. He needed a colorist to grade a commercial the following Sunday, and asked if I was interested? I was very keen, but could I fit it in?
That night I called him…
“Do you want the good news or the bad news Andy? The good news is I am in KL on Friday so a much cheaper option than flying me from Australia, the bad news is that on Sunday I have to fly to Jakarta. How about Saturday for the grade?”
We agreed on Saturday and Andy set about getting me a visa and flights from KL. The job was to grade a 45 second commercial plus a number of cutdown versions for a Fish Sauce campaign shot with the RED camera. I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City at 10am on the Friday before the grade. Andy wanted me to drop into Digipost to check out the room and the kit. I am glad I did…
I updated the version of Apple Color and added my reference material to the Digipost Mac.
The CP200 Tangent panels in the grading room had been configured rather strangely by the previous Colorist so I set about applying my panel settings using the new CP200 Wave mapper.
Happy with that we attempted to move the 4 panels closer to me across the desk when we suddenly lost power to one of the panels, then the next panel went down! Something strange was going on so I decided to use my own Wave panel. I plugged in the USB cable then applied my panel csettings to the Digipost Mac and all my favourite panel controls popped into life on the Wave surface. I then decided that 3 different looking monitors was not a good Idea for the session so I turned 2 off and rearranged the desk, moving the CRT monitor to the middle of the desk behind the Wave, Apple Color GUI on the right and Apple Waveforms on the left. This is my preferred layout in all rooms. I always carry some test Quicktime material that I know very well. I have bars, pluge, black to grey patches and some very neutral real images. I know what these should look like, so then have a good idea how well the monitor is lined up. Having completely rearranged reconfigured and calibrated the room we were ready to grade.
Whilst the clients and agency were finalising the edit and waiting for approvals I got the offline editor Sayam to send me the r3d files for the commercial. I spent a couple of hours adjusting different variations of Gamma Curve and Colorspace settings. The best setting I found was Camera RGB for the Colorspace and REDlog for the gamma curve. Although this made the “normal” look very washed out and desaturated it gave me the latitude to do what I needed to do to balance the two cameras which in some situations were very different.
This extra time before the clients came in enabled me to pull a selection of looks into my timeline. I then set some looks and balanced a couple of shots to show Gai the director and the clients my ideas whilst they were still cutting. The EDL got to me around 3pm. The commercials were conformed on to the same timeline starting with the 45 second version followed by the cut downs.
It is very important to watch the commercial a number of times, get to know the shots, the order they come in and what the problematic shots maybe. Ask for the offline to be e-mailed to you, although low res a number of things can be learned from the offline. I will sometimes try some test looks just using the offline, especially as sometimes I arrive at the post house at the same time as the clients.
The commercial started with an exterior scene followed by a number of cooking shots in the kitchen and finished with a happy lunchtime scene, showing the family and our hero chef enjoying the fish sauce.
Initially I balanced the r3d files to be as neutral as possible. I then saved that to a memory as a normal reference, which could then be applied to all the shots. We initially tried a warm golden look but this tended to “muddy” the clean white look of the kitchen. A cool white applied to the kitchen units with normal skin tone looked good, but we felt this was too much of a look and effected the product shots to much. It is very important in the early stage of your session where everybody is keen to decide on a look for the TVC that you constantly check the desired grade on a number of shots especially the pack shot.
We decided on a warmer grade with a very neutral white for the kitchen units, that helped both the skin tones and the product bottle. I normally grab a wide shot as a reference, then match everything to that. The lunchtime scene was again warmer, but never over saturated, crushed or clipped. I found that I had to build lots of depth into the food shots, using window shapes to add subtle light rays, shadows and contrasty areas. This is one way to give r3d files a more filmic look. The final pack shot featured our chef holding the bottle of Fish Sauce. This needed lots of correction to match the rest of the commercial. This left the pack looking a very strange green color. I drew a shape around the bottle and tried to track it, but it was moving around too much so the auto tracker couldn’t lock to the bottle. Gai and I decided to grade two passes for the shot, a grade for the chef and a separate correction for the bottle.
After 4 hours of matching, the various versions, happy with our initial work we watched the commercial back. At this point the two overhead soup shots were obviously too saturated and didn’t match the surrounding shots with the family talent. I fixed these then drew some shapes to isolate areas of the soup that needed more contrast. As always the product is always king in any production, so we spent some time touching up the food and bottle shots.
All happy so I kicked off the render at 2K size even though the finish commercial would be delivered in SD only This was to enable Cian the Smoke artist the resolution to resize any shots. The render plus the extra passes took about 30 mins. Cian conformed the commercials, I checked all the elements, the renders were all good and looked the same on the Smoke CRT monitor as it had on mine in the grading room.
My work done, we stepped out for a cold beer and some Vietnamese food…fish sauce anybody?
- Client: Kabin Fish Sauce
- Agency: JWT Vietnam
- Production House: Shooting Gallery Vietnam
- Executive Producer: Chris Loo
- Producer: Jeigh Santarina
- Director: Somphob Sanggerd ‘Gai’
- Post: Digipost Vietnam
- Offline: Sayam Dougklin
- Colour: Warren Eagles
- Online: Cian Mcylsaght
- Music Composer/ Sound mix: Nikk Eu
- Post Producer: Andy Ho
