Adapted from the stage hit, Jersey Boys is the musical story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. For his movie adaptation, director Clint Eastwood wanted a characteristic 1960s feel. He turned to the Warner Bros MPI team and their colorist Maxine Gervais on the Baselight color suite from FilmLight.
Shot in 2K anamorphic using an ARRI ALEXA, Gervais worked on Baselight with cinematographer Tom Stern to create initial looks. This meant the dailies had some of the character that Eastwood was looking to achieve before they even got to editorial. These looks formed the basis of the finished digital intermediate.
“I first met with Tom early on in the Jersey Boys project, prior to shooting,” explained Gervais. “Tom and I discussed doing dailies on Baselight, as they’d never done it before. We established looks that we converted into LUTs to plug into Baselight, so when we started getting the material all I had to do was grab the right look and balance things out.”
“Clint wanted to create a strong, de-saturated style with a very periodic feel to it. He really wanted to portray the sixties, so we let certain colors breathe–mostly elements of the wardrobe and details like the girls’ lipstick,” recalled Gervais. “I would de-saturate the overall picture then grasp and pull through certain colors, making it look very similar to television in the sixties.”
“It was an intricate look,” she added. “When you go very de-saturated, it always requires a little more balancing. Tom is a wonderful DP who shoots fast, knows what he wants but always got time to light it well. With Tom’s support, knowledge and understanding of how Clint works, coupled with the power of Baselight, I really felt I could do anything with the look. We ran a first pass by Clint who just had a couple of notes and then we just went from there and let our creative minds do the work. It really was a great team and a smooth DI process. For me it is an honor to work with such iconic filmmakers.”
Eastwood and Stern have already moved on to their next project, American Sniper, which they are grading in Maxine Gervais’s Baselight suite at Warner Bros. They will be using the same Baselight workflow but also introducing CDL for visual effects.
“Grading is moving away from one heroic session at the end of the pipeline towards a cumulative and collaborative process,” said Wolfgang Lempp, co-founder of FilmLight. “Today grading is a continuous process from set to deliverables, with colorists working alongside directors, cinematographers, editors and effects artists, rather than in sequence with them. That’s why we offer ‘Baselight at every stage’–not just in the grading suite, but on set, in VFX and in editorial as well.”
After 20 Years of Acting, Megan Park Finds Her Groove In The Director’s Chair On “My Old Ass”
Megan Park feels a little bad that her movie is making so many people cry. It's not just a single tear either — more like full body sobs.
She didn't set out to make a tearjerker with "My Old Ass," now streaming on Prime Video. She just wanted to tell a story about a young woman in conversation with her older self. The film is quite funny (the dialogue between 18-year-old and almost 40-year-old Elliott happens because of a mushroom trip that includes a Justin Bieber cover), but it packs an emotional punch, too.
Writing, Park said, is often her way of working through things. When she put pen to paper on "My Old Ass," she was a new mom and staying in her childhood bedroom during the pandemic. One night, she and her whole nuclear family slept under the same roof. She didn't know it then, but it would be the last time, and she started wondering what it would be like to have known that.
In the film, older Elliott ( Aubrey Plaza ) advises younger Elliott ( Maisy Stella ) to not be so eager to leave her provincial town, her younger brothers and her parents and to slow down and appreciate things as they are. She also tells her to stay away from a guy named Chad who she meets the next day and discovers that, unfortunately, he's quite cute.
At 38, Park is just getting started as a filmmaker. Her first, "The Fallout," in which Jenna Ortega plays a teen in the aftermath of a school shooting, had one of those pandemic releases that didn't even feel real. But it did get the attention of Margot Robbie 's production company LuckyChap Entertainment, who reached out to Park to see what other ideas she had brewing.
"They were very instrumental in encouraging me to go with it," Park said. "They're just really even-keeled, good people, which makes... Read More