Blackmagic Design has announced that picture post on BBC One drama “Broken,” including the conform, grade and VFX compositing, has been completed using an editorial pipeline featuring DaVinci Resolve Studio and Fusion Studio.
From acclaimed screenwriter Jimmy McGovern, Sean Bean plays Father Michael, a Catholic priest presiding over a parish in the North of England. He serves as a confidante, counselor and confessor to a congregation struggling to reconcile its beliefs with the challenges of modern day life.
Overseeing postproduction on the six-part drama was LA Productions' post supervisor, Patrick Hall. “Having completed the offline, we moved the project across to DaVinci Resolve. Relinking the ProRes 4444 media, we were able to work natively in 4K during the conform and grade.”
The references for “Broken” were pretty bold from the start, according to Hall. “The director and DoP drew inspiration from American reportage photography in the 1960s and 70s, guys like William Eggleston and Steven Shore,” he said. “These photographers spent a lot of time exploring communities in the deep South of America, communities that had very little money, but who had very strong beliefs. It was a fascinating mirror of the characters in Broken, and the story we wanted to tell.”
The starting point for the entire grade was a series of five look up tables (LUTs) which allowed Hall and his team to emulate the different styles reflected in the various photographic references.
“As with any drama series, one of our greatest challenges was consistency. The emulation LUTs alongside Resolve’s ColorTrace proved particularly useful when it came to delivering multiple versions for international distribution. Copying grades across took seconds, rendering a complicated, time-consuming process relatively straight forward.”
VFX for the prime time drama was composited and rendered using Blackmagic Design’s Fusion Studio.
“We had around 90 VFX shots across the series and then many more flares and OFX plugins which we introduced directly through Resolve,” said Hall. “In fact, we even relied on Fusion Connect during the offline assembly edit which afforded us the ability to send VFX shots into Fusion during the offline process as a rough cut. That was incredibly useful once we came to the conform as we were able to simply tweak those early Fusion files based on the online material.”
LA Productions carried out a range of VFX work including the generation of 3D rain particles and sky replacements. “Our production crew shot all of the train footage used on the series in one go. That presented continuity issues when using it across the series. It was our job to make it fit,” Hall explained. “In several instances we needed to add rain to the train window. We did that using Fusion’s particle generator and then applied motion blur to soften those effects and match with the original footage.”
Hall concluded, “DaVinci Resolve and Fusion is an incredibly powerful, node-based workflow that is incredibly quick and very simple to use once you know how. I don’t know of any workflow that’s quicker and more efficient for the conform, grade and VFX on a prime time television drama.”
The Oscars Are More International Than Ever. But Is The International Film Category Broken?
For many filmmakers, the Oscars are a pipe dream. But not because they think their movies aren't good enough.
The Iranian director, Mohammad Rasoulof, for instance, knew his native country was more likely to jail him than submit his film for the Academy Awards. Iran, like some other countries including Russia, has an official government body that selects its Oscar submission. For a filmmaker like Rasoulof, who has brazenly tested his country's censorship restrictions, that made the Oscars out of the question.
"A lot of independent filmmakers in Iran think that we would never be able to make it to the Oscars," Rasoulof said in an interview through an interpreter. "The Oscars were never part of my imagination because I was always at war with the Iranian government."
Unlike other categories at the Academy Awards, the initial selection for the best international film category is outsourced. Individual countries make their submission, one movie per country.
Sometimes that's an easy call. When the category — then "best foreign language film" — was established, it would have been hard to quibble with Italy's pick: Federico Fellini's "La Strada," the category's first winner in 1957.
But, often, there's great debate about which movie a country ought to submit — especially when undemocratic governments do the selecting. Rasoulof's fellow Iranian New Wave director Jafar Panahi likewise had no hopes of Iran selecting his 2022 film "No Bears" for the Oscars. At the time, Panahi was imprisoned by Iran, which didn't release him until he went on a hunger strike.
Rasoulof's film, "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" — a movie shot clandestinely in Iran before its director and cast fled the country — ultimately was nominated for best... Read More