Richard is proud to have cut the MMAD series of TV spots for Hylton Tannenbaum at Bioscope Films.
The series consists of no less than 10 separate performance scripts, some of which also had some alternate versions.
“There was so much creative freedom and so much great material that we just had to finish two or even three versions for some of the spots” enthuses Richard, “The main problem was having to do onlines and finishes of all those extra spots, but it helps to be super-organized and have a good workflow”.
“It is a real pleasure to cut material where every performance take is a strong one” he continues, “like working on a feature film in a way. Sometimes you just end up cutting around continuity problems and bad performance, but not in this case”.
All the spots were graded and finished in-house at Priest, so only audio was outsourced.
“The footage was shot exclusively on 5D, on three cameras, which is why they managed to shoot 10 performance commercials in two days. I originally used Pluraleyes to sync everything together and worked with the multiclip function of Final Cut Pro” recollects Richard, “but everything went horribly wrong and I had to start again. No disrespect to either of those products but I would never advise anyone to use multiclip in FCP. I kept opening up my cuts to discover that they had mysteriously reverted to some other random angle on the multiclip, so I started again”.
“All I had to do was quickly sync up three cameras worth of 5D footage, recut 4 spots and present to the director, in like a day and a half”.
Once Richard and Hylton had finalised the offlines with client, the footage was up-ressed (how
do you spell that anyway?
) to Apple Prores 4-4-4-4 for grade.
According to Jenine Lindeque, colourist at Priest, this is a superior workflow, “Most people would not bother with this step, they would probably just convert to Prores HQ and use that for both off- and online, but we find that we get much better latitude off the 4-4-4-4 codec, so it is worth it for us to take that extra step, even though it doesn't make complete sense. The colours remain more natural and there is just a lot more control over the grade”
Online at Priest was the one of the first jobs done by Grant Aerts aka The Monk, on his brand new Smoke. He was completely satisfied that he had made the right move by getting Smoke on the mac “Uncompressed, Prores 4-4-4-4, dpx, whatever I throw at this box it can do. Not to mention how awesome the Prores workflow is between FCP, Color and Smoke. It just works and is fast and easy.” says Grant.
He was not even phased when he was told that each of the 13 versions had to be done with two sets of end titles, and a clean version for the director, making 39 bodies to be saved.
Audio was completed at Big Leap Sound by Craig Ormond, and all masters and Mediahosting were handled by Priest.
The spots were shot on 16mm which is Luke's favourite format to work with because of the slight grittiness and grain that you don't get from 35mm. It also lends itself to HD formats really well so you don't have to muck about with extra crops and that kind of thing. The grade was completed at Searle Street Post on the Pablo and the online was done at Priest by Grant “The Monk” Aerts on Smoke, which turned out to be a really useful tool to adjust the softness and saturation of the shots quickly and non-destructively.
