DEFINITION July 2019

DRAMA | GOOD OMENS

BOTTOM Theatre 1 at Molinare, the suite used by Gareth Spensley to grade Good Omens

completely drenched in darkness at around 3pm. The varying light conditions on the exterior sets, accompanied by inclement weather, demanded some quick colouring by DIT Rich Simpson. He explains: “I had to balance the shots so that they would make sense in the dailies and in the edit.” Simpson describes one scene – a tracking shot of the good witch Anathema Device cycling through a forest. He recalls: “This was actually shot day-for-night, so I made a colour correction to the dailies, and applied a dynamic grade to take into account the change in light created by the foliage as the bike moved across it.” He continues: “Another interesting shot to work on saw the angel Aziraphale pulling an imaginary cord, which would turn the scene from night to day within the same shot. We set keyframes and applied a dynamic grade to every clip, so that this effect was there in the dailies when they were uploaded.” Good Omens was produced in many different locations, which, for Simpson, meant moving and managing a lot of 4K material. With this in mind, he designed a mobile lab – an extension of his Hijack post-production studios – which had an independently powered system with a calibrated grading environment and the computing power to handle a lot of data. “We had a dual Mac Pro system configured over a network; one was primarily used for colour adjustments and the other was used for data management and to create daily LTO backups on location. LTO tapes were stored off-set and a shuttle drive of transcodes went off to the edit team every night on wrap.” All transcoding took place on-set and the configured networks enabled rendering on both systems simultaneously. Also, because the lab was independently powered, he could switch over from the

the end of the series, it’s been reduced to a flaming heap by the imminent apocalypse. But, being a demon, that doesn’t stop Crowley from driving it at 120mph. A real vintage Bentley was used on-set and it could do 70 miles an hour, but only after an hour of building up to it – so that wasn’t going to work. With Lester Dunton, of Dunton Projection FX, the crew was able to build a Bentley interior with wrap- around rear projection, so no green screen. “We used a system of projectors and multiple screens, not just behind the car, but also projecting reflections into the windscreen and bodywork, so the interactive lighting was synced to the background plates,” explains Dunton. “We also had a couple of projectors that lit the actors with the same footage that was going past them.” This way, the director, actors and operators could see the finished product in the camera, with no compositing to do. The projectors that directly lit the actors went through 250 4x4 white diffusion frames, and the projectors that caused reflections in the car body were either front-projected onto screens hung overhead, or back- projected if that was easier to rig. FICKLE BRITISH WEATHER In our last issue, Finney noted there were some night-for-day scenes – due to daylight saving – where the Soho set had become The biggest scene was replacing the sky in the majority of the last episode, charting a red sky that signalled Armageddon

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