COLOUR SPECIAL
“LIKE A WOOL SWEATER”
Josh Bohoskey on crafting the textured autumnal look on Rooster
WORDS ADRIAN PENNINGTON
C reated by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, HBO comedy Rooster stars Steve Carell as an author teaching at an Ivy League university where his daughter is a professor. The series blends warm autumn tones, soft blown highlights, heavy textures and deliberately imperfect contrast behaviour into an image that’s far removed from the polished Rec. 709 look associated with many contemporary sitcoms. At the centre of that process was the collaboration between DOP Blake McClure, ASC, colourist Josh Bohoskey, who works for colour boutique Rare Medium, and LA post facility DigitalFilm Tree, where LUT design, dailies, VFX and final grading all existed within the same DaVinci Resolve ecosystem. “This was never about making comedy look dark or moody,” Bohoskey begins. “The brief was warmth. We kept saying the show should feel like a wool sweater: comforting, nostalgic, textured.” Initially inspired by the blown highlights and analogue texture of 2023 satire Dream Scenario , McClure and director Jonathan Krisel explored shooting Super 16 before pivoting toward large format 65mm digital capture. The production ultimately adopted Blackmagic’s URSA Cine 17K 65, shooting primarily in 8K using the full width of the
sensor within a 2:1 aspect ratio. McClure paired the camera with Camtec Falcon glass, typically working around a 55mm T1.3 focal length to preserve intimacy while exploiting the compression and spatial rendering of the large sensor. BUILDING THE LOOK Bohoskey first collaborated nearly a decade ago with McClure on pre- taped shorts for Saturday Night Live . He was brought onto Rooster before principal photography began and used DigitalFilm Tree’s Resolve-based workflow to develop the show’s look during lens, wardrobe and exposure testing. A defining ingredient of the process became the Camtec’s Color-Con filter system, which introduces coloured LED illumination directly into the lens through a matte-box-mounted diffusion system. The Color-Con alters shadow density, highlight roll-off and contrast dynamically depending on exposure. “The Color-Cons were wild,” Bohoskey explains. “Even small exposure changes would drastically shift the contrast structure. We had to figure out where the image would generally live exposure wise so we could build LUTs around that.” These filters introduced subtle colour contamination, ‘greens, magentas and warmth shifts’, while simultaneously
exaggerating both the lens shading and vignetting across the large format 65mm image circle. “It completely destroys the image in this incredibly beautiful way,” Bohoskey describes. “There are weird imperfections happening that you wouldn’t intentionally design. That then became part of the show’s identity.” Blackmagic later developed a Resolve plug-in inspired by the look, but Bohoskey says the production decided to stay committed to the practical filters because of their unpredictability. “While the plug-in could emulate it closely, the physical filters were doing these strange organic things that felt impossible to fake.” CONTRAST AND VIGNETTING The aggressive vignetting generated by the Color-Con system, compounded by the natural edge shading of the large format sensor and lenses, proved the main issue when grading. “Some shots almost looked like you were viewing the world through a pinhole,” Bohoskey says. DigitalFilm Tree handled dailies and online finishing internally, allowing all the departments to work inside the same shared Resolve project. That was important because the dailies team initially spent time manually
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