ROOSTER TECH
SOMETHING TO CROW ABOUT Steve Carell and Danielle Deadwyler (left) star in Rooster, shown here in a typically autumnal setting
CREATING NEW ENGLAND IN CALIFORNIA
Although Rooster is set within an Ivy League-style East Coast institution, production took place largely in Los Angeles and at the University of the Pacific campus near San Francisco. Recreating the feel of a north-eastern autumn became another collaboration between grading and VFX. “The biggest challenge was foliage,” Bohoskey says. “We couldn’t just turn trees orange and call it done.” VFX handled large-scale seasonal transformations and palm tree removals, while Bohoskey refined colour separation and density in the final grade. “We needed subtle variation in the leaves,” he says. “Not just orange blobs. You still needed detail and depth.” In winter scenes, secondary grading was used to suppress California greenery and shape backgrounds toward colder north-eastern palettes. “Sometimes it was as simple as desaturating green grass in the background or isolating out-of-focus trees in order to push the environment further.” The approach proved convincing enough that many viewers reportedly assumed the series had genuinely been shot in the Boston area. REFINING THE PIPELINE By the end of the first season, Bohoskey says the creative team felt they had fully discovered the show’s visual identity. “We actually went back and reviewed our favourite moments from each episode afterward. Episodes 9 and 10 especially felt like we’d really found the language.” Season 2, which will reportedly move visually past winter and into spring, is already prompting refinements. Bohoskey is developing dailies node structures designed to carry directly into final grading sessions, reducing the need for rebuilds during finishing. “The goal is to hit the ground running,” he says. “It’s still a comedy at the end of the day, but we wanted it to feel tactile and human, and not polished or sterile. Something warmer and more lived-in.”
compensating for the different shifting vignette patterns. “They were trying to fight every shot individually,” Bohoskey says. “So I built a reverse-vignette structure that opened the image back up enough for editorial while preserving the character of the look. “Every shot became this push and pull between removing technical vignetting and then deciding how much creative shaping you wanted back in afterward.” The integrated Resolve workflow meant VFX updates, editorial revisions and colour changes all appeared in real time without renders or reconforms. “We were sharing the same Resolve project across departments,” Bohoskey notes. “There was no exporting timelines or constantly sending versions back and WE WANTED IT TO FEEL tactile and human ”
forth. VFX drop-ins and reframes would just appear.” GRADING 8K BRAW Although Bohoskey had worked in Resolve for several years after leaving The Mill, Rooster represented his first major episodic production built entirely around Blackmagic Raw acquisition. The show shot 8K BRAW using Q3 variable bit rate (VBR) compression to keep storage requirements manageable while still preserving grading flexibility. According to McClure, the resulting files were actually smaller than some recent ALEXA 35 productions. “We were throwing everything at those images,” he says. “Grain, texture, colour separation and heavy contrast manipulation were all able to be held together beautifully.” Despite the show’s aggressive grading approach, only one shot across all ten episodes required denoising. Not to mention, the 8K workflow also provided considerable reframing flexibility in post, especially given the show’s unconventional large format camera. McClure positioned cameras physically closer to actors than would traditionally occur in comedy coverage, exploiting the lack of distortion and the spatial compression of the 65mm sensor.
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DEFINITIONMAGS
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