THE BUTLER PRODUCTION
WINDOW DRESSING A raft of Aputure lights, including the STORM 1200x (above), helped create The Butler
“For control, we used the Aputure Sidus Four, which gave us a fully wireless lighting set-up around the location.” “We also had an excellent team contributing to colour management in various ways, from the camera tests all the way through to final delivery,” adds Baker. “I had great support from DIT Arthur Graham-Maw. He calibrated our cameras and all on-set monitors so I felt in control and knew what I was getting.” Much of The Butler ’s story plays out at night, so the team – keen to avoid expensive night shoots – shot day for night, tenting Sutton Place’s 20ft-high baroque windows. While it created a few logistical constraints, the historic location also provided endless inspiration, according to Ross. “We used the existing wall coverings and textures to bounce and shape the light, and pulled colours already present and dialled them into our lighting control to build palettes we could return to. And we often enhanced existing fixtures, such as practicals, by placing MC Pro’s inside the shade,” he says. “I am very proud of The Butler and of what we have achieved – an authentic period look and feel using state-of-the- art camera and lighting technology,” concludes Baker.
contrast with the warm period practical lights in the set. Through extensive camera tests on location, the pair experimented with colour temperatures, diffusion types and filters, using these results to create three custom LUTs for the show: day, night and dirty. “The dirty LUT was desaturated and gritty; I also played with camera colour temperature settings, as well as those of the lighting units. This allowed us to dial in our look on-set and trim colour and intensity levels as we go. I like our image on-set to appear as close to the final look as possible. That said, we still had plenty to do in the grading suite at OnSight with our colourist Emily Russul Saib.” The team turned to Aputure’s STORM 80c and 1000c fixtures, which proved a perfect fit for the project. “We needed fixtures that could keep up with our production pace. The STORM 80c and 1000c gave us a huge CCT range for our daytime work, plus precise fine-tuning of
colour for our night scenes using HSIC+ mode,” says Ross. Aputure’s groundbreaking BLAIR (Blue/Lime/Amber/Indigo/Red) light engine, which is capable of reproducing a previously impossible colour gamut, was especially successful on skin tones and costumes. This, says Ross, made it invaluable when moving between set-ups, as it meant that some fixtures could work as hard or soft sources while staying colour consistent. “This is such a noticeable change from the limitations of traditional RGB fixtures,” he confirms. The pair also praise the Aputure ecosystem for smoothing out colour management challenges throughout the process. “From a lighting perspective, having a range of Aputure fixtures using the BLAIR colour engine let us match and recall colour values across different slates,” says Ross. “We could quickly copy settings from one unit to another and trust they would match.
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