CHERNOBYL | DRAMA
NUCLEAR FUSION Technicolor’s highly experienced colourist Jean-Clément Soret put the eighties aesthetic on Sky’s new Chernobyl drama, while keeping it real
WORDS JULI AN M ITCHELL / SKY
S ky’s new Chernobyl drama is the first to appear on our screen from the content deal it struck recently with HBO, showing on Sky Atlantic. The suggestions are that a $250 million amount has been put aside for programming and this drama recreation of the famous nuclear accident in 1986 kicks the whole thing off. As a statement of intent, the five- episode series isn’t bad, with an Arri Alexa UHD Raw capture and Technicolor’s Jean- Clément Soret taking up the grading duties. Our first question to Soret was to find out if there was any more budget to play with due to Sky’s new drama partners. “It was actually quite comfortable. Usually I get around two days to complete 60 minutes of drama, which is a bit crazy. With Chernobyl , we got a week for each episode and there are five of them,” says Soret. “The brief was to be respectful of
the aesthetic of the era and also the Soviet Union eighties. We had the archives to work from, but wanted to improve on that colour palette. At the same time, it had to be high-end, so we were treading a fine line between the temptation of desaturation, for instance, but then it wouldn’t look as nice, so you’d have to make it not too beautiful. This was particularly true of sunny exterior scenes, where we were careful not to make them too warm. We kept them quite cold to enhance the effect.” He adds: “Obviously with the subject matter, it had to be a bit scary so you avoided warm tones, that kind of thing. There are lots of scenes lit with sodium lighting and neon. Generally, we didn’t want to make it flattering. It would have been very easy to put a wash of green or yellow on all the scenes, but we resisted that to keep it inside a certain realism.”
Usually, I get around two days to complete 60 minutes of drama, which is a bit crazy
BELOW The aesthetic was steeped in the eighties and the horror of the nuclear accident
MAY 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 45
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