DEFINITION January 2019

SHOOT STORY | THE FAVOUR I TE

ABOVE The movie was shot on film but there was no HDR deliverable.

from both the camera and colour departments.

some film again. The way Yorgos works is very interesting. I graded another movie with him a year before, The Killing of a Sacred Deer , and we used the same approach. We kept it natural, we don’t use many secondaries at all, we try not to use much of the toolset. We tried to manipulate the colour using the primary colour correction – the blacks, the highlights – to create an interesting natural look.” “Most of the film was shot in available light,” Rob continues. “There were hardly any lights at all – the night scenes

Robbie says: “There was a problem where we had to go back and shoot one scene differently. Five weeks later, spring had sprung so all the leaves were budding, while for the first time there was no greenery. I think it just cuts and you don’t notice it. There are bits in the sequence where you think ‘oh that’s a bit greener’, but otherwise you’re in the story. It’s also testament to Rob’s grading.”

“That required a lot more work in the grade,” Rob recalls. “That’s the one area of the film where we had to use the colour corrector to its full potential. Other than that, we tried to

because he has great involvement in every facet of the film he’s making. “He’s the person everyone refers to. There’s no other outside involvement – that applies to everything: from casting to editing to final cut. In this day and age, this is a very precious and rare thing. You finally get a film that’s fully in the control of the director and everyone realises he knows what he’s doing.” The best-graded films are the ones where you don’t see it, you don’t notice it

were candlelight and needed a lot of candles. If you watch the movie, you’ll see what I mean. The blacks are really black on some of those night scenes, but it looks awesome. The night scenes are very rich, very warm, so automatically you’d back off the warm and dial it down a bit, put in desaturation,

DID YOU KNOW? Robbie Ryan shot the music video You’re Beautiful by James Blunt

grade it quite organically. A lot of the films that I’ve

worked on are not too stylised. Some of them require an awful lot of work to make them look

natural. Robbie, for his part, appreciates both the naturalistic approach and the consistency of Lanthimos’ vision.” Rob continues: “The best-graded films are the ones where you don’t see it, you don’t notice it, and that’s really the secret of being able to do good VFX or grading. So you don’t notice it and when you do, you think there’s something wrong. “When you’re doing a film with Yorgos, he’s the guy who calls all the shots. In the true sense of the word, he’s a great director

but it just didn’t look right. We tried to use a bit more of the toolset and it just looked fake. It didn’t look real, so we stripped the grade back and just went with how it came out of the can.” Unusually, there was no HDR delivery, given Lanthimos’ objections to the way an HDR grade looked. COLOUR CORRECTOR One scene stands out in Robbie’s and Rob’s memories as requiring special attention

THE FAVOURITE IS OUT NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE.

38 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 20 1 9

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