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IMAGES Alex Gascoigne worked on Black Mirror Smithereens using the Baselight Grid Warp. Right: Base Grade Dark and Bright tools
highlight and shadow regions in a very elegant fashion. For example, in an HDR grade session, you will often find highlights can be really ‘zinging’ to a degree that sometimes is distracting; you often want to drop down the top-end highlights without softening the contrast overall or introducing artefacts if using a keyer. Using the Dark and Bright tools within Base Grade allows you to make far more targeted and refined adjustments to parts of the image while maintaining the overall contrast ratio.” Want to find out more? You can see Gascoigne speaking at IBC2019, where FilmLight (stand 7.A45) is also hosting a free two-day seminar, Colour on Stage. The event is an opportunity to participate in live presentations and discussions with colourists and other creative professionals.
each new version,” he enthuses. “The way it handles multiple input colour spaces and its flexibility for creating multiple deliverables is incredibly intuitive, particularly on the large-scale broadcast and feature productions we’re doing. “For Smithereens , Lukas decided to shoot spherical lenses but wanted to introduce some anamorphic-style flavours – particularly for the car interiors. Rather than just vignetting everything, we chose to distort the edges of frame using a couple of tools. One of these is Grid Warp, which puts a load of control points on screen allowing you to create very detailed levels of barrel distortion. Further to this, we used another plug-in to create chromatic aberrations at the edges of frame to further ‘dirty-up’ the image around the actors.” Gascoigne adds: “The Base Grade operator is one of the most interesting new additions and acts like a hybrid of different features. It’s a very intuitive tool to work with and operates fairly differently to your traditional lift, gamma and gain adjustments. It allows you to control
to create an LUT that can be then fed out to VFX – it really develops from there.” From Season 4 of Black Mirror , the Dolby HDR grade was done first, so this early involvement within the production was even more necessary: “Everyone’s got to be on the same page in terms of the look. In the case of Smithereens , the director wasn’t available for the grade itself so it was only me and the DOP. HDR opens up many creative possibilities, but you’ve got to make sure that everyone’s happy early on in the process, so you don’t go off on a tangent.” BASELIGHT BENEFITS Gascoigne has been using Baselight colour grading for about seven years, and has seen some major innovations and developments in the system. “I love it, but perhaps what I like most as a general feature is the colour management within the software. That has only continued to grow and improve for
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