BEDLAM PRODUCTION
Rec. 709 terms it was hanging on, but I could see enough. I said, ‘It is OK. You are going to lose some of the absolute deepest shadow structure, but we can do something with this.’” The second line of defence was DaVinci Resolve itself. As soon as the card landed at his station, Kozlowski dumped the rushes onto his NVMe RAID, pulled them into the same LUTed environment he had used throughout and did a quick pass. “I always say, if I am worried, James will know about it,” he says. “In this case I brought him over, graded it live, lifted it, shaped it, then brought it back down. The important stuff was all there: tiny bits of chair in the background, texture in the stone, not just a black hole. That is what you need. In the dark at home you might not consciously see it, but you feel it. That is the difference between elegant blacks and just a lump of nothing.” CLOUD WORKFLOW ON AN INDEPENDENT BUDGET The pictures would have been academic without a workflow that could keep up, and there was also no appetite for an expensive, multi-platform pipeline. “At the budget level we were on, no one was booking a cinema, running a projector and paying overtime for everyone to sit there every night,” Kozlowski states. “The money just did not exist. Traditionally you
end up fudging it yourself on whatever you can afford.” Bedlam took a different route. Butler opened a DaVinci Resolve collaborative project and Blackmagic Cloud account at the start of the shoot. Over time, about half a dozen people were in that project: Butler, Kozlowski, the executive producer, the producer, an assembly editor, an assistant and eventually the main editor. “It cost me £12.50 a month,” Butler says. “That was our entire proxy storage – the collaborative workflow, all the metadata, pre grades, everything. On the last film I did, my Frame.io account alone was around £130 a month, plus whatever the producers were paying for storage.” The constraints of indie production still bit. In Romania, Starlink dishes and long Ethernet runs battled two-metre- thick prison walls and historic buildings that killed wireless signals. In the UK, time and infrastructure were equally tight. “Once you are underground in a fortress, if your Teradek dies at ten metres, never mind Wi-Fi,” Butler says. “On some days, we had three Starlinks just to get a trickle of upload. There were spots where Mark was working offline and syncing later.” But the core idea held: one shared DaVinci Resolve project, proxies feeding straight into editorial and grading tools available from day one. Kozlowski’s station ingested the 8TB Media Module onto production RAIDs and his own NVMe
NATURAL APPROACH Before lighting a scene, DOP James Butler would ask himself where a light source would actually be in the area
system, created proxies, applied the show LUT and metadata and pushed everything into the shared project. “The thing everyone underestimates is the metadata,” he argues. “If you can keep that clean, you can fix almost everything else. We had the digital slate writing scene and take, environment, lens and all that good stuff in the files. I added custom fields for UK slating, slate, shot, take, fixed the inevitable fat-finger errors and built smart bins so you could just punch in ‘C57’ – and everything for that slate appeared. Nobody had to rename clips. The burn-ins showed everything you needed.” That discipline paid off when the unit wrapped. “Four days after principal photography finished, there was a complete assembly of the film. Not just a string out, but an actual one-hour- and-50-something cut of every scene, graded to our LUT, with all sound and metadata in place. On every other feature I have done, the assistant editor starts after wrap, spends two or three weeks just building bins and syncing, and then the editor comes in. You are months away from seeing the film. Here, we stole that time back during the shoot.”
73
DEFINITIONMAGS
Powered by FlippingBook