Music video: Sauvons Radio-Canada

Music video: Sauvons Radio-Canada

Earlier this month I got a call from PMT, a Montreal post house where I work on two tv series. They were taking part in an project to bring attention on the state of Radio-Canada and the rough times the state broadcaster is going through. To mark the point, about 150 artists gathered in a studio to record and sing a song that symbolize their attachement to the public broadcaster. They asked me if I’d wanted to join the team as colorist.

The minutes video had 3 types of sources: the musicians, recording the song, set in a warm and friendly studio; the artists sing their parts in front of a green screen; and some “making of” that showed the artists meeting and having fun.

The biggest hurdle what to graded the footage before it was keyed. Resolve has some workarounds to temporarily key a green screen but, at the time, the director, Ricardo Trogi, wasn’t sure if he wanted to key the artists in front of a logo, a white background or the old orange Radio-Canada logo. So I used the alpha output in the node window to do a basic key over white and tried to match the skin tones as much as possible.

Once rendered, we sent the graded clip (with a less that ideal green screen) and a REC709 version of it to Alchemy24 and they keyed hundreds of shots in a record time. They used REC709 version to pull the key in NUKE and replaced the green by the logo, and the artists by the graded version. They also did a great job removing the green spill without touching the grade.

Here are a couple shots and how they were graded in Resolve.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

And here is the final result:

Dir: Ricardo Trogi
Song: “Tout le monde en même temps” by Louis-Jean Cormier
DP: Jean-Philippe “Parish” Pariseau + Jean-Sébastien Desrosiers
Shot on ARRI Alexa and Canon EOS C300
Post house: PMT
Color grading: Mathieu Marano
 
 

Grading a tv series with Mistika

Grading a tv series with Mistika

I got a call from Slik, a Montreal-based post house, when they got their Mistika workstation. After a little training and a couple of friendly gigs we got our first real grading job on a tv series.

MED is a comedy adapted from the French hit SODA. Three teens are presented in various situations that both young and old can relate too. The first show aired in January 2015 on Vrak 2 in Quebec.

SGO, the company behind Mistika, is featuring an article on the grading process used on MED on its website:

http://www.sgo.es/2015/02/slik-creates-the-edgy-urban-look-for-new-tv-series-med/

This slideshow requires JavaScript.