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.

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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
 
 

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