Web promo: Bluesound

Posted by mateodimarano on Mar 11, 2015 in Color grading, Gig, Resolve, Web | 2 comments

I’m happy to present you this piece I graded back in September. It’s finally out. It’s a promo video for HiFi streaming speakers by Bluesound. The clip was produced by MOM Industries and I was hired by Studio Plasma to grade it.

The plan was to give it a “coffee shop” look without going for the washy black hipster look. It had to be warm without being hot. This could be easily overdone in the appartement. One the grade was done it was sent to VFX where they translated the annoying sounds of everyday life into these square glitches.

Here is the promo clip:

Bluesound – Living HiFi Commercial Video from Bluesound on Vimeo.

Music video: Ariane Moffatt “Debout”

Posted by mateodimarano on Mar 9, 2015 in Color grading, Gig, Music video, Resolve | 0 comments

Ariane Moffatt collaborated with ValléeDumamel to produce and direct the music video for Debout, the first single of newly released album 22h22.

Based on a choreography by Isabelle Boulanger, two dancers evolve in four different sets. Each set, representing a different room, was painted in a different color. To save time, DP Simon Duhamel used a gelled 12K to wash the white cyclo with the different colors. In the grading room, I only had to enhance those colors, bring back the different elements by removing unwanted color casts and make sure these color were broadcast safe.

Surprisingly, this dance video doesn’t use much cuts but comes out as a very active piece. Most of the dynamics are the results of the steady cam following the dancers across the sets. The result is a movie that is both an eye candy and an ear worm.

Here are some still pull off to explain the grades I did:

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Here is the video:

Ariane Moffatt – Debout (Vidéoclip officiel) from Ariane Moffatt on Vimeo.

Music video: Sauvons Radio-Canada

Posted by mateodimarano on Feb 25, 2015 in Color grading, Gig, Music video, Resolve | 0 comments

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:

Grading a tv series with Mistika

Posted by mateodimarano on Feb 12, 2015 in Color grading, Gig, Mistika, TV Series | 0 comments

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/

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Music video: Rococode Banks

Posted by mateodimarano on Jan 19, 2015 in Color grading, Music video, Resolve | 0 comments

This fall I worked on this music video for the Canadian band Rococode. Five Thousand Fingers, a Montreal based studio, directed the video for the first single;e Banks. It was shot in various location on the Montreal island by DP John Londono on a Red Epic.

In the video, we see different portraits of people living quite different lives that will somehow gather to find their way through a portal. We tried to stay true to the cloudy and mellow mood of the shoot. The studio shots were very intimate and we tried to keep the dimmed and closed atmosphere.

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Here is the video:

Rococode – Banks from Fivethousand Fingers on Vimeo.

Here is a quick breakdown of the grades I did:

BANKS by Rococode color grading breakdown from Mathieu Marano on Vimeo.

Web: Samsung Galaxy Note 4

Posted by mateodimarano on Jan 15, 2015 in Color grading, Gig, Resolve, Web | 0 comments

Every time I work on a project with ValléeDuhamel it’s a lot of fun. This time it was to recreate the creative environment enabled by the new Samsung Galaxy Note 4 pen as an artist would see it.

Shot on Epic Dragon by DP JP Bernier, the 45 spot is all real hands, objects and gestures … no 3D models. Il was edited and comped by Josh Sherrett @ Mile End Workshop who used some morph and comp tricks to fuse the take together.

The grading  gig consisted of giving the scene a very pictural and analog look while playing on the edge of the cartoon universe. I had to match the various background, match the color of the closely tinted objects and fill mask quite a few flying objects.

That’s when Resolve becomes really handy. I was able to give a node for nearly object and animate them independently. The non-linear nature of the node tree also enabled me to efficiently key some hard-to-get colours.

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Samsung – Creativity at work from Vallée Duhamel on Vimeo.

And here is the making of:

Making-of : Creativity at work from Vallée Duhamel on Vimeo.

TVC: McDonald’s Hockey restaurant

Posted by mateodimarano on Dec 22, 2014 in Color grading, Gig, Resolve, Tv commercial | 0 comments

Hockey season is going strong in Montreal ans McDonald’s just opened a new restaurent next to the Bell Center. They hired Cossette to create a tv commercial for the event. Jet Films produced the 15 sec TVC shot on F55 by director and DP Alexis Durand-Brault.

I was called for a day of color grading at Jet Films on their DaVinci Resolve station. This was a pretty straight forward gig. The biggest struggle was to animate mask over the menus to make the light one by one. Otherwise simple masks were used to isolates the team members from the background that had to be remove or hidden as much as possible.

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