Post-production uncovered: Dirty Looks on The Zone Of Interest (feature)

Dirty Looks provided full picture post for A24 and Film4 feature film The Zone Of Interest.

Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, and a loose adaptation of a novel of the same title by Martin Amis, The Zone Of Interest centres around Rudolf Höss (camp commandant of Auschwitz) and his family as they go about their everyday lives over the wall from the horrors of the concentration camp. It premiered in the US on 15 December and in the UK on 2 February, going onto be nominated for five Academy Awards and nine BAFTAs. 

The film is Dirty Looks’ second feature film collaboration with Glazer, after working on his 2013 film, Under The Skin. Colourist Gareth Bishop worked the creative grade to help tell this historic story through a modern lens.

The majority of the film was shot simultaneously through up to 10 cameras, using only available and practical lighting. Maintaining the naturalness or verity of the image was upheld as a guiding principle throughout the entire picture post production process.

Bishop said: “Jonathan and I created a set of rules to keep the colours as natural as possible in line with what Lukasz [Zal], the film’s cinematographer, had shot as opposed to creating a cinematic picture.”

He added: “No shapes or keyframes were used to lift the images at any point; we stuck to the rules we had set at the start of the grade and worked on a shot by shot basis. If we needed to remove camera bias we re-graded the full image to the natural or true look of the film which threw up some real challenges, especially during the scene where Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) walks her mother on a tour of the garden and the sunlight was constantly changing throughout the scene.”

The film also made use of thermal cameras, which prompted extensive research into repurposing industrial and military cameras for cinematic use. Footage transfer and grading capabilities of various non-standard cameras were tested and Dirty Looks worked closely with the VFX company, One Of Us, to create pin-sharp images that stand up next to the quality of the Sony Venice camera footage. The thermal sequences required extensive grading and blending of multiple VFX versions to create as sharp and detailed an image required for the director’s vision. 

Dirty Looks streamlined the VFX pulls and created a tailored workflow system for tracking and pulling VFX shots for edits and re-conforming VFX pulls. It also completed the conform, finishing and full theatrical, HDR & SDR delivery to A24 (including all archive deliverables) and also delivery to Film4.

Senior DI producer Sarah Morowa said, “We are immensely proud to have been part of this creative collaboration, working with Jonathan and the entire team to bring this important film to the big screen.”