Creative Review: New worlds and deep fakes

His Dark Materials travels back and forth through new and familiar worlds, each with a distinct look. Picture Shop worked with producer Stephen Haren in pre-production and adopted an ACES workflow to create a unified, tracked colour pipeline for all the on-set looks, and for dailies, VFX and the final grade.

Colourist Sam Chynoweth graded the series using FilmLight’s Baselight. Each cinematographer had the opportunity to create their own twist on the show LUT. For Gary Shaw, Chynoweth softened the contrast to cover the wide scenario of set-ups. He also digitally recreated Petra Korner’s glass filtration ideas to tint the ‘suburbs of the dead’ and enhanced the warm lantern light in David Johnson’s rendition of the ‘land of the dead’.

To transition the looks crafted on set through to post-production, the DIT passed camera details to the Picture Shop front-end services team, who processed the dailies and uploaded the LUT and colour decision list (CDL) information. This helped the VFX team, who received a colour package containing the matching LUT and CDL.

Likewise, Picture Shop conformed episodes in Baselight for final grade, accessing the full colour history and creating timelines that matched back to what the creative team had seen on set. Chynoweth then leveraged Baselight’s tools and colour management to sculpt the final images and deliver SDR and HDR masters for HBO and the BBC.

During the audio post-production, Formosa Group re-recording mixers Gareth Bull and Will Stanton used multiple theatres simultaneously to ensure the main mixes could continue while other complex deliverables and versioning were completed.

While the first two seasons of His Dark Materials were primarily mixed in 7.1, the final season was natively mixed and delivered in Dolby Atmos.

Bluebolt created vast Neoclassical sculptures, a transformed London cityscape, swarms of bees and an eye operati on depicted in gruesome detail for this sci-fi thriller. Based on the William Gibson book of the same name, The Peripheral follows a young woman as she takes a job controlling a character in a VR game – or so she thinks.

She soon discovers that the futuristic, deserted London of the game is in fact the real world of the future and the character she’s controlling is a robot or ‘Peripheral’.

The BlueBolt team was led by VFX supervisor Kyle Goodsell and VFX producers Sam Dubery and Panos Theodoropoulos. BlueBolt was the primary VFX vendor for the futuristic London environments and created fl y-over scenes depicting a dilapidated capital, with some striking additions to the skyline, such as statues of Greek gods.

The BlueBolt team also provided tech viz that enabled the directors to plan the shooti ng of the aerial plates, which was done during early-morning runs from a helicopter.

Andy’s Global Adventures is the sixth series of long-running CBeebies superbrand Andy’s Adventures. Doghouse worked across the offline edit, through to finishing post and VFX, with creative director Fred Tay at the helm.

Andy and co-presenter Jen travel the world solving nature’s mysteries and getti ng close to the animals with which we share our planet. This series brings new tech in the form of an eco-friendly truck, ‘The Explorer’, and a new CG character, ‘Scout’. The Doghouse VFX team designed and created Scout and The Explorer, with the interior shots filmed on set at the Bottleyard Studios in Bristol.

All exteriors were created in Maya, rendered using Arnold and Redshift. Doghouse completed more than 100 VFX shots per episode. The introduction of The Explorer and Scout required intricate sound design by dubbing mixer Benjamin J Jones. From turning and blinking to the roboticised voice of Scout, each aspect of the character needed to be covered in the tracklay and final mix, adding a new layer of complexity to the series.

KSI: In Real Life follows the YouTuber in his first feature-length documentary.

Molinare provided full post-production, with Lee Clappison completing the grade. Clappison wanted to clearly differentiate the YouTube archive and enhance the interviews to give them a filmic quality to highlight KSI’s journey and progression.

He incorporated certain film stocks into his grading pipeline, as well as specific tones and palettes, and textured with some grain. In the online, senior editor Ben North used a number of tools to help balance out the various pieces of archive footage.

He stabilised shots using Machine Learning Timewarp and Flame 2023’s 3D Tracker, enabling him to make small adjustments to help the YouTube content flow better within the wider film. Director Wes Pollitt wanted a bright, lively, dynamic audio mix with extreme highs and lows to help tell the emotional story of KSI’s journey.

Dialogue editor Jamie Hartland, SFX editor Patrick Fripp and sound supervisor Greg Gettens worked together to create a rich soundscape.

Produced by Tiger Aspect, this series is the world’s first long-form narrative show that uses deep-fake technology, employing AI to turn the UK’s best new impressionists into celebrities – all appearing to be embroiled in petty neighbour disputes.

Fifty Fifty worked with StudioNeural AI to design a workflow, with layers of picture refinement using Avid, Flame and Baselight. Senior colourist Joe Stabb set the look of the show with the Tiger Aspect creative team in Baselight, working on the native material that was assembled in Avid Media Composer.

He says: “There are certain nuances with deep-fake technology, such as awkward face positioning, misplaced shadows and unnatural colouring, so attention to exposure and detail was given to the actors’ faces to provide the AI soft ware algorithm optimum material to achieve a flawless character render.

“The graded 4K rushes were supplied to StudioNeural for an AI render, creating the synthetic deep-fake media that was later supplied back to Baselight for the second grade pass. This stage concentrated on the AI merge, to refi ne the lighting, skin tone and so on to ensure a realistic and seamless manipulation.”

Following the AI pass, the images were returned to Avid, with senior online operator Beth Sayer and the Fifty Fifty online team running a post-grade, AI pre-grade.

Sayer explains: “This involved stitching the sequences together with the newly created ‘fake’ faces. During the online, there was further scrutiny of the pictures to pick up on any small glitches in the video. Some shots were managed and fixed in Avid, with more complex shots being passed through to Flame.”

Flame artist Ell Riella refined the face masks to ensure seamless integration with the original footage.