Picture and audio post production of the 4 x 60-minute series about the day-to-day family life of a rural African tribe.

Post The Farm Group  

Client Renegade Pictures

Brief Full post production of the 4 x 60-minute series about the day-to-day family life of a rural African tribe.

How it was done This new observational documentary series makes use of new fixed rig technology to capture the intricacies of tribe members’ lives.

The biggest challenge The Farm faced when asked by Renegade Pictures to work with them on the ambitious project was how to work with their native language, which is spoken by only 20,000 people in the world.

The Farm’s head of special projects Jack Edney said: “Filmed over four weeks in Ethiopia, and with all editing based at The Farm’s Shed facility, we needed to find a way to provide the production and editing team with English translations for all of the rushes captured to enable them to assemble the show without compromising on time or creativity.

“The answer to the problem was to create subtitle files to overlay on all rig and PSC rushes.”

The Farm’s software team added support for the creation and export of the subtitle files in an Avid-ready format to the post firm’s online viewing and logging platform Fred.

All rushes were imported into Fred and transcribed by interpreters on location and in post.

Subtitles were then exported on a scene-by-scene basis and overlayed onto the vast volumes of material in the Avid offlines.

This enabled the editors to access rushes swiftly and understand what they were working with.

Sonny Sheridan graded the series using the Nucoda Film Master, adding brightness regions to lift very dark scenes and creating a clarity which enhances the warm tones of the vibrant village life.

Sheridan used hue curves to adjust and correct the colour balance and sub keys to take down highlights.

Nick Fry mixed the audio in Pro Tools 11, having to choose from at least 40 different mics and using a mixture of EQ and audio restoration plug-ins to produce a final mix.

Fry also used sound taken from various wild track sources to produce a full soundtrack. Tam Osman completed the online in Avid Symphony.

Watch it Thursdays, 9pm, Channel 4

Topics