P!nk: All I Know So Far is out today on Prime Video
P!nk: All I Know So Far is a documentary that chronicles the artist Pink’s (aka Alecia Moore) 2019s beautiful trama tour. The audience gets an intimate look at what it takes to be a touring global icon while balancing family life. Producer Tom Pellegrini sought out Paul Lavoie and myself to finish this project. I was uniquely qualified having done similar work for Miley Cyrus, Missy Elliott, The Jonas Brothers, and Katy Perry previously. The first step was to get the enormous amount of footage to editor Cindy Mollo and her first assist Mary Chin.
Dailies
There was over 260 TB of footage that needed to be converted to DNX36 for Avid cutting. The footage consisted of multi-camera live shoots for multiple nights of tour performances. There was also behind-the-scenes footage, and archival clips spanning from Pink’s childhood to the present day. The live show was captured using Sony Venice cameras. All behind-the-scenes footage was shot using Blackmagic Pocket Cinema cameras. Dailies colorist Eric de Azevedo created CDLs to balance the footage underneath the show LUTs for the Venice and BMD cameras. The rec709 archival material stayed rec709 and was simply converted to DNX. It was also at this time that we normalized the frame rate for all sources to 23.98.
The Look
I first spoke to Michael Gracey on New Year’s eve 2020 about his vision for the look of the show. I remember this well because since he was in Australia it was already his New Year. He wanted a rock and roll look for the behind-the-scenes material. I presented him with 3 different options. He dug on a riff of 7219 that I created. The main difference from a standard print simulation was a decrease in magenta saturation. We then took that original look and refined it further by introducing a fairly heavy application of LiveGrain. We also developed a Tri-X black and white treatment for when Alicia breaks the fourth wall.
The Venice live show material was pretty straightforward. I used the built-in Baselight T-CAM transform with a couple of small tweaks. First I took the skin tones and hue shifted them away from magenta-red. The second small enhancement was with the blue magentas. I grabbed those vectors and swung them to be more true blue. This made a nice complement of skin tone to blue stage lighting. Other than those two minor corrections it was pretty much stock Venice. The idea there was to have the stage show very vérité. Just as if you were there.
Conversely, I wanted to do the opposite with the behind-the-scenes material. I wanted to show the juxtaposition between Pink the artist and Alicia the mother. To achieve this I removed all the “Pink” from the Blackmagic footage by keying and channel mixing out the magentas.
I wanted to avoid the greens being overpowering with the picture devoid of magenta, so I took the greens and shifted them towards the yellows. In my opinion, this brought back balance to the fairly strong look. This device allowed the story to focus on the two very different sides of Pink’s life.
Pink(literally) when she’s on stage. Alicia when she’s not.
Editorial Conform
As usual, my right-hand man on this project was the always buttoned up, Leo Ferrini. Having done editorial work on shows like this in the past, I have a great appreciation for the effort that goes into documentary editorial finishing. With all the various formats, sources, colorspaces, and effects there were many plates spinning for him. The conform was done natively in Baselight with some opticals being run through the Avid for an exact match.
Finishing
The Color grading work began shortly after the looks were set. At the end of my shift each day Leo would export the reel to Australia as an HDR10 ProresXQ QuickTime. Michael reviewed while we were sleeping and would send back notes for my morning. Michael is a great communicator and would send notes back a couple of different ways. We used project files with markers if the notes were straightforward. This was great because I could jump from mark to mark hitting the notes as I went. Very efficient! The other note tool we used was video. He would send me clips of what he was looking for. This was sort of like an offline CineSync. It was a great way to convey complicated ideas that a standard text note couldn’t.
Towards the end of the process, once a lot of heavy lifting and the Dolby trim was done, we started to use ClearView for interactive remote sessions. We sent hard drives with H.265s and ProresXQs for Pink’s notes and creative input. We then started mastering once all the creative choices had been locked.
Deliverables
The deliverables for Amazon fall under the standard deliverables that I recommend for every show.
UHD Graded P3D65 PQ 16bit tiff files with textless sections
Unmatted and ungraded working resolution and colorspace archival export
Dolby XML
ProresXQ HDR and SDR
Thanks for reading! As always a big thanks to the entire Warner Bros. Post Production Creative services team. This is one of those projects that benefited greatly from having sound and picture in a one-stop-shop. Now go check it out on Amazon Prime Video and let me know what you think.
