Here is a first look at the latest project from Chris Williams and Netflix that I graded. An awesome project with an animation A-team. Let me know what y’all think.
Kimi - Virtually a Virtual Production
Hey everyone! Steven Soderbergh’s latest “Kimi” is out today on HBO Max. This was a fantastic project to have been a small part of. Here is a quick look at how the color was finished.
Getting the Band Back Together
Firstly, It was great to reunite with Steven and the team. Kimi marks the sixth picture helmed by Soderbergh that I have been credited on. There is a shorthand that has been developed over the years with his core post team consisting of Corey Bayes, Larry Blake, and Peter Mavromates. The speed of this kind of communication and the trust built over the many projects makes for an extremely efficient finish. When the maestro is at the helm, it is not movie-making by committee. Truly just a singular voice of one of our generation’s greatest auteurs.
Another exciting aspect of this project was that it utilized virtual production technology. Bruce Jones supervised the visual effects on the show. I have worked with Bruce going all the way back to Michael Jackson’s “This is it” concert. The Stereoscopic LED portion of that show was directed by Bruce and I did the 3D finishing. Again, there was the benefit from a comfort factor built over many years. The first task was to ensure the plates matched the 3D asset that would be playing back from Unreal. The second task was to tweak the white balance of the plates to ensure they answered back the way Steven was expecting once captured by the RED camera off the LED screen. The color pipe for the screen ended up being REDWG Linear to REDWG log3G10. It was all a bit of voodoo to me after it went into the engine. Unreal is an area I would like to devote more time to in the future. A few years ago I made a VR app in Unity. In hindsight, I should have been tinkering with Unreal. Thankfully the masters at Weta Digital ensured that the footage was tone mapped correctly to the LED display provided by Monolith.
Kimi LED wall background
The Look
Sometimes it’s not the buttons you press but the ones you don’t. When you have a cinematographer as masterful as Peter Andrews the only thing to do is mind the picture. A younger me had to learn this lesson the hard way. Often I felt my worth as a colorist was defined by how much I did to the picture. Over the years I have come to realize that to be truly in service of great cinematography, you just need taste, a tempered hand, and a language for giving cinematographers consistent results. This is one of the reasons why I default to film terminology so often. Most folks know what a stop or one point looks like.
I used the RED ippv2 color science with Filmlight’s basegrade for a majority of the film. There are a few shapes here and there but that’s pretty much it. Soderbergh lights and shoots what he wants.
Mastering
Most of the heavy lifting was done in HDR P3 D65 PQ 1000nits. Second up was the theatrical version which was a tone-mapped derivative off of the PQ master. Once we were at a good place on the projector, we screened in the Steven J. Ross Theater marrying the sound for the complete experience. After those two versions were locked I used the theatrical p3 D65 2.6 gamma output as a reference for the Dolby SDR trim pass. I set up the Baselight in dual cursor output with a p3 to 709 LUT in-line on the reference output. Then I trimmed to get as close as the Dolby tools would allow on the other cursor. There was one last screening to approve the 709 derived off of the XML.
Watch it on HBO Max
Kimi is a fantastic story that taps into the zeitgeist of the world we are living in now. I’m very excited for it to finally be released. Go check it out on HBO Max and let me know what you think.
Happy Grading,
JD