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The 2018 action-adventure Tomb Raider film, with a new Lara Croft played by Alicia Vikander, was shot across two continents. It's no surprise then that the flick demanded an incredibly large team working tirelessly behind the scenes with the film's dailies team residing in both Cape Town and London - the two locations providing a contrast for the dynamic shifts in Lara Croft's story.
Cape Town post-production facility, The Refinery, took care of the dailies for the South African leg of the production, working closely with onset DIT, Joshua Callis-Smith to realise DOP, George Richmond's colour vision for the film. The dailies team would then extend across to London with Company 3, who were also responsible for delivering final grade.
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We approached the colour pipeline for Tomb Raider in a similar way to our previous projects, explains Callis-Smith. We began by shooting tests, these were then taken to Company 3 in London where colourist Greg Fisher worked with George to establish a look for the film that would transition into the dailies and viewed throughout post.
George was keen to achieve two juxtaposing colour pallets, explains Allan Taylor of The Refinery, dailies colourist on Tomb Raider. He was looking for a warm, rich, jungle-like look for the exteriors, then a cooler, darker feel for the interior cave sets. The team intentionally shot in the South African summer to take advantage of the intense blue skies and the deep contrast the summer light would offer.
Craig Parker, workflow manager at The Refinery adds: George wanted absolute confidence in his control over the colour pipeline and didn't want to leave anything to chance. When we took him through options, he became noticeably relaxed when we suggested a DaVinci Resolve workflow. From then, we really got stuck into the detail.
Once principle photography got underway, Allan Taylor worked closely with Callis-Smith. He was the critical communication bridge responsible for ensuring that George's vision translated all the way through the colour pipeline, Taylor recalls.
Callis-Smith would set the initial look using Pomfort Live Grade Pro, creating a CDL for the scene being shot. This was then passed through the DaVinci Resolve system used on set to be applied to the dailies colour. I would grade each roll on a shot by shot basis, matching any inconsistencies in lenses or exterior light that occurred to make sure that all the dailies matched and carried across the exact look George intended, he explains.
Using a Flanders Scientific BoxIO and Pomfort Live Grade for live colour, Callis-Smith produced his dailies colour in DaVinci Resolve. Both were fed into a video matrix using an UltraStudio 4K allowing him to grade on the same OLED monitor he used to set the live colour. It also meant that I could pop into Resolve if I quickly wanted to see how a window or secondary grade could be used to manipulate the image prior to turning over, he recalls.
This kind of colour work can't be achieved through a live grade system alone and requires a dailies colourist to make these changes. Over the years myself and George have worked this way on set with me taking the role of both dailies colourist and DIT, adds Callis-Smith.
The efficiency within this process has become faster and more intuitive. George can work quickly, making colour decisions instantly rather than visiting a facility on wrap or needing to fire stills back and forth to an offsite colourist throughout the evening.
After wrap, Callis-Smith would provide The Refinery with each day's DaVinci Resolve project along with any rushes; Taylor would then log and sync the pictures and audio to populate his colour timelines. A rigorous check was then done to confirm that all of the metadata required by Company 3 was present, Taylor explains.
The Refinery used Resolve's support of custom metadata to help with its processing of the media, while retaining all the metadata necessary for the editorial exports. This was an immensely helpful tool within Resolve, comments Taylor. By using a custom metadata view, we could focus on the main tags required by Company 3 while providing editorial with all the information they needed.
When we were happy that everything was logged correctly we ran off the various soft deliverables, including editorial MXF files and viewing dailies. Where anomalies were found, I would rebuild timelines based on new bin structures to accommodate new footage. In these instances we would use the ColorTrace feature in Resolve which allowed us to easily replicate the colour work done on set by Josh, often utilising multiple nodes beyond that of the primary, he says.
Working on Tomb Raider within a continent-spanning dailies team has seen The Refinery pick up some processes that they will take into future projects. Attention to detail was integral to working on a dailies setup such as this. We now set up custom metadata views as part of our standard operating procedure, even when those jobs aren't going to utilise media sharing platforms. It definitely helps our operators to focus on many details at a glance, and enables us to move more quickly through the initial stages of any workflow, Taylor concludes.
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