Colored by Tim Maffia

I got involved with The Joneses when they locked picture. The film had been shot in Atlanta and the dailies were done there. The film’s producers and DP Yaron Orbach were in Spokane preparing to shoot "The Ward". Because of scheduling, we had to do the 2K scanning and conform quickly so they could borrow Orbach to supervise the DI before production started. Somehow they also managed to squeeze a reshoot for The Joneses in during that prep time.

READ: Tim Maffia about The Ward

The DI was done at Modern Digital in Seattle from 3-perf Super 35mm framed for 2.39 but protected out to 16x9. The video was cropped to 2.39 and the anamorphic squeeze for projection was done digitally in the DI. There was a 16x9 deliverable that was created by turning off the matte and repo’ing from the full neg.

I used vignettes to darken the edges, and cheat the subject a bit brighter

- Tim Maffia -

Bill Lord and I did the 2K scans on our Sony Vialta datacine out to 10-bit Log DPX files. I used a proprietary LUT emulating a 2383 film print from Alpha Cine in the DI.

The DI was done on an Autodesk Lustre’ (ver. 2). The conform tool in that version was pretty weak, so the conform was done in Smoke by our editor, Kevin Adams. I received a DPX image sequence and had Lustre’ do a scene detect to notch each reel. I worked in Lustre’s Log architecture using the Log tools for the grade.
 

The look

This film was unusual for me at the time because I didn’t have a director or DP in the room supervising the entire session. When the scanning and conform were completed, Orbach flew over for the weekend and we quickly went through the film with director Derrick Borte, setting a reference look for almost every scene. He then flew back to Spokane and I went through the film by myself. Each morning I’d review the previous day’s work with Borte and get his notes. The next weekend Orbach came back for a final review.

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