Year: 2020 – on going project Color Grading – several episodes
The “MANIFEST” series is a collection of short documentary films featuring prominent Slovak artists, produced by Slovak Television over the course of several years. Our task is to ensure that the visual representation is consistent and coherent throughout different episodes and locations, despite the varying types of cameras used to capture the documentary material.
The JOJ television’s detective series in Slovakia features a unique protagonist – a talking dog. To make the dog’s speech seem as realistic as possible, trained dogs with similar appearances were used during filming. The dog received instructions from its trainer off-camera, and when it was necessary for the dog to talk, its muzzle had to be animated. We used match-moving and MOCAP techniques to accomplish this. To create the animation, an actor spoke the dog’s lines, and the mouth movements were analyzed as a basis for animating the virtual model of the dog. We stabilized the image of the dog’s snout and placed the virtual puppet on it. The rendered animation of the muzzle was then superimposed on the real dog in each shot of the talking dog throughout the series. This process was repeated for every instance of the talking dog in the series. We collaborated with Studio 727 during this project.
This Slovak JOJ TV series is based on themes suggested by the audience. In order to meet the demands of a fast-paced television environment, we had to color grade one hour of footage in just four hours. Our main objective was to unify and correct the color in the images, ensuring that the multiple cameras used during filming were harmonized as much as possible. The end result needed to look like a cohesive cinematic work.
The Slovak JOJ television series offers guidance on resolving disputes with the court or the police through mutual agreement. Despite the fast-paced nature of TV production, we were able to quickly prepare the color grading for the latest episode. Our approach involved unifying the color scheme of the footage and adding simple color grading to enhance the visual style. We aimed to ensure that the multiple cameras used to shoot the episode were harmonized to create a cohesive and seamless final product.
