CULVER CITY — Colorworks (www.sonypictures.com) provided post services for a new animated short from writer/director PES that was recently short-listed for Academy Award consideration. Fresh Guacamole was commissioned by Showtime and is the follow-up to PES’s earlier short, Western Spaghetti. Like its predecessor, the new film is a whimsical bit of stop-motion in which everyday objects are transformed into a delicious dish.
In the short, PES substitutes a hand grenade for an avocado and a billiard ball for its pit. He slices and dices a baseball and a pin cushion, and coaxes other ingredients from a golf ball, a holiday light bulb and chess pieces.
The facility performed color grading and DCP mastering for the short so that it could be screened in theaters as part of the qualifying process for Academy Award consideration.
“It was all shot in-camera,” says PES, who produced the film with partner Sarah Phelps. The project was shot in a Torrance, CA, studio using a Canon 5D camera. Production of the 1 minute 40 second film took four months.
Colorworks’ role was to prepare a version of the short suitable for theatrical display. That included putting it through a 4K color grading process, and exporting a master in digital cinema format.
“We needed to put it in a proper color space so that it would display properly in various projection systems,” explains Colorworks colorist John Persichetti.
For PES, it was the first time that one of his films had undergone theatrical mastering. “It was effortless and quick,” he recalls. “We had a tight time deadline to get the film into theaters for Academy consideration and Colorworks really came through.”
Fresh Guacamole is one of ten films short-listed for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Nominees will be announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on January 10th.