LONDON — Deluxe’s Encore recently completed UHD picture post on the six-part television series The Night Manager, a BBC television adaptation of a le Carré novel.
The Night Manager brings love, loss and revenge together in a complex story of modern criminality. Hugh Laurie stars as Richard Roper, with Tom Hiddleston portraying Jonathan Pine and Olivia Colman playing Angela Burr.
Set across several international locations, the story structure takes viewers back and forth between Egypt, the mountains of Switzerland, and to the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. The brief for Encore’s colorist Jet Omoshebi was to create specific looks and an individual feel for each location. Cairo, with its dusty and vibrant streets, was a stark contrast to the cold, clean mountains of Swiss Alps.
The VFX pieces were seamlessly fitted to live action by Jet during the grade, which involved the addition of filters, smoke and flicker plug-ins, so that the creative decisions could be made during the grading. The whole piece was finally rendered with a fine layer of film grain.
The production also marks the first UHD delivery for Encore London (www.encorepost.co.uk). Utilizing Autodesk Flame suites, partnered with Encore’s ultra-fast SAN, enabled senior online editor Rob Cooper to share with Jet's Nucoda Color Grading suite. This allowed Cooper to creatively achieve all the online fixes which crop up, coupled with the ability to play full res 4K all the time. “The speed and UHD performance of the Flame was outstanding and allowed us to quickly try out solutions without long render times,” he notes.
Encore director of operations Johnny Whitehead adds, “The logistics of working on such a major high profile project in UHD were both exciting and challenging. The first decision was to establish the optimum workflow along with the best choice of edit systems to be used and for this we decided that Autodesk Flame would be ideal for both conform and online. The edit systems were all set up and running on the latest Quantum SAN which was shared with Jet’s Nucoda Filmmaster enabling seamless transitions between edit and grade.”
“The Night Manager is a rich, layered and exciting story, and was shot with great scale in four countries,” says Simon Cornwell of The Ink Factory, which produced the show. “We took the decision to shoot in UHD both to capture the full scope of the material we were working with, and to ensure that we had something to offer our networks and home entertainment partners that would stand the test of time. It was wonderful to be able to work with Encore, who were able to deliver an end-to-end 4K workflow. We knew as soon as they committed to supporting us that Jet and the whole team at Encore would bring something special to the raw material we had captured, and the final results are exciting, nuanced and spectacular.”