BOSTON — Rob Bessette, senior colorist at Finish Post (https://finishboston.com), recently used Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve to perform the color grade for Titleist’s Always Bring Your Best commercial. The :60 spot is part of the Titleist New Pro V1 golf ball campaign and touts the advancements in its latest golf ball, which has a new aero design and softer cover that results in longer distances and increased control.
Rather than use CG to show off the ball’s flight characteristics, the spot instead relied on drones to capture Pro V1 balls traveling through the air when hit by pro golfers. Bessette was tasked with making the drone footage of the ball’s flight match the commercial’s A-camera footage - shot on Sony’s Venice - as well as overcome the drone cameras’ higher compression and the zoom needed for proper framing. Since the footage was shot on different golf courses, Bessette also had to create uniformity throughout by matching the colors of the green and sand traps, while still allowing for variants from the different courses to shine through.
Grading: before and after
“Titleist’s current advertising campaign incorporates a lot of flares, and we wanted to stay true to that for this commercial,” he recalls. “Custom masks were used to balance out flares that were obscuring too much of the golfer’s face. When a shot felt as though it was lacking some of that special flare treatment, we used the Resolve flare OFX to help achieve continuity throughout the piece. It involved a lot of creative experimentation combined with some technical execution to make it appear as seamless as possible.”
Bessette also performed selective blurring to mimic the lensing on the Venice footage.