'This Little Life' posted at Pepper

'This Little Life', a moving drama detailing a families’ ordeal of a premature birth supported by The Film Council and screened last night on BBC2, was graded and edited at Pepper.
To reflect the groundbreaking storyline, the creative brief was to push the boundaries with the colour saturation by draining the colour and increasing the inkiness of the blacks, giving the look an overall green tone. As the mother in the story becomes more absorbed by hospital life the grade becomes darker. In contrast, as the timbre of the storyline lightens towards the conclusion, this is also mirrored in the grade which was completed by Ergin Ahmet using C Reality.
During the fantasy strand that runs through the narrative, the opposite approach was taken by enriching the green and cyan hues.
Shot on Kodak Super 16, one of the biggest creative challenges was to ensure the seamless transition between the shots of animatronic and real babies. In the shots of model babies they frequently appear next to human skin so the grading had to be handled with great care.
Ergin Ahmet said: “The grade had to be responsive to the changes of mood in the piece and importantly reflect the great sensitivity of the subject matter”
Director Sarah Gavron concluded: “ Pepper were recommended by the BBC and we’d heard only good things about them. From the beginning I felt Ergin and the rest of the Pepper team were completely in tune with the look and feel I was after, so enabling us to be very bold with the decision making process.”
(GB)