The Station post ‘The Man Who Destroyed Everything’

Leading post-production facility, The Station, have recently finished extensive post work on ‘The Man Who Destroyed Everything’, the first programme aired on new digital arts channel BBC4, with a simulcast on BBC2, on Saturday March 2 2002.
The programme, which was post-produced entirely on Avid systems, focuses on Michael Landy, the artist who captured the public's attention last year when he systematically destroyed all his worldly possessions in the disused C&A building on London’s Oxford Street.
Director Nadia Haggar filmed Landy for several months and arrived at The Station with over 100 hours of footage on DigiBeta, BetaSP, DVCAM and MiniDV.
The Station’s Editor Paddy Lynas was impressed with how the Avid Unity™ network made the project easier to manage: “We were getting a lot of archive material and, rather than stopping to digitise, we were able to digitise remotely into the project which was a big help. Time restrictions meant that the picture conform was started during the last day of the offline, so we put the Avid Unity system to good use by producing ‘mixdowns’ of the pictures and sound instead of playing out to tape, and sending them to the online via the Avid Unity system. This avoided hanging around for an hour waiting for the digicut to be made.”
The programme has a gritty feel with lots of observational footage shot in natural light, something Haggar didn’t want to disguise. The Station’s Online Editor Danny Davis, who spent a lot of time on grading during the online, said the Symphony system's superb colour and secondary colour correction capabilities were indispensable when ‘fixing’ poorly colour-balanced material from a variety of formats, while instilling a gritty style throughout the film.
The titles were designed by The Station’s Sharon Spencer and feature hand drawn animation to achieve an organic typographic style. The sequence was then composited in the Avid|DS system with shots from the programme treated with 5D Film Effect.
(GB)