M2 Uses Nucoda Film Master For 'Death Of A President'

Digital Vision, a leading developer of advanced digital media applications specialising in film and video solutions, has announced that top London post production facility M2 used the Nucoda Film Master system to grade the provocative Borough Films/Channel 4 feature-length doc-u-drama, 'Death of a President'.
'Death of a President', which had its worldwide premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September, where it won the International Critics’ Prize, premières in the UK digitally on More4 on October 9, terrestrially on Channel 4 on October 16, and is then released theatrically across North America on October 27. It is a fictionalised documentary, set one year in the future, which imagines the assassination of US President George W Bush and the American public’s subsequent response.
“It’s unusual in that it’s a film in the style of a documentary containing both fictional as well as many documentary elements,” explained the film’s Head of Production, Donall McCusker. “To make it look like a realistic documentary we used a mixture of acquired and archive footage – principally NTSC material on Beta and VHS – and while it was shot mainly on HDCAM, we also used 16mm, a bit of Digi, miniDV and cameraphones.
“Multiple acquisition formats and multiple archive sources gave particular challenges to both the online and the grade.
"We had to make the HD material match SD material, which was the bulk of what we were doing, and the SD material match HD material, which is significantly harder."
Written and directed by Gabriel Range, 'Death of a President' was posted over a six-month period at M2 in London. Offlined in Avid and conformed in Nitris, it was then passed onto Nucoda Film Master for grading. The look had to be just right, striking a balance between authoritative documentary on the one hand and filmic for theatrical release on the other. Meanwhile, numerous visual effects had to be carefully graded into the finished whole.
'Death of a President' was the first job that M2 put through the Film Master and Baker is happy with the way the system performed.
Digital Vision AB was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with two wholly owned subsidiaries, Digital Vision (US) in Los Angeles, California, and Digital Vision UK in London, England.
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