Blue Paints Portrait Of Boy George On Channel 4

Channel 4 has aired a 60-minute documentary tracing the steps of 80s pop-icon, Boy George, throughout his August 2006 trial for cocaine possession.
The cameras follow Boy George’s five days' community service as he sweeps the streets of New York. blue was brought on board to stylise the programme with arresting visuals and narratively-inspired grading.
blue’s online editor, Alex Pickering, created the opening sequence based around ‘the two faces of Boy George’ by taking a headshot of the star, creating a mirror image, adding perspective and then ‘dirtying’ the ghost-like, receding secondary image. Alex developed a similarly gritty look of interference for all the titles. His main task, however, was adding dynamism to archived still images of other celebrities like George Michael.
blue’s online editor, Alex Pickering, said: “The programme is peppered with about 15 still images of celebrities. In order to make the scenes flow, these stills needed livening up with some movement. Rather than simply using a rostrum camera to add basic camera moves, I decided to cut around the figure so that I could draw them away from their backgrounds and pull focus, in effect creating a 3D image.”
Meanwhile, blue colourist, Graeme Hayes, used colour to create contrast between the documentary’s historical and contemporary footage in order to convey the difference in mood between Boy George’s upbeat prime and his recent ordeal.
blue’s colourist, Graeme Hayes, said: “I graded all the archive footage to mirror the halcyon atmosphere of Boy George’s heyday. However, all the recent New York footage has a cool, blue look to reflect the starkness of his current situation.“
Formed in 1995, blue is Soho's premier facility for creative post-production, offering specialist services to the broadcast television market. With a wide range of services in both picture and audio, blue provides a complete post production solution from storyboard through to final delivery. blue’s state-of-the-art facilities include linear and non-linear editing in both standard- and high-definitions, film and tape grading, sound, design and effects, and 20 AVID systems working at both offline and online resolutions.
(DS)