Arresting Colour From Framestore CFC For Hot Fuzz

Hot Fuzz is widely tipped to be the next Brit flick to find runaway success in the US. Written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, directed by Wright and starring Pegg and regular associate Nick Frost, the action comedy is on release in the UK and in the US. Produced by Working Title Films in Association with Big Talk Productions, and with cinematography by Jess Hall, the film was given some of its VFX and an elaborate digital intermediate at Framestore CFC.
Working with Director of Photography Jess Hall, Framestore CFC Senior Colourist Asa Shoul graded the main body of the film in just three weeks. In parallel with this, in a second suite, Colourist Brian Krijgsman worked on opticals.
But it doesn't stop there. Brian Krijgsman worked with Editor Chris Dickens in the second of Framestore CFC's three DI suites, adding around 60 muzzle flashes, 70 wipe effects, and 20 split screens. For the muzzle flashes Krijgsman built a database with single frames of selected shots where the flash was relevant for the gun in question. He would then composite this over the new shot, which involved panning and scanning the background plate, hand drawing a shape and mixing it through.
Krijgsman also removed boom reflections from sunglasses and windows and added specific camera shake to around 60 shots, particularly in fight scenes and the car chase. To make things even more complicated, there are scenes where the camera was hand cranked, and the fluctuating light level had to be dynamically graded so that it didn't pop on a cut. On some flashback scenes Krijgsman added a flicker effect where every few frames we would change the exposure. Scratches and dust from the 167,000 frames were removed by a team of five in just over a week, and the Digital Lab Compositing team added captions using Shake, and steadied the hands of the church clock using Baselight. All seven reels of the movie were filmed out in three days, and an HD master was played out directly from the Baselight to HDD5 for the press previews and cast and crew screening.
(DS)