American Cinematographer - October 2016 - 21

it with the highest-quality imaging
systems," Förderer says. "That sounds
contradictory for a period film, but it was
an opportunity to create something new,
and to see how you could make something
look period without using all the clichés."
Integral to Meridian's period nature
was the project's LUT - or, in ACES
vernacular, a look-modification transform
(LMT) - which was developed in partnership with FotoKem "for the purpose of
providing a Kodachrome-print emulation
to the images," Clark explains. The LMT
concept evolved out of Clark's decision to
open the movie with genuine vintage
Kodachrome imagery from 1947 Hollywood, which he located in the archives of
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences. As FotoKem principal color scientist and close collaborator Joseph Slomka
opines, Clark's team had thus discovered a
look that achieved "a combination of
historical accuracy and artistic need."
"Curtis had the real Kodachrome
footage scanned at FotoKem at 4K, [and it
was] used as a reference to create the lookup table," Förderer elaborates. "The LUT
mimics the characteristics of Kodachrome,
but it is modified to use full dynamic range
to allow us to get really bright highlights
and deep blacks. So in that sense, it is a
hybrid of what Kodachrome really looked
like, but in an HDR space. We can use the
deepest blacks that HDR can give us and
still lend them a film-like look. And that
means that going into the digital intermediate we will have the creative control to
go really deep for certain shots and
moments."
Also participating in the development of the LMT was FotoKem colorist
John Daro, who explains that once the
LMT - built with SGO Mistika - was
finalized, it was converted to a series of
transforms that were available to on-set
production as well as to the dailies and
visual-effects processes. The final result was
left fully open for edits and changes during
the DI within the ACES universe. Daro
would go on to perform the final color
grade at FotoKem, also with Mistika. At
press time, the grade had not yet begun.
"We will be monitoring 4K, but my
final renders will be 6K to preserve all of
the original pixels for the Weapon," says

Top: Director/co-writer Curtis Clark, ASC works with Kilner on location in Malibu, Calif.
Bottom: Cinematographer Markus Förderer, BVK lines up a shot on a police-station set dressed
for the project's 1940s period.

Daro. "The master, which the numerous
deliverables will all be struck from, will be a
16-bit EXR sequence using ACES
primaries."
Slomka adds, "As for delivery, we
are doing both a 1,000-nit, 60 fps, 4K Sony
BVM-X300 grade as well as a Dolby Vision
Pulsar grade. I expect there to be other
deliverables as well, such as a 24-fps traditional DCP." A standard-dynamic-range
deliverable is also planned.
Working at such a high resolution
and frame rate meant that rendering visualeffects shots would take longer than usual.
And since Meridian is an ACES show and
Taylor was personally performing some of
the composites - which included combining multiple elements to produce ominous
skies and storm fronts - an initial task was
deciding which file format to employ for his
www.theasc.com

work in Adobe After Effects, his preferred
platform.
"ACES is not formally fully
supported by After Effects yet, so there are
a variety of approaches in this area," Taylor
explains. He recalls that Ash Beck - After
Effects expert and an informal advisor -
"suggested that I utilize 16-bit OpenEXR for
this show. The OpenEXR color space is
bigger than that available from either
camera we were using, so that protected us
by making sure there would be no compromise in quality. Ultimately, the composites
were executed in 32-bit floating-point EXR.
Color scientist Joseph Slomka and digitalintermediate producer Jason Pelham, both
of FotoKem, were also most helpful in
working out the details."
Meridian was meticulously designed
around storyboard images created by Clark,
October 2016

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - October 2016