How New Hat Used the Baselight to Grade Richard Bowen's Little Sister

When Santa Monica boutique post house New Hat decided to build a DI theater last year, its aim was to provide independent filmmakers with access to the type of high-quality post services that were once available only to major studio releases. With its work on Little Sister, the new film from writer/director/cinematographer Richard Bowen, New Hat hopes the results speak for themselves – Variety called it “a strikingly lensed fairy tale as magical as its picturesque design.”
A retelling of the Cinderella story set in ancient China, Little Sister is full of ravishing landscapes and fairy-tale costumes. Shot by Bowen with the RED One camera, the film was one of the first projects to undergo final post in New Hat’s new DI theater, which provides a cinema-style grading environment and supports a non-linear, file-based workflow. The room is anchored by a Baselight FOUR grading system and also features a 14-foot Stewart screen, a Barco 2K projector, and Blue Sky 5.1 audio.

Colorist Bob Festa performed the final grade in Baselight, working directly with the camera-original 4K R3D files in P3 color space. The R3D files were loaded onto the facility’s central SAN. Because Baselight has the ability to read those files natively, no transcoding was necessary and Festa was ready to proceed immediately with the grade.

New Hat decided to grade Little Sister in digital cinema P3 color space even though Bowen had no immediate plans to produce a film master. The director initially intended to screen the film at festivals while seeking distribution, and all he required for that was an HDCAM master, as well as Blu-ray and DVD copies. Still, New Hat reasoned that finishing the film at high resolution would save the director in the long run.

“A lot of post houses would have simply done an HD master pass, but we treated it as if it was going out to film, because one day, it will,” explains New Hat technical director Michael Lafuente. “We’ve done all the work for the film-out, so Richard won’t have to come back to us to do another correction when he sells the film. It’s already taken care of.”

Festa and Bowen had worked together previously on television commercials that Bowen shot as a DP, but this was their first collaboration on a feature film. “It was an incredible opportunity for me, as a colorist, to stretch out,” Festa recalls. “The film was shot in China and has a number of classic looks. There are day exteriors, evening exteriors, fantasy sequences, [and] an eclipse sequence, so clearly there were a lot of different color interpretations that went into the project.”

Working natively with the R3D files gave Festa a lot of room to work with the imagery. “I could grab the original camera information at the header of each R3D file,” Festa says. “So, not only could I use the full dynamic range of the 4K file, I could re-profile the camera after the fact. I could change the exposure, contrast, color balance, ISO settings, and so on. Richard Bowen is a very talented DP, so that was rarely necessary. But if we needed to recapture a sky that was blown out, or if the base black was a little too dark, Baselight allowed us the luxury to alter the camera setting and make the shot more attractive. It’s a tremendous benefit and every DP’s dream.”

The Baselight FOUR in the DI theater is one of three Baselight systems at New Hat. The other two are installed in grading suites designed primarily for television commercials. All three, however, are attached to the same network and, using FilmLight’s Truelight software, New Hat has the ability to calibrate the monitors in the three rooms with one another. That gives the facility flexibility in managing its workflow. For Little Sister, primary grading was conducted in the DI theater, but ancillary work was performed in one of the television suites.

“We used one of our television studios to produce Blu-ray and DVD deliverables,” Festa notes. “Our workflow allows us to reserve our theater for the heavy lifting film mastering, and do other work offline. That saves overhead.”

Festa says working in the DI theater helps him broaden his relationship with filmmakers who, like Bowen, are making the transition from commercials to features. “We had a great working relationship previously, so it was very easy for us to collaborate on this,” Festa says. “It’s wonderful to work with an experienced cinematographer like Richard because the images are already beautiful. At that point, it’s easy for me to contribute and improvise, and do what we both wanted to do, which was to craft something really special.”