Home delivered audio post, online edit and colour grading for second series of crime drama
Home has revealed the work that went into providing post-production on BBC1 crime drama This City Is Ours’ second series.
The Manchester facility provided audio post, colour grading and the online edit of the show, which is produced by Left Bank Pictures. In-house post producer Laura Praciak oversaw all eight episodes.
Matt Ison led on workflow design, developing the pipeline to support VFX, grade, online and delivery, as well as creating LUTs with senior colourist Max Goldini. The delivery specification covered UHD Dolby Vision, HLG and the BBC’s HD Rec.709 requirements. To simplify renders, versioning and storage, Ison built the pipeline around a single HDR master in Rec.2020 PQ, with HLG generated from technical transforms in Flame and SDR derived from Dolby Vision trims.
Goldini had worked on series one, and had already established a strong visual identity for the show then. A key creative consideration was the relationship between Liverpool and Spain. Spain offered a rich, vibrant and dynamic environment, and the grade needed to feel beautiful and inviting, while retaining a sense of danger and unpredictability.
As the characters’ home, Liverpool remained central to the identity of This City Is Ours, with a personality that extends its role as a location. Goldini aimed to balance the beauty of the city and its rougher edges, without losing the tension that runs through the drama.
He prepared extensive looks for both locations that would sit comfortably alongside each other, while also forming a foundation for on-set LUTs. Separating the technical and creative LUTs maintained consistency, with scope for further refinement in the grade. LUTs were designed with director Saul Dibb and DoP Richard Mott for the opening block.
The Home team adopted an HDR-first workflow, using Dolby’s tools to create SDR and HLG versions alongside the required Dolby XML metadata.
During the grade, a Rec.2020 PQ H.265 work in progress went to Frame.io every evening for review on HDR iPad Pros. Audio also reviewed from the HDR output of the grade, so clients saw the true picture at every stage.
As the dialogue is quite sparse in This City is Ours, this gave the Home team scope for setting scenes and moods with sound design. Mark Ryder and Mark Briscoe created an incredibly detailed mix, while still allowing space for the score. With the use of carefully chosen atmospheres and spot sound effects, the team were able to audibly place the audience in the warm sunny planes of Spain and the gritty urbanism of Liverpool.
It also allowed the sound to contribute to the tension, without fighting with the dialogue, such as the car wash scene in episode one. Sound effects were by Nick Cox, dials by Sam Biggs and Dan Pugh. The team worked closely with Rael Jones for the interactivity of score, fx, dialogue and mix.
The online edit, delivered by Alex Howells, was completed in HDR in Autodesk Flame, using a Dolby Vision workflow to generate multiple deliveries in various colour spaces. Working alongside DNEG on VFX, Howells cleaned up locations, beauty work, splitscreens, camera crew paint outs, phone screen replacements and other minor FX work.
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