Post production house Dirty Looks collaborated with director Jonathan Glazer for a second time on his BAFTA and Oscar-nominated film, The Zone of Interest.
Having previously worked with Glazer on 2013’s Under the Skin, Dirty Looks delivered full picture post on the new film.
Colourist Gareth Bishop worked closely with Glazer in the creative grade to help tell the story of Rudolf Höss (camp commandant of Auschwitz) and his family as they go about their everyday lives over the wall from the horrors of the concentration camp.
The majority of the film was shot simultaneously through up to 10 cameras, using only available and practical lighting. Maintaining the naturalness or ‘verité’ of the image was upheld as a guiding principle throughout the entire picture post production process.
Bishop and Glazer created a set of rules to keep the colours as natural as possible in line with what Lukasz Zal, the film’s cinematographer, had shot as opposed to creating a cinematic picture.
“No shapes or keyframes were used to lift the images at any point; we stuck to the rules we had set at the start of the grade and worked on a shot by shot basis,” said Bishop. “If we needed to remove camera bias we re-graded the full image to the natural or true look of the film which threw up some real challenges, especially during the scene where Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) walks her mother on a tour of the garden and the sunlight was constantly changing throughout the scene.”
The film’s use of thermal cameras prompted extensive research into repurposing industrial and military cameras for cinematic use. Footage transfer and grading capabilities of various non-standard cameras were tested and Dirty Looks worked closely with VFX company, One Of Us to create pin-sharp images that stand up next to the quality of the Sony Venice camera footage. The thermal sequences required extensive grading and blending of multiple VFX versions to create as sharp and detailed an image required for the director’s vision.
Dirty Looks streamlined the VFX pulls and created a tailored workflow system for tracking and pulling VFX shots for edits and re-conforming VFX pulls. It also completed the conform, finishing and full theatrical HDR and SDR versions of the film.
Senior DI producer, Sarah Morowa said, “We are immensely proud to have been part of this creative collaboration, working with Jonathan and the entire team to bring this important film to the big screen.”
The Zone of Interest is released in UK cinemas on 2nd February
