Formula 1 Lookback

Sky Post Production Colourist Mark Mulcaster worked with Tom Oliver from Sky Creative to grade this beautiful 30 second promo for Sky Sports F1. Here's what Mark had to say about it:

"The promo was a look back on last season’s F1 so Tom wanted to give it a cooler look that could be both reflective and dramatic. Like many of Tom’s projects, he wanted it look premium and feel stylised as well.

The  spot had several clips from different sources such as in-car footage, race footage and clips from various packages, so there was some initial work to balance the shots first before applying a look.

Creating the look involved me first balancing then pushing cooler blues and teals into the midtones and shadows; to give the image more of a flashback/ retrospective look. I created a bleach bypass layer for the midtones and highlights. On my second pass of the reel, I increased saturation in the reds and lowered the luminance of the reds to give the image a bit more density and a subtractive film look.

A challenge we encountered is that some of the source material had a few clips with some treatment from a VT package, and so I had to try and deconstruct the treatment which involved some glow transitions. My own look initially wasn’t working on those transitions so I had to add some dynamic grade changes to smooth out those transitions, but you would never be able to completely counter act them so it’s a matter of finding a point where they aren’t as distracting any more. I love working on Creative Promos which allow us to push a bit of style into the reel!"