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 would 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 bringing balance to the overall piece and then pushing cooler blues and teals into the midtones and shadows. To give the image more of a flashback or retrospective look, I created a bleach bypass layer for the midtones and highlights. On my second pass of the reel, I increased the saturation and lowered the luminance in the reds to give the image a bit more density and a subtractive film look."

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