Untethered

Melanie Barratt, a gold-medal winning Paralympian, swims tethered to an elastic bungee in a small pool on her own. But she’s desperate to try open-water swimming. Being blind, the only way to do this is to ask for help, but asking for help is a complex and often controversial issue for disabled people. What happens next surpasses all expectations as she not only finds community, but also a newly discovered pride in her identity as a disabled woman. With the support of her ‘Ironfish’ friends, she not only learns to swim in open water, but enters the record books by becoming the first blind woman to swim the English Channel. 

Documentary Maker, Danielle Sellwood was keen to share Melanie’s story of personal exploration and record-breaking adventure but lacked resources. In her own words: “Funding for anyone is a nightmare. Funding for a relative newcomer, middle-aged woman is next to impossible. But then I had a chance meeting with Anna Kessel MBE, who pointed me in the direction of the Sky Sports New Focus Fund and everything shifted. I could never have imagined that my vision for this film would be so enthusiastically embraced by the team at Sky. The process, the support, and of course the funding, as part of their New Focus Fund, has enabled me to tell this story how I want and need to tell this story. That means with authenticity, with passion, with integrity and with ACCESS at its heart.” Sky Post Production stepped in to support the project offering our Baselight Grading system to create a look which would not only appeal to all viewers but, in tandem with audio description and sign language, would also offer the greatest possible access to a visually impaired audience. We asked Colourist, Mark Mulcaster, to describe the process of bringing about Danielle’s vision to our screens.

‘When I was first approached by Producer, Nick German, it was initially for some advice and the simple question: “How would you approach a grade for the visually impaired?” It was a fascinating idea and one which, as a Colourist, made me reflect on our role in telling stories to the broadest audience and how colour perception plays its part in that. A common note when grading is to make the look “cinematic,” and I’d say that with some productions that equates to being darker and more “sat down”. Colours tend toward being more muted which can be an intense watch for those with more standard vision let alone for someone who is visually impaired. During the start-up chat the Director, Danielle Sellwood, mentioned that creating strong contrast throughout the piece would massively help those viewers to make out shape and detail and that the colours should be vibrant to help identify objects and people. It was interesting to be told not to worry about certain things; for example, if the skies were blown out and white that would actually make it easier for the visually impaired viewer to read the foreground, which goes against all my instincts as a Colourist to bring the highlights down and use a key to recover some of the detail. In this instance that nice little bit of detail in the clouds wasn’t really going to help us to achieve our overall goal.

The challenge became to “grade where you think the image needs to be, and then push it some more”. This meant that at key points the things that I would typically try and do to compress the dynamic range would actually work against the accessibility brief. I was constantly trying to find a balance between allowing the grade to work for the visually impaired, whilst not looking off-putting for everyone else. I felt that we should be making the effort to ensure that the story was also accessible to as many people as possible and not just a niche audience to ensure that Melanie’s story reached the widest audience possible.

The film has a clear story structure; moments of the cross-channel swim are intercut with Melanie’s back story, and we learn about her personal struggles and her Olympic success. It’s a fascinating story, beautifully told. As the swim progresses, the time-of-day changes and so we leant into that. Editor Menna Pritchard and Danielle wanted to keep the swim faithful and the grade realistic, so I took my cues from the offline reference as to where I needed to set the grade. In particular, I was keeping an eye out for any fluorescent colours, very common in aquatic environments, as it can be a struggle to maintain richness in Rec709, and I wanted these colours to remain faithfully represented. The sea itself was challenging to grade because, depending upon the angle of the camera, you’d get an almost mirrored appearance so at times I had to add shapes and track them with additional contrast to pick Melanie out from the watery background.

The question, halfway through the grade was, had I pushed it enough? Or too far?

With Danielle busy on other projects, Menna and I worked together via our new Colourfront system which allowed me to stream the output of my monitor via a clever bit of kit in a secure, high-quality stream to Menna’s studio. She was able to view the film live with me, and we could then make adjustments in real time. This significantly sped-up the sign-off time and completely removed all the hassle of exporting clips and waiting for feedback. This was first time we’d used the new streaming service, and we were all very impressed with the ease of use, the quality of the pictures and the real-time responsiveness. I was especially impressed with how straightforward it was to set up the stream. It’s no different to any other video call – you simply create the session and send the invite. The nice thing was that I could use the Colourfront streaming application on my iPhone as a confidence check, so I could see in essence what was being fed to my client. Even small tweaks and adjustments were able to be read across the session so that was very reassuring.

Menna’s feedback made me rethink some scenes, in particular the opening scene which takes place in the dead of night. The only light on the dock at the start of the challenge was street lighting so my natural inclination was to lift everything up and sacrifice noise in order to be able to see everyone involved. Menna, however, encouraged me to rethink that and to make the blacks black and to give it a sharp contrast which actually worked better; it became more abstract and created a stronger opening.

I had a full five days on the film and the final grade really came about on the Thursday and Friday as a lot of it was really stripped back.  Power windows and shapes that we use a lot to remove distractions and bright areas weren’t really needed as the bright areas really helped to create the contrast in the image. I did employ some additional midtone and shadow sharpening to bring out edge details a bit, which I saw as beneficial because the process of sharpening is basically adding contrast to lines and edges.

Untethered premiered at Kendal Mountain Festival on November 21^st and is now available on Sky Sports Main Event, Sky Documentaries, Sky Sports + and Sky Sports Mix as well as On Demand.