How do you grade a Dinosaur?
Prehistoric Planet is a ground-breaking collaboration between BBC Studios Natural History Unit and Apple TV +
Films at 59 has extensive experience in natural history programming making but this series was a departure from our usual approach to natural history grading explains Senior Colourist, Simon Bland.
The back-plates were filmed on location and the CGI creatures were cleverly incorporated by the talents at MPC but a new challenge was presented – how to balance the components to accurately present a prehistoric natural world?
We spent significant time balancing the textures of the CGI assets to sit comfortably within the specialist shot landscapes of the back plates, de-saturating the CGI to embed the hyper-real colours within the back plates. We added noise texture, camera shake and lens distortion, mainly to underwater or camera trap footage, to give a sense of the reality you would experience if you were out in the field filming this natural world. An ACES/EXR colour pipeline through Baselight, Flame and AE provided us the full colour spectrum and all the tools we needed to achieve the desired outcome.