- I want to propose a toast!
To God,
who is everywhere.
In the streets and in the squares.
At road crossings and the gates of cities.
In the jewels of beautiful women.
And in the blasphemy of men.
In the bell towers,
the cloisters,
the sermons of priests,
and the prayers of children.
In sentences passed by judges,
and in fear.
- You decide...
if you want to get burned.
In the hands of artists.
In the birth and abandonment of babies.
Between the sheets of the dying,
in the beds of hospitals,
and in the gallows of the executed.
In the pleas of the poor,
and the charity of the rich.
In the silence of the night
and in the sound of bells and organs.
- You're not afraid?
- Of what?
Men and women.
Everything is done in His name and by His will.
Nothing human is foreign to Him.
Nothing divine is strange to Him.
Everything is God.
THE PLAGUE
- Just so you can get an idea of the scope of this project,
I'd like to ask Iván from Atípica Films...
about the challenges of producing this series.
- Our production company has always worked in feature films.
We've always relied on the same team to produce Alberto Rodríguez' films.
Movistar came to us with the challenge of producing a premium TV series,
with the same quality of a feature film,
with the same team that created "Marshland", "Smoke & Mirrors"...
It was even hard to imagine.
It was way beyond anything that all of us had done before.
We had never done a project of this size.
So we also had to hire people coming from TV,
but the production times of this series
were different to what they knew, and also to what we were used to.
I mean, we had to work faster than in our typical film production,
and much slower than in the regular Spanish TV series.
On top of that, we had to face lots of new challenges.
We had done period films before...
We had traveled a few decades back to the 80s.
This was a bigger leap....
with a lot more characters, lots of extras...
many more locations.
So this was another step for us, but it was a huge one.
It really is a complex production and we are really proud of it.
We had to find a whole new path.
There wasn't a path laid out for us to follow.
That was the most difficult thing, but also what made it interesting.
- Well, after some background about the production,
let's move to the technical side of things and discuss workflow.
As Iván pointed out, this series required a cinematic standard.
That's why it was shot on Arri Alexa.
They generated lots of footage by shooting with two cameras...
so they didn't go for raw.
They decided to shoot in ProRes 4444,
and leave the Arriraw format only for the VFX shots.
The advantage of shooting in ProRes,
is that you can edit natively.
There is no offline, no transcoding.
Editorial didn't get 'dailies', they got the original media.
The DIT would only transcode the VFX shots to ProRes 4444.
That way everything was on the same codec.
They edited natively in Final Cut Pro 10.3.
Editorial would get 600 Gigs of footage every day.
Everything was stored on a 120 TB Jellyfish Tower server.
After leaving space for parity and a 20% performance buffer,
they have 71 TB of working space.
We did well our math... - We almost filled it!
Cut People was responsible for the system integration.
Here you can see a diagram of the different edit bays.
Only one assistant editor for the whole series,
to prep the footage, sync and tag everything...
Three editors, including Manu who is here with us.
Jose had another suite as the supervising editor.
All of them working simultaneously, in native ProRes 4444 at 2K...
from the server.
In terms of organisation...
I will be the one doing this overview since I was the workflow consultant.
I will give them the floor in a minute.
They used Sync-N-Link to sync based on timecode.
FCP X can sync based on TC but only one take at a time.
It doesn't allow you to sync everything in a batch like Avid.
Something very interesting about FCPX is how it handles sound metadata.
They can see all the channel info added by the sound team,
right in the Final Cut Inspector...
and also in the timeline.
They can control that in the Timeline Index and display them in different ways.
This is very helpful when editing.
No need to go through audio reports to find a particular mic...
Everything is right in the timeline, where you are working.
More metadata...
FCP X really takes advantage of metadata.
Other NLEs support metadata, but FCP X does useful things with it.
It allows you to take advantage of it in your day to day work.
Shot Notes X was used to transfer script supervisor notes into FCP X.
Here is how you can see that information in the Browser.
You can do specific searches based on these notes...
Just type a particular word and the clip is right in front of you.
Something curious about this project is that it was shot in a 4:3 ratio.
It was a decision made by the director of photography.
He and the director wanted the audience to feel like they were in the XVI century.
They didn't want it to look fake. So they move around the space.
When you keep panning the camera, sometimes the final position isn't ideal.
And it's good to have some extra margin to fix it in post.
The series was finished in a 2:1 ratio.
And this allowed them to reposition each shot vertically.
Let's talk about LUTs.
They shot in Log.
But they kept tweaking the color on set.
Naturally, they want editorial to add that look to the footage.
No one likes to edit with a washed out log image.
The series was edited in 10.3, which didn't support custom LUTs.
There was the standard Arri Log C to REC709 lut,
but that wasn't the look they created on set.
So how could we apply it?
We tried using ColorFinale but it uses a lot of resources,
specially if you apply the plugin to all the footage.
We sent feedback to Apple about this, like many other users.
And in the new 10.4 release this has been fixed.
As you can see, now we have an option to add Custom Camera LUTs.
After going through their workflow,
I'd like them to tell us about the creative editing process.
Enzino, this is the cathedral of Sevilla.
Is it bigger than Rome's cathedral?
Farewell.
Good luck.
Goodbye.
Good night.
I never felt in this series that we were working for TV.
I felt like we were doing a feature film,
because of the budget and the timeframe we worked with,
larger than what you usually get in TV.
In TV you normally don't have the time to refine the cut so much.
In this series we had it.
The editorial team was challenged to deal with lots of footage.
For six episodes they shot over 70 TB of ProRes footage.
All the sequences were shot with two cameras,
unless there were two units shooting at the same time.
Either way, we got lots of footage, and many takes...
Alberto likes to do many takes and explore different options.
Figuring out what he intended is not always easy...
It's been a thorough job.
- The first cut of each episode was... - 1 hour 20 minutes.
And we had to edit it down to 50 minutes.
You can imagine what this involves.
It's a matter of cleansing and refining sequences.
You get rid of all the unnecessary things,
or things that may slow down the plot.
It's a historic series but also a thriller.
The audience needs to be able to follow the story...
You've been able to work in an unusual way for a TV series,
more like in a feature film...
because you had all the footage from the six episodes at your disposal.
You were able to move sequences from one episode to another...
- Did you take advantage of that? - Yes, we did.
In the first episode, there was a character...
that we didn't...
- It wasn't introduced.
- That character was initially introduced in episode 2.
And we decided to move it to the first episode.
It was Teresa, the widow.
The initial idea was to have only a POV shot of her from Mateo.
But we decided to move her presentation sequence to Ep. 1.
- That woman...
I want you to find her.
- This series doesn't have a typical episodic structure...
where each episode has to end in a cliff hanger,
and the audience is eager to see what's next.
This series is different, more like a very long film.
The first episode is like the Set Up.
It introduces the city, which is also a character...
It also introduces the main characters.
Episodes 2, 3 and 4 are like Act Two: The Obstacles.
Episodes 5 and 6 are like the Resolution.
That's how it's structured.
- In fact, the length of each episode responds to the classic three act structure.
The first episode is rather short...
Episodes 2, 3 and 4 are the longest ones.
And the last two episodes have a reduced length again.
- It was godsend to have all the footage in one place,
allowing us to access any library from any room...
and just get to work.
- With direct attached storage, could you have pulled this off?
- It would have been impossible.
Well, maybe we could have but...
- With less time to polish? - Right.
Less time to polish, more assistant editors...
- Night hours perhaps...
- Something I'd like to mention...
We already begun planing "The Plague", both the story and the production,
while we were shooting and editing "Smoke & Mirrors".
That's were we started working with Final Cut Pro X,
and we realised they needed a Jellyfish to share all the media.
That's something we all started discussing back then.
- Between you, Manu and Jose, how was the editing process?
Did Manu give you his episode so you could work on it with Alberto?
- Alberto and Paco Baños, the two directors of the series...
once they finished shooting their episode,
they wanted to see a decent cut of the whole episode.
Let's say 80% of what it would be the final episode.
We couldn't just build a rough cut or first assembly.
We had to go beyond and start really editing.
There were three editors, editing two episodes each.
Every day they would edit their sequences as they came.
The next day, I would start reviewing their edited sequences.
At the end of the process, after an editor finishes his episode,
I'd work on the whole episode for a week or two,
with the director in the room, trying to take it to the next level.
Making changes in structure...
If a sequence didn't work we'd try to change it over
in order to make it clearer for the audience,
or maybe more provocative.
- Well, in terms of visual effects, you had to deal with a lot of shots...
- Yes.
- The VFX Supervisor of the series is Juan Ventura, who is here with us.
And the VFX house is Twin Pines.
His owner Juanma Nogales is also here.
Let's watch some VFX breakdowns,
to show the amazing work they did to recreate the XVI century Seville.
- Well deserved applause.
- Before handing the mic over to my colleagues,
I'd like to say that this was a challenge for us too.
We had to choose most of the VFX shots well in advance,
agreeing with them on the amount of handles we needed for the edit.
We had to make decisions constantly in that regard.
- How did you two collaborate?
I know your role, Juanve, has been key during preproduction.
You were on location with the production team,
helping them choose the right locations to recreate the XVI century.
It was not an easy task.
- No, because there is almost nothing left from that period.
As you've seen in the breakdowns, we had to recreate everything.
Something that really helped us to achieve what you've seen,
has been the collaboration between many departments during preproduction.
The VFX team got involved also in preproduction.
After Alberto decided what to show with the art department,
we could start figuring out how to make that happen.
All the information that was gathered in preproduction...
location maps, pictures,...
was shared with the VFX team.
With that material, Juanma and his team...
started working their magic.
- I agree, it was a good thing to incorporate us at the beginning.
We were at the readings with other departments,
we had several meetings before...
That puts us on the same page as everyone else.
And we are all on the same boat, for real.
- We hired Twin Pines after months of deliberation,
and a long recruiting process...
And it was the right choice.
We didn't just want a VFX provider,
we wanted to incorporate VFX talent to our team.
- About your work on the VFX of the series...
what was the biggest challenge?
- Everything was a challenge.
This wasn't like the standard TV series that we had done.
This is like a giant feature film, almost like three films.
You have to do all of these things we wanted to do as much as them.
But you have a tight timeframe and a particular budget...
So we had to figure out how to manage...
our whole team during almost 10 months,
in order to deliver everything within those constrains.
This project enabled us to grow as a company in a big way.
We've been able to manage many different elements...
hundreds of shots, versions, delivery dates...
It's been challenging for us, but we are proud of the result.
- To wrap this up... Let's talk about color correction.
You work with Mistika...
You graded "Marshland" and every film by Alberto.
What did you try to achieve with the grade in "The Plague"?
- It played an important role...
because Alberto wanted to shoot this series with the light of that period.
When you watch an episode...
if you see candles, that's what's really lighting the scene.
There might be a back light somewhere but...
They almost shot with natural light,
to achieve the look that both the director and DP wanted.
It's a dark series, but also artistically.
We tested different lenses, various cameras...
to see how far we could push the grade later.
We wanted to get the maximum detail in the shadows.
I use Mistika because I've been working with it for many years.
It's a very fast tool and it has a great workflow.
It was also a big help for Juanma and his VFX work.
In the boat sequence from Episode 1, we changed the luminosity 4 or 5 times,
until we got the right look for the docks of Seville at dawn.
That was a key thing because this sequence required a lot of VFX work.
It was completely shot in a stage.
We really had to agree on the type of light we wanted
so that they didn't work in vain.
If the scene is going to be dark...
they don't need to waste time working in areas that won't be seen...
masking or whatever.
So I think it's been a great asset, regarding the approval of VFX shots...
being able to see them in Mistika.
- Well, we have to wrap this up.
If you want to learn more about the series, check the Movistar YouTube channel.
You will find lots of making of videos: VFX, production, art direction,
rehearsing with actors...
You should take a look at it. And of course, watch the show...
if you haven't already.
A big round of applause for the team.
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