Grading 'The Reef Stalked’

The Reef Stalked was definitely one of the most challenging features I have colored. Why is that you ask?
It was 90% shot in far North Queensland doubling for a fictitious tropical island. Filming took place over a 28 day period, and despite changing weather conditions the show went on. This meant that matching the different cameras, stock footage and VFX wasn’t the easiest process as the weather and ocean conditions were constantly changing.

The conform, grade and finishing were all via Chop Shop Post in Brisbane with the VFX being handled by Emma Clifton in NZ.

The main unit cameras were x2 Canon C500 MK 2 with the Byron Bay underwater pool material shot on RED, GoPro Hero 8 and DJI Drone.
Stock was a complete mixture of formats solutions and frame rates.
I set up an SDR Resolve Color Managed project which became a great starting point for the grade.

Due to COVID-19 lockdowns I only had director Andrew Traucki for 1 week, which meant we had to start remotely. I started with a ZOOM call to Justin Brickle, the DP. This was to check if there was any specific camera info I should know about. He basically said to make it look good and do my best with the swimming pool shots.
The next call was with Andrew. I shared my Resolve GUI screen via ZOOM, this was so he could point me to key points in the movie, we weren’t making any color decisions at that point. We bookmarked some key scenes and I roughed out some grades via ZOOM but followed up by sending Andrew some WIP stills later that day.
He stressed he didn’t want a very stylised ‘look’ and was more concerned with a clean match, especially on the skin tones, water and skies (98% of the movie right there I thought :) With the key scenes locked I jumped into reel 1.

At the end of day 3, I got 5 key scenes from the whole movie up on Frame.io for Andrew and the producers to look at. These were balanced and matched only, no softening, secondaries or windows. Andrew came back with some great points, but generally we were on the right track.
VFX were coming in every day from NZ and I was adding these every morning before picking up on the grade.
I had 15 days for the grade, which is generous for an indie feature, mainly because of the matching challenges in the movie.
At the end of day 10, I rendered all 7 reels as a WIP H264 and uploaded to Frame.io. This was so Andrew could comment before the start of our 5 days together and so he could earmark the shots for sky replacements and bubble overlays.
The final week finishing ’The Reef Stalked’ went really smoothly. This was because I had already matched all cameras and stock so we were just tweaking the look to aid the story. We had a few director/colorist battles
over certain shots - all were settled amicably with the movie being the eventual winner. 
The producers' screening was on the Thursday morning of the final week. This is always a nerve-wracking experience as big changes would be tricky in the time we had left. They had minor changes and suggestions that meant we could add the remaining VFX on our last day and watch the film all the way through before finishing on time.
The ‘The Reef: Stalked’ can be seen on the major streaming networks.
IMDB https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12735282/?ref_=nm_flmg_cin_1

Director: Andrew Traucki
DP: Justin Brickle
Editor: Scott Walmsley
Producers: Neil Kingston, Michael Robertson, Andrew Traucki, Jack Christian
VFX Supervisor: Emma Clifton
Post Production: Chop Shop Post
Post Supervisor: David Napier
Grade: Warren Eagles

Watch the Trailer.