Time Bandits

As pre-production on the project began, the sheer magnitude of the task ahead unfolded like a gathering storm. We were going to create and inhabit not just a whole new fantasy world, we were going to create at least one per episode. Over ten episodes.

This was going to require a tour de force of visual effects, and the final numbers involved would be enough to spin heads. Ultimately, around two million frames had to be pulled for VFX plates.

The fun didn’t stop there. Just like the 1981 film version, the series would also employ a number of miniature sets. Combine those with all the full-scale live action, much on location, and controlling all these interlocking parts was going to set a real test.

With our involvement stretching from end to end, a lot of planning and hard work was needed to ensure tight control, and exceptional efficiency, right through the process. So we started by building the technical plan and workflow, setting up and liaising between departments at the prep stage. Other technical details would be needed to keep things on track, like creating documentation for picture settings and metadata to travel from on set right through to post production.

Then there was wrangling the shoot logistics. Shooting, both on location and in studio, was mostly based in Wellington. This was not only because it’s home turf for Taika and Jemaine, it also offers plenty of variety in a short travel radius. Including locations that were a great stand-in for 1920s New York in one of the episodes. Miniatures and other studio work were based at Stone Street Studios, with The Rebel Fleet providing on-set DIT, Video Assist and Dailies services across Main and Second units. This helped with collaboration on the shoots and keeping consistency on track.

Main Unit Dailies was based close to set in a van, travelling with the shooting unit and enabling the DOP or VFX to check shots easily. Second Unit was shooting more sporadically. All media, however, was to be piped directly to The Rebel Fleet base in Auckland where TRF had all the required infrastructure. This required a dedicated 10Gb fibre connection and it proved invaluable, transferring an average 5 TB per day. By the end of the project 882 TB was backed up.

Up in Auckland, we provided all the space, connectivity and IT support needed for three editors and up to 10 Aassistant Editros and support staff.

The 600km separation between Wellington and Auckland wasn’t the only geographic issue. The production team included LA-based DOP Mike Berlucchi, while the writing and directing team of Taika, Jemaine and Iain are about as internationally mobile as you can get. Remote viewing and approval would de essential, and it would have to be 100% consistent. As well as our established workflow methodology, from Dailies through Moxion viewable on iPad, we incorporated an ACES 1.3 colour pipeline that went right though to picture finishing. This meant everyone, at every stage, and whatever their location, could be confident that what they were seeing was completely accurate and consistent.

Underpinning picture finishing and deliverables, including VFX, would be our proprietary metadata solution, Konsol. 

So, did we deliver the control and systematisation this massive, VFX-heavy production needed? When you’re not afraid of a straight answer, you ask the producer, right? “If you're going to shoot a lot of heavy visual-effects shots, including shooting with an LED wall, then the data capture is crucial,” says Co-Producer Jake Rice. “From the moment of conception and planning with art department, all the way through execution on set, you have to be post-production minded. You’ve got to be thinking about the life of a shot from the very moment of its conception, all the way through its execution and finish.”

This is where Konsol really shone.

“So, your light levels, your focus distances, the subject itself, you’re scanning all of these things as such valuable bits of data. The metadata that we captured in each shot each day has so much information packed into every single piece of the puzzle that you're building. So to have a system in place that allows us to gather all that data on set, live, in a real production environment, and know that that data is going to be married to the shot that you're creating, all the way through the pipeline process, was a dream. By the time editorial is picking a plate shot, all that buried information carries right through to the visual effects vendor and then, as a package, back to editorial and back to the edit facility. It was just so valuable. In numerous ways this software has completely spoiled us. I can't imagine doing any show without it.”

This was DOP Mike Berlucchi’s first time working with us (we went on to work together on season two of Our Flag Means Death), and his first time working in New Zealand. How did he find it? “Working in New Zealand, and I'm not just saying this, has been one of the greatest experiences of my career,” says Mike. “The crews are just phenomenal. It felt like anything was possible, they’re always willing to go the extra mile with this can-do attitude and ingenuity.”

At first, and understandably, Mike took a bit of convincing to leave everything to The Rebel Fleet.

“When I got the offer to come here for the first season of Time Bandits, one of the first questions I asked was who who can I bring with me from the States? You know, from my normal crew. I wanted to have somebody I was familiar with, but they assured me: Mike, you're not going to need it. So I said, okay let’s give it a shot–I love meeting new people! I guess what I didn’t factor in was these are people who’ve worked on some of the biggest and best films of all time.”

It wasn’t just the crew’s skills and attitude that impressed.

“When I first came to NZ, I was concerned about the logistical challenges of shooting on location,” says Mike. “But the teams there, they've been navigating the environment for so long and everything was so smooth. On Time Bandits, we did film on location quite a bit. We did a plate shoot in the South Island. We went to Dunedin, to Queenstown, and we were able to shoot these amazing environments for our LED work and for visual effects afterwards.”

If you were looking for the sharp end of a large, complex and technically-challenging production like Time Bandits, you could do worse than chat to the on-set DIT. In this case, Hadley Parsons. Because there was so much to think about, Hadley was involved from the get-go in establishing the technical plan and pipeline. “It’s quite a rare thing for me to be involved that early,” he says. “Overall, there was a lot of prep involved, because of all the world building present in the show. And not just in digital imaging, there were miniatures shoots too, huge miniatures! It was all part of the world-building which they’d shoot slightly off speed, with action pieces, explosions. Really cool.”

Hadley understood how important consistency was going to be across all this. “It was definitely a hard gig for VFX,” he says.

“Because we were using the LED screen, using environments that weren’t ideal, and straight-out shooting things that shouldn't be there, it meant a lot of paint-out on the shots. But everyone was delighted with how The Rebel Fleet set up the back end of things, how simple and straightforward it was. Everything was backed up to LTO, and when a VFX pull is called in they know exactly where the footage is, so it was really quick.”

Hadley largely engaged via QTAKE, with most being automated. “It pre-populates a lot of metadata directly from the cameras. All I have to write in is physical filters, or maybe specific things that cannot be captured within that metadata field.” Meanwhile, Konsol was capturing data across the entire production: digital camera sheets, script supervisor, VFX, virtual production, sound, dailies as well as from the DIT. This was key to making the overall VFX experience so seamless, with automated and metadata-rich pulls for the VFX teams.

The decision to go with an ACES 1.3 colour pipeline proved to be a great call. When it came to Conform, the person in charge was TRF’s own Tristan Simpson. “What ACES allowed was a consistent colourspace across the entire pipeline, from dailies to VFX, to grading, to delivery, to mastering,” says Tristan. “Across multiple cameras and acquisition formats, what was seen on set matched what we got in the finishing suite. They could do a Dailies grade, then when we came to the Conform and handing it over to Damian, the colourist, we could give him a timeline with the colour of the Dailies grade spot on. What we delivered was exactly what they’d seen in Editorial, in all their proxies viewed during the shoot. There were no questions about the pipeline, like ‘is this what it really looked like on set’? It was surprisingly simple to put together, and that rolled into the visual effects as well. Editorial would send us a list of plates to pull and we had all the grades in our database from Dailies, so we could send the visual effects artists the plates prepped in the ACES colourspace with the grade that they could apply to it. When they did their comps and all their work, and sent it back to Editorial for approval, the colour was entirely spot-on and consistent. It was really fabulous. Of course then you hand it off to the colourist and the colourist changes everything!”

Even so, Tristan is clear about the technical benefits ACES brought to the process.

“When Editorial are cutting or viewing proxies, like Moxion files or whatever during the shoot, they’re all in Rec. 709, standard dynamic range. When we set it up for the grade, we’re working in high dynamic range. And normally, you’d need really complex LUTs to be able to do that, to convert. But ACES has output transform at the end, which is what your display monitor is. Essentially, Editorial was all rendered out at Rec. 709, and when we came to the grade our output display was HDR. Yet it still looks the same, except for with a wider range like brighter whites and more detail in the blacks. No complexities of having to build custom LUTs and having a colour scientist come in and build looks for you that would approximate what you had seen in Dailies, it was all in that ACES pipeline ready to hand over.”

Damian McDonnell cut his teeth on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings before moving to LA in 2008. Returning to NZ to work on The Hobbit films, Damian was brought in as finishing colourist on Time Bandits. “It was a really good experience,” he says. “Pete Harrow [The Rebel Fleet CTO] was great with doing all the colour science. That was nice, because I didn't really have to worry about that. I could just concentrate on the grade. And, you know, and that's the best thing, when you can really trust the workflow.”

Delivering the creative finishing touch at the end of the process, Damian has the mandate to upend any previous colour decisions. Even so, he appreciated the platform provided by the ACES 1.3 pipeline. “Overall, it was a complicated production. Trying to deal with multiple clients, people were on different shows on different time zones, and we're having to do remote grading. That’s just the reality of a show like this,” says Damian. “We had three cinematographers, though Mike Berlucchi was the main point of contact and mostly set the look. This was the first time I'd worked with ACES colour management and that simplified everything, which was really good. And for VFX, which was a big part of the show, it simplified things massively. For me, though, it was great not to have to worry about the colour science. The Rebel Fleet took care of all the workflow and deciding early on to do ACES took all those questions away and just simplified it.”

Ultimately, however, things come down to Damian’s creative approach. “I get the graded Dailies, and I’ve done Dailies grading before, I've done it on set, but for me it’s mostly just a reference. People employ me for my creative input, to apply a fresh look. One reason being, once it's cut, once it comes from the edit room, things are in a different order than what they were shot and originally viewed. But it has to be collaborative because, fundamentally, these aren't my images, these are someone else’s. I'm only helping to get the best look.”

Since its debut on Apply tv+, it’s a look that seems to have won over critical opinion, such as that of Amber Dowling of Canada’s Globe and Mail:

“An epic time-travelling tale…from episodes involving the Mayans and Neanderthals to instalments about mediaeval villages and Prohibition…Time Bandits is a delightful surprise, thanks to solid performances with impeccable comedic timing, incredible world-building, and a fun but quirky tone.”

We’ll take that as a win.