I was hired by MCM Creative Studios in NYC to adapt a 6k 360 panorama of the famous Tanzanian restaurant The Rock for a unique dining experience at Spring Studios in Manhattan. Mastercard and Spring Studios wanted to bring the incredible dining experience of The Rock to New Yorkers by simulating the actual restaurant using projectors and a purpose-built stage. A near exact replica of the restaurant was built on a sound stage at Spring Studios. Projectors and highly reflective projection screens were placed outside the “windows” with a compass rose accurate depiction of their respective vantage points. The ultrahigh resolution video was recorded using RED cameras over a period of twelve hours so that as customers dined, they would see the sun move in the sky and fishing boats come and go. There were speakers placed throughout the restaurant which sounded the ambience recorded on location of the tropical environment. There were even machines which emitted the smell of the sea.

My job was to color manage and match all compass directions initially in the color lab and then oversee the matching and physiological response to the levels on site at the restaurant. It was a great example of differing subjective experience with luminance relative to the environment in which we’re in. Simulating a real life environment in person is not the same as simulating real life on the companded proscenium of an electronic display. Marrying the two presentations in a post pipleline requires a lot of math and a strong grasp of high dynamic range technology and workflows.

You can read more about this ambitious project in Forbes Online.

February 9, 2021

Deconvolutional Upscaling for Legacy Media

MCM Creative in NYC reached out to Magic Lantern and asked if it was possible to clean up and upscale his feature doc Shelter Island prior to an Amazon streaming distribution sale. Unfortunately, the original media was no longer available and the master had already gone through various unknown encodes.

February 2, 2021

Superior Deinterlacing and Upscaling With Machine Learning

Typically, filmmakers use the deinterlacing tool provided for free within their NLE or Davinci Resolve. This article will demonstrate why this approach can be destructive to the image and will offer a better alternative.

January 28, 2021

Rendering With JPEG Compression(ism)

A collection of photos taken with a cell phone at full magnification yields interesting results. Although the discrete cosine transform compression still has a significant effect in the image, by magnifying the image in camera prior to the encode, these images take on a hybrid of pixilation and compression decimation. There is also a slight halation ghosting around the higher contrast edges which get encoded into a pleasant glow.

Color and the Physiological Response - A Colorist's Exploration

Colors, generally speaking, are instinctively associated with emotions. Working as a colorist and having to manipulate color everyday – I feel that most directors and cinematographers intuitively ask for specific colors to enhance specific emotions on special scenes without even realizing it. Here is a little help on how to actually use color in film making to activate – or not – a physical reaction in your audience.