Back in 2023 I worked on the Noah Films feature documentary Hatton about the boxer Ricky ‘The Hitman’ Hatton. Sky Post was engaged to cover the full post for the documentary which garnered Sky Post nominations in various Craft award catergories in that years award season as well as multiple wins for the the documentary itself.

I was honoured to have been nominated for both the Media Broadcast Awards and the highly prestigious Royal Television Society (RTS) Craft Awards for ‘Best Colour Grade’. Unfortunately i didn’t win but it was truly an honour to be nominated alongside some heavy hitters in the industry.

Here’s bit of a case study about my work on Hatton and you can read more about it here: https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/post-and-vfx/post-production-uncovered-sky-post-on-hatton-sky-documentaries/5188106.article

The Hatton grade took place over four days at Sky with director Dan Dewsbury attending, but conversations about the look for the film had started weeks before covering such subjects as film stocks and grain structure to use as a base for the final grade. We requested a test sequence which was representative of the edit, and set to work on the look weeks in advance.

Our experimentation took us from some very authentic film print emulations to something a bit more stylistic with warmer highlights and skin tones whilst pushing cooler tones into the shadows which really enhanced the interviews. Then, after locking in the look, we started to explore the texture of the images, experimenting with different grain stocks and plugins. We also discussed incorporating some halation (the spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries to form a fog round the edges of a bright image) so I built a film halation layer which could then be blended into some of the shots to try and replicate that quality that you find in many feature films. This was all done prior to the grade which gave us a great foundation to build upon and explore further during the attended sessions, making the most of Dan’s valuable time.

The interviews were shot over the course of several days in natural light which required continual adjustments from shot to shot as well as having to dynamically adjust for lighting levels during some pivotal interviews. Some of the environments really allowed us to enhance the emotion that we wanted the viewer to feel, from the warmth and security of Jennifer Dooley’s living room in Manchester, to the almost Godfather-like setting for some of the boxing promoters in Las Vegas.

Ricky Hatton’s interview was made to feel a lot cooler and having it set at the end of a long table in the kitchen created a sense of separation and isolation from the story. The cool blues and teals worked really nicely with the chrome of the kitchen. For the most part we kept the film fairly natural although when the story moved into discussing embezzlement, we made some of those affected a bit greener to create an off-kilter perception and then returned to our normalised grade once that story had been resolved.

I was really pleased with the grade and how the collaboration between myself and Dan went. It’s always rewarding and satisfying to work on a film with a director who has such a clear vision yet allows you the time and space to creatively explore the visuals.