Eric Whipp is a regular colorist on the Baselight system. He runs a VFX studio in Toronto called Alter Ego. Recently, he has reported that he has been involved in the final stages of production on the film Three Thousand Years of Longing, directed by George Miller, cinematographed by John Seale and starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.

“The Baselight system, used by Eric Whipp at Alter Ego, was a defining factor in attaining the visual mood that the Director George Miller had envisaged for his film,” comments Seale.

The process began with set looks off QuickTimes, set in ACES and translated to the full res EXR sequences. The editing took place in Sydney, Australia, while Whipp worked on the grading in Toronto, Canada. The team sent Baselight scenes back and forth from Sydney to Toronto, so that at any time a scene could be opened on the Baselight 2 system in Sydney, and vice versa

“We moved high-res images across servers and when it came to live sessions, we streamed 4k images to Sydney for George and John in less than three seconds with almost no perceptual compression,” explains Whipp. “Early on in the process the plan was for me to fly to Sydney to sit with George in person, but this was all happening in the middle of COVID and the lockdowns were becoming an issue.

“There was a huge amount of VFX work in the suite. We created vapour coming off the djinn, sky replacements, ‘Djinn vision’ FX, and very complicated transitions,” comments Whipp. “Due to the way Baselight is architectured, it was possible to do this all in the suite without the need to have VFX involved. This was a bit of a life saver because we were able to keep the grades of the incoming and outgoing shots ‘live’ rather than bake them down and supply to VFX,” Whipp adds.

“The Baselight grading system was an incredible asset to finessing the images”, agrees cinematographer, John Seale. “The visually complex film in flashbacks was aided in the shooting by knowing that grad filtering, vignettes and sun shafts could all be done in post. This was a great saving in time, comfort, and speed of shooting.”