Producer: Rob Humphreys, Bobbin-and-fly.com
Conform & Delivery: Dan Herman
Director: Camille Cellucci
VFX Team: Edward Douglas
Tome Rolfe
Julia Kragh
My role: Colorist & Finishing Artist
The color reference for this project was "Spectre (2015)", the James Bond film. Like every project, though, the direction ultimately took on a life of its own—and MouseTrap was no exception.
The look needed to be both elegant and cinematic. For the first part of the film, we developed two distinct looks: The live-action footage, which adhered closely to the "Spectre" aesthetic. The Apple Vision Pro footage, which required a more realistic tone to align with Apple’s branding. We kept the sky and highlights clean while enhancing the Apple Vision Pro goggles with a push of cool whites and deep electric blues in the lens reflections, making them stand out.
As for the film's end sequence, we originally went with a much grungier aesthetic and a more rusty look that we loved. However, since the project was designed to be projected at AU2024, we had to make adjustments—lifting the shadows and toning down the higher-contrast to ensure it translated well on the big screen.
Look reference still...
WORKFLOW AND NOTES
The footage was captured in ProRes RAW, which presented a challenge—Resolve doesn’t currently support this format, so I had to transcode the cut to be graded. Baselight would have been amazing and straight forward.
The most commonly suggested workflow is to transcode to CinemaDNG, as this format best preserves latitude, color depth, and access to camera RAW controls. After testing multiple tools, including FCP, After Effects, Premiere, Adobe Encoder, and CinemaDNG Processor, I ultimately chose to work with Assimilate Play Pro. It provided the best flexibility and was the most practical solution for the job.
Dan Herman assisted as the conform editor and handled the plate conversion for the VFX team; for this, he transcoded the ProRes RAW footage to EXR using CinemaDNG Processor.
With a workflow in ACES, we were off to the races… so to speak.