Director Juan Cabral (who incidentally only shoots on a full moon – true story) and DoP Eric Gautier (Fr) teamed up to film this very dark and dense tvc. Shot over 5 long nights, the shoot featured a lot of stunts with road trains, criss crossing traffic, and a specialty rig remote controlled car which allowed the actors inside to sleep whilst the car drove along on the road.
Mesh were entrusted to turn over a large amount of data quickly. We processed and colour timed dailies on the back of a Arri RAW workflow that had the OCN count up to around 4TB a day, in time for them to be couriered back to Sydney the morning then uploaded to Juans editor overseas, straight into the edit. Colour timing footage at low exposure levels at night can be tricky as your eyes adjust so well to the dark and Eric was also very worried around exposure considering we were using next to no lighting. I convinced Eric to shoot RAW as opposed to Prores in pre just to give us that extra leeway with levels in the grade. Still, it was very important to keep one good eye on the black point – no rest for the wicked!
