Tech Column

In the Tall Grass was Wrobleski’s second work filmed on HDR for Netflix

through, and they are slapping the grass out of the way because it was so irritating. It really supported what we were doing. Working in that environment really made the film what it is because we were living what we were shooting.

What was your experience in filming HDR?

On Tall Grass, the script requirements and the realities of the setting told us we would be dealing with bright, sunlit day exteriors and dark, “moonlit” night exteriors – all in the tall grass environment. Those situations can create quite a challenge for the HDR process, especially where the expanded dynamic range could make already bright highlights overwhelmingly so and could potentially reduce detail in the blacks where you wish to retain texture. Our amazing DIT, Gautam Pinto, is well-versed [in] the HDR process and was ever vigilant about protecting our digital negative by ensuring we always retained detail in both the highlights and the shadows so that we would have complete control throughout the process to modulate the levels and guide the audiences’ eye in the right direction. With Joanne Rourke in the grading suite at Deluxe Toronto, the balanced negative we maintained on set gave us complete control to create the look we desired. We had both HDR and non-HDR monitors side by side and were able to compare the two images to ensure that we would be happy with the results in both versions. As an aside, one interesting visual side-effect of the brighter highlights in HDR is that eye lights on actors require additional attention. Multiple highlights reflected in the eyes or eye lights that are too bright in night work can become unnatural and somewhat distracting in HDR. We were very careful to ensure that, whenever possible, the eye lights were round in shape as a large square or rectangular reflection of a light source could look very artificial, especially on extreme close work. Reprinted with permission from ARRI.