It’s been a real pleasure working with BBC Studios and Stanley Tucci’s Salt Productions on the critically-acclaimed series ‘Tucci In Italy’ for National Geographic, Disney + and Hulu.
The brief across grade, online and audio was consistent – to maintain the authenticity and personality of Italy, avoiding postcard cliché and focussing on Italy’s lived-in warmth and historical patina. Damion Katwaroo, Colourist, used Baselight for the core look, utilising Chromogen Sector Saturation to enhance the Canon C500’s natural vibrancy allowing selective amplification of the landscape, through olive groves and terracotta rooftops, without oversaturating skin tones. Then BaseGrade & X Grade allowed precise adjustments and refined hues; while luminance isolation balanced Venetian blues and golden-hour glow ensuring hues felt lived-in rather than hyperreal.
In Online, Jamie Home, used Boris, Saphire, and Neat video plug-ins, particularly using Mocha Pro to stabilise the odd shot so that the viewers attention was never distracted. There was also some blurring which had to be as subtle as possible, whilst still covering legal requirements.
Head of Audio, Ben Newth, led the audio team. The main brief was to keep as close to the original character of the footage as possible, feeling connected with the area – the culture and it’s people. This was also the most enjoyable part about working on the series – sonically bringing out the variation across the towns, the cooking, the food and all the little details to enhance the depth of the culture and the flavours of the food. A light touch was mostly required with the dialogue, which were very well recorded, though occasionally we had to dig out the dialogue in loud crowd situations to hear Stanley et al talk above the noise and, in this case, we used tools such as Izotope RX, Supertone Clear and Accentize dxRevive Pro.
As this was a delivery to National Geographic we worked closely with their team to deliver all the programmes to their exacting requirements, building on our existing close relationship to collaborate constructively between our QC team and theirs for a successful upload against tight deadlines.
As Senior Post Producer Abi South remarked ‘long-form projects like this are always such a delight, as you get the opportunity to really build on your relationship with the client, so that it grows into more than just post-production support. You become integrated and one of the team and, as the project matures, those foundations no longer feel like work but friendship. The Tucci team are all so brilliantly talented, and I feel extremely lucky to have spent the past year working with such a fantastic bunch of people so adept in their craft.’