Colorist Toby Tomkins about "Eric"

After "The End of the F***ing World" in 2019 and "This Is Going to Hurt" in 2022, Toby Tomkins was back hands on the trackballs in the grading suite at Harbor Picture Company with Benedict Spence and Lucy Forbes for "Eric".

ZEISS: It's the third show you've been doing with Benedict Spence and Lucy Forbes: anything you knew before even starting about their tastes and requests?

TOBY TOMKINS: I knew we would be doing something completely new for the show compared to before, but I knew the process would be the same in finding and defining the look. Lucy brings so much vision from the start and Benedict brings a million ideas to the table, so when I came on board, I really just get to run with them on finding what’s best for the story. They like authenticity and rawness but always want to build a 'world' that revolves around the characters and environments as characters. I knew we’d be doing something film-inspired but I had no idea exactly where we would end up. The most exciting thing about this collaboration is the journey in finding the look with them at the beginning!

There seems something in common, color and texture wise, between "The End of the F***ing World", "This Is Going to Hurt", and "Eric".

There are definitely some common attributes across the shows. I see all the differences myself but undoubtably our deep personal tastes are shing through our unique decisions for the project. All three shows have some sort of print film emulation, halation and film grain, to name a few common elements. Well spotted!

What was the workflow like in prep and during the shoot: did you prepare LUTs?

Benedict wisely pushes for proper screen tests, ideally with the actors in a setting from the show. This is immensely helpful as all the boring lens and camera test have got out the way. We’ve now got material with the other variables decided on and we can focus on the look for the material we’ll be getting. We can be much more prescriptive and bold with the show LUT and don’t need to be overly conservative. The show LUT was made in SDR (Benedict and I agreed that HDR monitoring just isn’t there yet and would cause more problems than solve!) but I built the look under a DRT (Display Rendering Transform) so we could expand our work to HDR later in the DI.
During the shoot, there wasn’t full dailies being done. Benedict was supervising changes by the DIT and I wasn’t really involved. Sometimes that’s quite nice for me as I have a very fresh take when I first see the material in the DI.

Benedict went with modern lenses instead of period accurate glass: any comment from your point of view, as a colorist?

I’m a big fan of shooting with modern glass if you’re happy with the lens characteristics we can’t change in post. I think too many people rely on vintage glass for certain things that COULD be better done in the DI, for example 'sharpness'/MTF/'bite' and contrast or color qualities. Obviously, there are other qualities that we can’t change or adjust in post but if the DoP is happy with those with modern glass I think there’s a lot of advantages. Modern lens sets seem better matched to me so it can also save time in the DI with matching and flare changes. 

How did you tackle the "period" challenge?

We knew we wanted something inspired by the stock of the time. There was such a range of photographic and motion picture stocks and formats at the time that the research was more confusing than focusing. We loved the color of some of the reversal stocks, the limited palette of the color negative stocks and the grain and halation on the consumer stocks. We tried to mix it all together and then add a bit of contemporary flair and a bit of extra color separation to create something that felt like 80s NY but also something that was bold and colorful. We were constantly fine tuning the look and only settled on a final overall look by episode 3!

Come the final grade: did you start from the LUT?

Kind of! I initially did the LUT build in DaVinci Resolve using a pipeline built by my new employer, Harbor Picture Company. When it came to the DI, I had to switch to Baselight (this was my first job in Baselight!) so I had to rebuild some of the elements that made up the LUT. This was a really fun starting point as we weren’t locked into a baked LUT, we had all the elements of the LUT separated into layers so we could revisit the look development and adapt the look for the whole show and 'upgrade' it to HDR. Also worth noting that the LUT can never contain spatial changes, so it was a fresh start when looking at high light texture, halation and grain. We had an extra day on ep1 to do the HDR look dev and I think we had 2 eps conformed that we could bounce around between before settling on our look for the show. (Although we did tweak it after that!). 

Could you elaborate about your work on the grain structure? Benedict described a long process of trials and comparisons: how did you experience it?

I thought "This Is Going To Hurt" would be the most comprehensive grain experimentation I would ever do, and I was wrong! We used the Baselight Grain but really messed around with the setting to get what we liked, dialing in different amounts in the tonal range and per channel. After we found what we liked in the suite (looking at it uncompressed) we exported loads of versions with different variables to be sent to Netflix to be put on their platform. Benedict then watched the different tests at home, on his iPad, and at Netflix HQ on 65'' OLED to see how the different encodes behaved across different devices and hardware at different sizes on the Netflix platform itself. I checked it too and we agreed on a sweet spot which then got approved by Lucy and the Execs. All I can say is that we settled on '1.3', which means nothing to you but the amount of times we said 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 made my head spin!