Fifty Fifty Post Production and The Greatest Night in Pop
We talked to Elliot Riella from Fifty Fifty Post Production about his love of EIZO and how they perfectly fit into his Autodesk Flame workflow.
Fifty Fifty is a post-production house based in the heart of London’s SoHo, who over the last 20 years have established themselves as one of the independent go-to post-production facilities for Broadcast an SVOD content in HDR, 4K and HD delivery and everything in-between. Ell is their Lead Flame artist and Online Editor, having joined Fifty Fifty to set up their Flame department, having previously worked in advertising and as a VFX artist on natural history documentaries. Fifty Fifty set up a Flame department to help broaden their reach and expand their work into high-end TV for both broadcasters and streamers, as Ell explains “They (Fifty Fifty) started breaking out into high end TV and distributing to the streaming platforms. To do this they needed to deliver HDR content and be able to facilitate high-end finishing of their shows, so they knew they needed a Flame department. I had a lot of experience training people and building up a specialist department, and I wanted to be doing more drama/comedy, so we fit together perfectly.”
We catch up with Ell just after he finished work on Netflix’s ‘The Greatest Night in Pop’, a documentary about the recording of the ‘We Are the World’ charity single, by some of the World’s biggest pop stars in January 1985, shortly after Bob Geldof had changed the world of the charity song forever by recording and releasing the single ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ by Band Aid, including many of the UK’s biggest pop stars at the time. Ell explains his role on this project, “As the online editor and Flame artist my role was to clean up all of the archive material and to remaster it, to make it consistent without taking away the style of the era. The production also shot a lot of modern-day material that they then wanted to look like it was from that era, so I am degrading some footage and remastering others to give them a consistent look. Working with our in-house colourist Joe Stabb, we put a through line of consistency between lots of varying media, and that balanced very nicely with the modern-day interviews, all packaged up 4:3 for that extra nostalgia kick.”
Ell’s Flame workstation consists of a HP Z8 workstation connected to Pixit Media's, Pixstor NVME Storage, a high end consumer TV set up to replicate the home viewing environment, a reference monitor and an EIZO ColorEdge CG279X, not the newest of screens, but it was new at the point the workstation was installed as Ell explains, “The EIZO we have here is 5 years old, I’ve never had to worry about it, I have never had to speak to your technical team, it hasn’t degraded in anyway, it calibrates itself daily. Pretty much the only button I push is the on button. It is the same with the EIZO in our second Flame suite and the one I have at home, where I just trust it. Knowing that I can go home and check things in a different environment and knowing that the two monitors look exactly the same gives me a lot of comfort. I wish I could say that it’s more integrated into my workflow and that it’s a thing we have a big discussion about, but it is just not. It’s consistent and reliable, and that’s all I need from it.
Flame is a high-end all-encompassing tool, you can online (editing) and do visual effects, it is not just node-based compositing, but timeline based as well. Like most Flame artists, I am die-hard enthusiast, falling deeper and deeper into it. EIZO is definitely a household name with Flame users, every Flame system I see, there’s an EIZO monitor with it. You don’t even think about using alternatives, my first ever Flame system had an EIZO. There are a lot of monitor options but when building our Flame department at Fifty Fifty, I said ‘obviously we’ll be getting EIZO monitors.’ When I've gone to other post houses, when I've hung out with other Flame operators, it's just assumed that if you have a Flame, you have an EIZO and a lot of that is down to the trust we have in the product.”
Ell’s workflow is all about confidence, confidence that his workstation will work when he needs it to and confidence that when he is looking at footage it’s being displayed correctly. The fact that the EIZO is not part of the conversation is a huge positive for Ell and why he has always used EIZO and will continue to use EIZO, “So actually having that consistency and knowing that from the moment I start a project to the moment I end a project, it’s all correct, it’s really key. For people who are producing shorter form content like photography, they'll be looking at new content on a daily basis. I'm on a project for, you know, a few weeks sometimes, for a long form project. I'm coming back to the same media every day and I need to know that my monitoring is consistent. Working for years with a product like EIZO, there's so much trust in it that it's never really something that crosses my mind.
All of the problems that I would experience are solved, but the key thing for me it is consistency between the suites. I think the self-calibration is absolutely a part of that. I know that at the end of every day, as soon as I hit that off button, I know it's going to self-calibrate. I know that, if a piece of media comes in and it looks wrong, the idea that the monitor is wrong is so far down the list of things that I'll check first. It's nearly always to do with how it's been exported or all of these other reasons, it's never been the monitor. If I were to get that far down the list, I would be extremely surprised.
You know, we want to make sure that when client come from the grading suite through to me and they see their film, I need to know that this looks exactly the same as it does in there, that the calibration is spot on. If they even question it, if they even ask me the question of ‘oh, that doesn't look right?’ then they've lost confidence in our pipeline and as soon as that begins, it'll spiral. It's so important to us, the confidence that the client has in us and our workflow, it can be detrimental to the project, and you lose your flow as well.”
Process and workflow are often talked about in post-production and the consistency of output is obviously key, especially when there are multiple processes, people and workstations potentially involved in the final output of a single project, but flow is not something that we would usually think a monitor can help with but Ell is very clear that his EIZO is critically important to his personal flow on a project, “I've often talked about the idea that, especially on the Flame and because I'm using a Wacom and I'm moving around the tablet pretty quickly, using muscle memory, so having the correct aspect ratio etc. is essential, down to a pixel level, even the smallest change can make a difference. The aspect ratio of the monitor changed, when I moved to the CG279X (which is 2560 x 1440 pixels, compared to a 2560 x 1600-pixel screen), and it took me about a month to get back up to speed. I think that is so important to me, especially with speed of workflow and this is why I said when we were setting up the Flame department, ‘please buy this exact monitor, my muscle memory is mapped to this aspect ratio, and I can work quicker.’
I know that to some people it might not mean much, but to me having the official Autodesk (the creator of Flame) keyboard that's made by Logitech, I've used that keyboard the entirety of my career. Having consistency within your working environment, you might not think that can change the speed that much, but it does, especially over a long period of time, over a long project, knowing that I'm hitting the right button without even looking is crucial.”
Having an EIZO as part of Ell’s toolbox at Fifty Fifty Post Production, gives him confidence because he knows that his screen is going to be calibrated and is going to output what he and the client are expecting to see but it also helps with his workflow again providing confidence that Ell and the wider Fifty Fifty team can deliver their projects successfully to ensure their customers keep coming back with new projects as they arise.
Fifty Fifty and EIZO are also organisations aligned on their view of the future, Fifty Fifty are a certified B Corp while EIZO are taking huge steps to ensure our own legacy. It is not just about how we are trying to reduce our carbon footprint, but about our commitment to our staff, their wellbeing and our impact on our local environment, you can read more about Fifty Fifty B Corp status here and EIZO’s CSR policies here.
Autodesk Flame is a powerful tool that enables 3D compositing, visual effects and editorial finishing work on commercials, TV episodes, trailers and features, via an integrated environment aimed to accelerate the creative workflow.
Find out more about the EIZO ColorEdge range and how ColorNavigator can ensure consistency of your ColorEdge monitors across your environment here.
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