Yes, I can. I had a couple of days of training with FilmLight and then I was straight onto my first project, 45 Years. I was really pleased with the results and the look of the film. It was a completely different way of thinking for me because I had previously used the Lustre system while working on Jupiter Ascending and The Revenant.

I can’t even imagine grading on anything else now because Baselight just makes so much sense.

45 Years opened the doors for me to work on British independent films that I love so much. I then graded The Souvenir, from Director Joanna Hogg, which we collaborated on and it just stuck. We’ve now done three films together: The Souvenir, The Souvenir Part II and most recently The Eternal Daughter which stars Tilda Swinton and premiered in Venice in August 2022, and at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September.

I usually get to the office about 7:30am and start tinkering; looking at bits that maybe I didn’t have time for the day before or take that time to work on details that need more refining. Then, clients usually arrive around 9 or 10am.

For some shows, like The Wheel of Time, I’ll have the day to grade on my own after we’ve set some hero looks. Otherwise, it’s just a fully attended day and we go through scene by scene. I do try to set hero looks when I can, so I can go back and fill in the gaps when I’ve got a minute. I find this helps to keep things moving forward and I like working this way.

Once we do have a base look in place, we’ll watch it on double speed and see what’s working and what isn’t. Something I do like to do with Baselight - nearer the end, when most of the film is graded - is to stick each reel on a cursor and put them on a screen and then scroll through so every reel is moving at the same time. It gives a general feel of what the entire film looks like and helps to make sure we have not got a scene that looks way too different to anything else. I’m also a huge fan of using snapshots for matching scenes. It is something I absolutely couldn’t live without now, and the clients seem to love it as well.

David Raedeker was the DoP for The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II. The Eternal Daughter was shot by Ed Rutherford on film.

For The Eternal Daughter, we had previously made some daily LUTs, so we had some idea about where we wanted to go in the final grade. For The Souvenir Part II we had kept The Souvenir online so we could use it as a reference.

In terms of how we collaborate, I always work very closely with Joanna. We even made that happen during the first lockdown when we graded The Souvenir Part II and could only have one client in the room at a time. When I graded The Eternal Daughter, Ed was really lovely and trusted in our collaboration.

With The Eternal Daughter we play around with stronger colour at times, which was fun to do. Some parts are a bit darker than we would normally go, but I’d say it still maintains a similar film aesthetic.

The Souvenir was shot on Alexa using the 16mm sensor, to give it more of a filmic quality. The Souvenir Part II was shot on the new Sony Venice as well as a varied amount of film formats.

For The Souvenir, the palette we went for had a lot of silvery tones, and a lot of it was based on specific memories of certain colours that Joanna had in her head. For example, she’d remember the specific colour of an ash tray in the ‘80s and we had to replicate that exact look. She really drove the look of the film and it was less about visual references and more about communication and interpreting her memories.

Part II was interesting because we had a lot of the references from the first film. However, there is an entire sequence where we were paying homage to a student film that Joanna had done at collage, at her own film school, so that was really unique to experiment with.

Regarding Baselight, we used a lot of different features. I did a lot of hue swinging in the first film. For Part II, I used a lot of shapes and the flare tool as well. I used flare a lot in both films as well as vignettes.

I am personally trying my best to support female colourists coming up the ranks and doing all I can to encourage and motivate them. I’ve recently been working on mentoring a junior female colourist who will support me on The Wheel of Time Season 2.

A really proud moment for me was when I received a message on Instagram from a superstar female colourist in LA, Natasha Leonnet. She had watched something I graded, The Pale Horse, and messaged to tell me it was beautiful and a ‘Tour de Force’. Those words put me on top of the world, and I think industry support like this for each other is really beneficial.

I’m about to start The Wheel of Time Season 2 for Amazon, and recently released projects include Dangerous Liaisons for STARZ and Wedding Season for Disney+, both available to stream now.