M2 Uses Nucoda Film Master to Grade Death of a President

Digital Vision announced that London post-production facility M2 used the Nucoda Film Master system to grade the Borough Films/Channel 4 feature-length docudrama, "Death of a President."



"Death of a President," which had its worldwide premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September where it won the International Critics’ Prize, premieres in the UK digitally on More4 on October 9, terrestrially on Channel 4 on October 16, and is then released theatrically across North America on October 27. It is a fictionalized documentary, set one year in the future, which imagines the assassination of US President George W Bush and the American public’s subsequent response.



"To make it look like a realistic documentary we used a mixture of acquired and archive footage – principally NTSC material on Beta and VHS – and while it was shot mainly on HDCAM, we also used 16mm, a bit of Digi, miniDV and cameraphones," the film’s Head of Production, Donall McCusker.



"Multiple acquisition formats and multiple archive sources gave particular challenges to both the online and the grade. We had to make the HD material match SD material, which was the bulk of what we were doing, and the SD material match HD material, which is significantly harder."



Written and directed by Gabriel Range ("The Day Britain Stopped," "The Man Who Broke Britain"), "Death of a President" was posted over a six-month period at M2 in London. Offlined in Avid and conformed in Nitris, it was then passed onto Nucoda Film Master for grading. The look had to be just right, striking a balance between authoritative documentary on the one hand and filmic for theatrical release on the other. Meanwhile, numerous visual effects had to be carefully graded into the finished whole.