Low Water: six episodes, one grade

Low Water was shot over 31 days from late winter into summer, on two cinema cameras, a phone for the car interiors and a drone for the valley wides. When the cut reached Pellmar Post, its six episodes looked like four different shows.

Petra Moerk picked one frame from episode one as the reference: a house in the valley at 08:00 under thin cloud. Glimr matched each episode to it in one pass per reel, taking the green cast out of the drone and the magenta out of the phone before grading everything to the reference frame.

The phone shots were the worry. The car scenes sit close on the two leads, and skin from a phone lands far from skin from a cinema camera. Glimr’s skin tone guard kept both faces on the skin line after the match, so a cut from a phone close-up to a cinema wide shows the same person in the same light.

The match report flagged 14 shots out of 1,180, most of them with a clipped sky. Petra’s team graded those 14 by hand and kept the rest as Glimr matched them. Each episode took about an afternoon to match, report included, where the old schedule had set aside a week per episode to make the cameras agree. The reference grade went into the shared Look library, so the two colorists on the later episodes started from the same place.

The series grade then started from Harbor, cooled a few hundred kelvin further for the winter episodes. “Nobody spent an evening making the drone match the cameras,” she says. “We spent those evenings on the flood in episode five.” The first client review came back with notes on two scenes, both about story, and all six episodes were delivered on the date in the contract.