CASE STUDY
NATIVE SON

OVERVIEW

Native Son is an example of a post solution in which Irving Harvey acts as a decentralized post production house for a project where the chosen members of a post production team are spread across a number of companies and facilities. By offering a comprehensive package of service Irving Harvey is able to fill in the gaps and keep the post process as smooth as if it were done under a single house.

For Native Son, producers Matthew Perniciaro and Michael Sherman assembled a post team from a variety of companies: editor Brad Turner and his company SeeThink, colorist Tim Stipan from Company 3, VFX supervisor Josh Johnson from VFXdaily, and sound supervisor Ryan Price at Goldcrest. Irving Harvey designed and serviced a post solution encompassing every phase of post production to act as the central hub for post keep things seamless between all parties. Founder Samuel Gursky served as post supervisor for the project and supervised all parts of the process including all aspects of the Irving Harvey post solution.

PRE-PRODUCTION

The Native Son post solution started during pre-production. The film was produced with A24 so Irving Harvey worked with the production team to make sure that all of A24’s delivery requirements were planned for. We worked out the data flow plan including hard drive selections and plans for getting data from on set in Cleveland to our New York facility.

Production

During production, we chiefly liaised with DIT Paul Schillens to coordinate media and shoot information. We received runner drives from production every few days and consolidated the media to master and backup drives. Once media was consolidated watermarked dailies with on-set color adjustments applied and audio synced were generated for production to review and offline editorial files were generated and sent to SeeThink so editorial could begin working with the footage.

OFFLINE EDITORIAL

Before offline editorial started under the supervision of director Rashid Johnson, Irving Harvey worked with Johnson’s studio to design and implement a workstation setup there for Turner and assistant editor Jeffrey Star.

During the edit, Gursky remained in contact with the editorial team and production to facilitate any additional needs that arose. We prepped and delivered online VFX sends to VFXdaily during the edit as well as were needed.

ONLINE

Once picture lock was reached, we onlined the film to the Arriraw source media. We generated reels and delivered color prep to Company 3 as well as all remaining VFX prep to VFXdaily. When color, VFX, and sound were completed we compiled all delivery assets into a final timeline and generated screeners for final QC in our screening room.

DELIVERY

After the film was approved by the director and producers we generated the DCP and supplemental screening materials for the film’s premiere at Sundance. At this point there was limited time before the premiere so we leveraged our infrastructure to accelerate renders and allow for a final DCP QC. We delivered the materials to Sundance and the premiere was a success.

There were some remaining VFX and color changes to make after the premiere, so we facilitated another round of final conform and QC. With the film completed we handled delivery of all assets to A24 including final masters, final DCP, non-graded archival master, and all media archived to LTO-7. Finally, Irving Harvey remains the lab for the project and is responsible for retaining the film’s assets for the duration of the contract.

IN CONCLUSION

We frequently use the term decentralized post production to describe the trend we’ve seen of productions electing to work with favored collaborators in a variety of places and from a variety of companies as opposed to seeking a one-stop-shop post house solution to handle the entirety of post production. Native Son is an example of how we are able to facilitate this style of post production. Through a combination of supervision and service we were able to keep the project on schedule and moving smoothly, and fill in all of the workflow gaps that a conventional post production house would fill on a feature film.

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