Splice completed full post production for the BBC sitcom 'Here We Go', created by Tom Basden. We follow the Jessops family as they navigate life's everyday challenges. 'Don’t be fooled by the ordinary look of the show', as Benji Wilson from the Telegraph puts it. With top ratings flooding in, the show has already been named a ‘masterpiece’.
Shot on ARRI Alexa by DOP Jeremy Hewson and directed by Will Sinclaire, the series was graded by Splice’s Head of Picture, Adam Dolniak, in an ARRI Log C wide gamut colour space. A colour space conversion layer was used in the grade stack in order to accommodate a creative Rec709 LUT.
'Here We Go' follows teenage son, Sam, as he makes a documentary about his family for his media studies coursework. Because of the home video style footage many shots were continuous; lasting between 1-3 minutes, meaning each episode averaged around 100 shots.
The overall look was to feel unobtrusive with natural saturation and contrast levels. The persistent character movement between different spaces meant each shot required dynamic grades with lots of tracking. For clarity between time periods, one scene required a character’s dress colour to be changed from red to green. This was done using Baselight’s DKey tool combined with tracked roto work.
Splice’s Senior Dubbing Mixer Joe Cochrane and Sound Editor Elliott Bowell completed the sound on the series in Splice's new Nile Street facility.
For Elliott, it was key to get the dialogue editing as clean as possible, so each character’s lines could be heard clearly. With a chaotic family setting of the series, the interjections were fast paced to keep the scenes moving forward. Izotope's Post Production Suite was used to clean-up and preserve as much of the original audio as possible, removing any unwanted background noises and interference.
In order to create a sense of disorganised family dynamic almost every gap between dialogue was filled with ADR - usually involving off-hand comedic remarks or reactions from cast members.
With the large number of ADR cues, the sound team utilised Sounds In Sync's EdiPrompt to carefully mark up every cue for each character in advance, creating a streamlined and efficient workflow for the ADR sessions.
Joe Cochrane mixed the series using Avid S6 in ProTools Ultimate. The series was mixed in one ProTools session, which gave Joe further creative control to mix sounds from different episodes and to deliver a consistent feel throughout all episodes.
The single-take point-of-view camera shooting style led to opportunities for perspective shifts with Sound Effects and atmospheres, giving the viewer no chance to hear anything before it was happening on screen.
All episodes of Here We Go are available now on BBC iPlayer.