The Tourist is a 6 episode drama series which aired on New Year’s Day 2024. Series 1 premiered in January 2022 on BBC One and BBC iPlayer in the UK, as well as being broadcast in Australia and the USA.
Returning for a second season after being the ‘most watched drama series of 2022’, Elliot and his ally Helen travel to Ireland to find answers about Elliot’s identity. Instead, they are forced to face the dangerous consequences of his past actions.
UNIT Film & TV team lead by Louise Stevenson were awarded Full Picture Post & Delivery on the returning Tourist series guaranteeing a dedicated, talented team to carry out the post production, bringing together UNIT Film & TV Senior Editor and VFX Artist, Sión Penny, Producer, Devan Vimal and VFX Artist Alex Antonio.
This followed on from the Senior Colourist, Dan Coles’ outstanding grade on ‘The Tourist’ Season 1, which landed him nominations for Best Colourist in both the Broadcast Tech Innovation Awards and RTS Craft Awards.
Working closely with Production Company Two Brothers Pictures the UNIT FIlm & TV team were tasked with bringing the mysterious and action packed thriller to life carrying out the full picture post.
Season 2 was filmed in the breathtaking Irish countryside, which DOP’s Johann Perry, Stephen Murphy and Ben Wheeler honed in on using the outstanding imagery ready for UNIT Film & TV’s Dan Coles to further enhance the enchanting scenery in the grade using Baselight.
UNIT Film & TV Senior Colourist Dan Coles explains:
“Season One of this incredibly successful BBC Drama had a uniquely bold style – we achieved this in the grade by going for a very strong, and warm feel – embracing the golden hues, amber tones and oppressive heat of the Australian Outback.
It was a very exciting challenge to follow this up with Season Two, particularly after finding out it would be largely set in Ireland. Johann Perry (DOP), Fergus O’Brien (Director) and I did a pre-production camera test together using the same unique and beautiful vintage Hawke anamorphic lenses as the first series, but this time with the Alexa 35 camera, and together we created a shooting LUT.
We wanted this series to have the same bold use of contrast, but with a completely new take on the colour palette to embrace cooler and more muted tones – blues, greens and cyan – although we did retain an amount of warmth for skin tone. We also retained the same soft highlight and shadow detail roll off to create a cinematic and textured print feel.
Much of the look was captured in camera in conjunction with the bold LUT we had created. This allowed me to use the grade time to focus pretty much solely on fine tuning the look and getting continuity across the different weather conditions which was a challenge! We also had different camera formats to match, including spherically shot drone footage to which we added an anamorphic feel to help match the main unit photography. This gave a real consistency to the material. Grain was added for texture, and shapes were used to draw us into, and to enhance certain parts of the image.
Golden hues and warmth were also embraced towards the end of the series. In episode 5 we went back to our original ‘Australian’ look, and in some of the more stylised sequences we pushed the look into something closer to that of series one. “
UNIT Film & TV Senior Online Editor & VFX Artist Siôn Penny comments “One of the most challenging aspects of this project was the number of different deliverables we had to make including HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision and SDR in UHD and HD. Our pipeline allows us to derive all the deliverables we require from a single grade render and the ability to online in both SDR and HDR simultaneously in Flame means we could generate all the files we needed to a very tight schedule.”
Season 2 of ‘The Tourist’ is available to stream now on BBC iplayer.
Find out more about UNIT Film & TV here
We are Post Super Ltd , your ultimate destination for all things post-production management.