Netflix’s Tiny Creatures: Pushing Narrative With HDR Color Grade

Post Perspective 

Netflix’s Tiny Creatures is a natural history drama with an anthropomorphic approach to telling stories that show the harrowing life-and-death challenges that small animals face.

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“This is a new genre,” says Jonathan Jones, creative director of Ember Films, as well as a director and DP. “There’s nothing else like it around. It’s not a documentary and it’s not completely fiction. I call it an animal drama.”

The eight 25-minute episodes tell various stories about the lives of creatures in a narrative style more common to a feature film.

Jones called on 20-plus years of experience working with and photographing animals for natural history programming when planning for Tiny Creatures. His credits include the flagship BBC series Planet Earth II, for which he won an Emmy Award, Seven Worlds One Planet and National Geographic’s One Strange Rock.

“I understand what motivates these animals, whether they are nocturnal or diurnal, and the science behind their physiology,” he says. “I put that experience into the script so that our filming approach could be plausible and technically achievable.”

Mini Movies
This grounding allowed Jones to push each story’s drama using the tropes of cinema. A rolling ball chasing a little mammal, for instance, recalls Raiders of the Lost Ark. Water pipes burst as a mouse escapes in the nick of time. A hawk looms over a kangaroo rat like a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. And a scene with an opossum in a hen house has nightmare overtones.

With producing partners Blackfin and Momentum, Jones developed the script and formulated narrative arcs for the little creatures, giving them a voice based on their real-world habitats. For example, Episode 1 plays out like a Western, only the stars aren’t a cowboy and a bank robber — they are a rat and a snake.

The landscapes were shot in various environments at locations throughout the US. Episode 1 was filmed entirely on location in Arizona, but for the other episodes, the animals were filmed at Ember Films’ studio in England — where the habitats were rebuilt as sets (i.e., New York apartments, wood lodges, sewer systems, barnyards).

“We painstakingly storyboarded every shot to be frame-accurate so that the entire shoot would unfold just as we scheduled it,” he says. Video backplates, including footage from drones plus high-resolution stills, were captured at each location “to make everything sing visually.”

Double-Pass Technique
These elements were used as a style guide to recreate the set and tune the lighting to mimic the real environment. For example, Ember used 10-foot by 6.5-foot print enlargements mounted outside the windows of the stage, rather than greenscreen, to reveal the external world.

Other in-camera tricks included blurring depth of field so that the eye concentrates on the foreground and only subconsciously sees the background; adding physical mid-ground sections between studio-shot foreground and background plates; and making rapid cuts so the viewer doesn’t have time to interrogate the picture.

However, it was another SFX technique that enabled the shots of heroic creatures appearing to be in dire peril from being captured by predators, including a snake, an owl and a hawk. Jones explains how the “double-pass” technique ensured the animals’ safety. “We photographed one animal and then made that animal safe. With the camera angle locked, and provided nothing in the set was moved, we filmed the second animal so that when we put the frames together, it looked like a predator chasing its prey.”

This was only possible with a workflow that brought post production to the set. “To ensure that the two frames match when stitched together, rushes from each take are edited in the moment,” he says. “Some shots would have eight or nine layers of 8K footage to composite into one shot.”

His tool of choice was the Red DSMC2 camera with the Helium sensor. “I wanted to shoot the highest resolution possible,” notes Jones, who shot at 6K to 8K. “For slow-motion, we used the Phantom Flex4K often at 1000fps.”

The data requirements were eye-watering. Everything was kept raw for post in Adobe Premiere. Each day’s shoot averaged 3TB to 4TB. Each episode totaled about 80TB running online, mirrored for backup and archived on LTO. Adding to the challenges of this production, the episodes set in Washington and Louisiana were filmed at the same time with dual post workflows.

HDR Master
Tiny Creatures is also mastered in Dolby Atmos and in HDR. The color pipeline was devised and managed by Toby Tomkins, colorist and co-founder at London boutique Cheat.

“Jonathan really wanted to push the narrative with the HDR grade, which was really fun,” Tomkins recalls. “For example, when there was a shift from night to daytime or dark interior to sunny exterior, he really wanted the audience to feel the change with eyeball-iris-closing inducing dynamics to really push a heightened realism not possible in SDR.”

Alongside Tomkins was Cheat colorist Jack McGinity, who developed the base look together with Jones and graded three episodes as well. Cheat calls on Blackmagic Resolve for color grading.

Tomkins continues, “The stars of the show were the animals, and we leveraged the enhanced dynamic range and color volume to amplify the texture and colors of the animals to add depth and really make them ‘pop.’ We ultimately made the decision to prioritize the HDR grade, as we believed most viewers would benefit from the enhanced experience.”

Lighting
Shooting with the Red and Phantom cameras at the same time necessitated a lot of light to compensate for the fast speeds. To that end, they employed large HMI lights as distant sun sources but many of the scenes were lit by LED Dedolights, which emit no heat and can have their color temperature changed with ease. Other fixtures included ARRI SkyPanels for softer light and circular Rotolights.

“Circular rather than square lights are useful for highlighting the eyes and looking like a reflection of the sun,” Jones shares. “The animals are our superstars, and the temperature of the lights was always monitored.”

He continues, “If an animal wasn’t feeling ready on set, we would never push it. We always had three things scheduled at any one time as a backup in case we couldn’t go with plan A. The biggest challenge was the logistics in taking a different approach for every animal and for each episode.”

Finishing Under Lockdown
The color grade was a complex job, but due to the global pandemic, it had to be completed under lockdown conditions. “Fortunately, we had already set the tone and look for the series with Toby,” Jones relates. “When COVID forced social distancing, we used Streambox to communicate, and I had a color HDR monitor manually calibrated with Toby’s Resolve. It took longer to do reviews, but it’s testament to Toby and his skill that we made it work.”

Actor Mike Colter (Luke Cage), located in the US, had voiceover work on Episode 8 to finish when the work-from-home mandate struck. Jones says, “He recorded the episode on his iPhone while sound-proofed in his daughter’s closet using a new microphone we bought online. He had to stop at the end of each page and upload it.

“Everyone on this production worked so hard to make it what it is. This is a new genre using some of the highest-resolution cameras around, with a truly cutting-edge post workflow. Everything was a real challenge but the potential for extending the format geographically in the US or anywhere in the world, as well as changing the scale of the creatures, is exciting.”

Jones concludes, “For me, though, it all comes back down to trying to engage families in wanting to ask questions about the natural world. Hopefully by enjoying this shorter, higher-octane show, they will dig further into whole seasons of amazing shows like Our Planet and Planet Earth.”