NORSEMEN (SEASON 1)

Set in 790AD, “Norsemen” features the daily challenges of people living in a small Viking village, from power struggles, brotherly rivalry, gender equality, to betrayal and friendship. It's the story of people from our time, but living during the Viking era. Of course everyday choices have far more dramatic consequences and that makes for great comedy material.

At a glance, "Norsemen" looks and sounds like a mix between "Vikings" and "Game of Thrones", but as soon as you get to know the characters and hear the dialogue you quickly understand that this something different. The series has high production value, but has humor in the vein of "Black Adder" and "Monty Python" but with a modern twist. A extremely fresh approach.

The series features a vast cast of popular Norwegian actors, some of which who also stared in the hit Netflix series "Lilyhammer".

Another special aspect of this production is that it was shot in both English and Norwegian language. The Norwegian speaking version, "Vikingane", was released in October 2016 and had great ratings. The English speaking version will probably hit the American / International market during 2017 via a "major" US distributor. As of now I can´t disclose more than that.

The series is extremely funny, and has plenty of embarrassing moments and "dirty" jokes, with lots of blood-splatter where needed.

It was great fun to colour this series together with the creative team. Especially since the series had a lot have talented people onset. DOP Håvar Karlsen, directors Jon Iver Helgaker and Jonas Torgersen wanted an epic look with muted colours, something gritty and worn. I looked at the supplied reference imagery, took that on-board, and mixed in my gut feeling. This resulted in a library 4 - 5 different looks for each main location, which I presented on our first grading session. A lot of these looks made it through to the final grade.

I graded both the Norwegian version (six episodes) and the soon to be released English version (six episodes). The equivalent episodes in both languages share roughly 40% of the same material, but all the sequences with dialogue are different. So I was able to reuse grades from "shared" clips using Davinci Resolve´s Color Trace function. This saved time during the grade of "Norsemen".

Season two has already started shooting, in both Norwegian and English. Hopefully I´ll grade season two too.

Below you can see the colour-flow throughout all six episodes (ep1 at the top, start frame to the left).