SÅ OCK PÅ JORDEN

In 2004 director Kay Pollack's movie "As it is in Heaven" (Så som i himmelen) was released.
The movie was selected as a Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Picture in 2005. The movie was one of the most successful movies of all times in Sweden.

This year Pollack is back with the continuation of the story about Lena and the choir in the small village in northern Sweden.
It contains a rare mix between laid-back country humor, serious life changing events and the importance of spreading happiness.

I had the great pleasure of being the colourist for this feature film, working closely with director Kay Pollack and cinematographer Harald Gunnar Paalgard.
The look for this movie focused around making the characters feel believable and authentic, while strengthening the storyline for each scene as it unfolds.
So in other words the grade is intended to be natural, not pushed too far.

Director Kay Pollak had a clear vision concerning the feeling the movie should have, he incite was crucial to transport the images where he had envisioned them.

The movie was beautifully shot by Norwegian DOP Harald Gunnar Paalgard, who is a highly experienced cinematographer with over 50 feature films behind him.
He is a true master of light. I found it especially inspirational to explore the pictures with him, since he thought like a classical painter.

We used a large amount of power windows to control the light, basically old fashion dodge and burn techniques to create enhanced depth and to draw the eye towards important elements to tell the story. Great stuff!

The movie includes a wide variety of locations and is shot during all seasons, grading directly on the RED RAW 4K files was a huge bonus when we needed to match clips with different practical lighting within the same scene. The DaVinci Resolve and the big-controlsurface also helped out. We monitored on a Christie 2K projector.
For some of the low light scenes the RED images where noisy, I used NeatVIdeo (OpenFX for Resolve) to clean things up and regrained the entire feature with Kodak 35mm filmgrain from Film Convert (OpenFX for Resolve).

Below you can see colourflow for the whole feature film and a comparison between the ungraded flat REDlogFilm-gamma and the final graded image.

In addition to grading this 1450 clip / 2h 15min movie, I also comped a number of VFX-shots and did the final online.

The movie will premiere in Sweden 04.09.2015. It has also been sold to a number of other countries, among other Germany, Australia, Finland, Denmark and Norway.

Check out the trailer!