First Dates Hotel

Client: Twenty Twenty

Talent: Grade and Online by David Grewal

Brief: Complete the grade and online of a 6 x 60-mins series set in a four-star hotel with a Michelin-starred restaurant in southern Italy for Channel 4.  Maître d’ Fred takes a break from the show’s restaurant to take over the running of a luxury hotel where he will welcome singletons from the UK on a two-day dating stay.

How it was done: The style brief was to push the colours and brightness as much as possible to accentuate the hotels stunning exterior and luxury interior using Baselight Editions. The biggest challenge was pulling as much colour from the foliage in the hotel grounds as it consisted mainly of olive trees which can be quite grey. A combination of saturation and hue shift was used to pull as much green from the gardens as possible in conjunction with shapes and tracking effects. The next challenge was to create the same feel inside the hotel and restaurant as outside by the pool as the interior was very dark. Here, Neat Video’s noise reduction plug-in was a life saver as the brightness had to be pushed a great deal creating extremely noisy pictures. This was applied in the online where David used Avid Symphony where titles and credits were also created.

Watch it: Six episodes on All 4 now.