CHEAT Emulates American Film for Netflix and Channel 4’s Bloody Teen Road Trip

Channel 4 airs the first episode of its 8-part darkly comic road trip tale, ‘The End of the F***ing World’ (co-produced with Netflix). Directed by Jonathan Entwistle and Lucy Tcherniak, the series was coloured by CHEAT’s Toby Tomkins.

The series invites viewers into the confused lives of teen outsiders James (Alex Lawther – Black Mirror, The Imitation Game) and Alyssa (Jessica Barden – The Lobster, Ellen, Penny Dreadful) as they decide to escape from their families and embark on a road trip to find Alyssa’s estranged father. As the pair get caught up in a series of violent events, they find themselves on a journey of discovery that becomes progressively ominous, trailed by two uniquely mismatched police detectives – played by BAFTA-winning Wunmi Mosaku (Damilola, Our Loved Boy) and Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones, The Moorside).

The television series is based on the award-winning comic books series by Charles Forsman, so Executive Producer/Director Jonathan Entwistle and DoP Justin Brown, were looking for something special stylistically, to bring the chilling yet humorous tale to life on screen. They reached out to Toby Tomkins at CHEAT, whom they have partnered with on a number of commercials and other narrative work including feature film, ‘Sixteen’.

Toby Tomkins, Co-founder and colourist at CHEAT comments: “Having worked with Jon and Justin before, we were able to establish the overall look for the series fairly quickly. We wanted to emulate something filmic and American in style, despite its British location. To do this we wanted quite a dense film print look, using skin tones you would find on celluloid film and a shadow and highlight rolloff that you would find in films as opposed to British TV.” 

CHEAT used its proprietary film emulation to create the look, working from references provided by Jonathan and Justin on a scene by scene basis. The whole series was shot in 8K, providing the CHEAT team with huge files.  In order to handle the additional processing requirements, the team invested in a new Quad GPU Linux Resolve workstation, which will now be used to service further projects in 8K resolution.

Toby Tomkins, Co-founder and colourist at CHEAT comments: “The creative benefits of the new workstation are huge. The ability to use post-shoot exposure and colour temperature settings to photo-realistically adjust and match shots allowed us more time and subsequently more freedom to focus on the finer details of the grade. I couldn’t have wished for a better series to be my introduction to episodic TV. The creative team were amazing to work with and the brief was right up my alley so it was nice to really sink my teeth into this and flex my creative muscles in the tight time frame we had.”

The series will air in the UK on 24th October 2017 on Ch4 at 10:20pm. The series will be released worldwide on Netflix as a Netflix Original on 1st January 2018.