Stephen Hawking's Universe.

Prime Focus was delighted to be asked by Darlow Smithson Productions to post produce 'Stephen Hawking's Universe' in high-definition. This landmark three-part series for Discovery delves into the incredible mind of the world’s most famous scientist, Professor Stephen Hawking.

The Physicist and Cosmologist, who also describes himself as "something of a dreamer", takes the viewers on a journey of discovery and looks at some key questions such as how did our universe begin, could alien life be found in distant planets and does our galaxy have a life expectancy?

"Prime Focus has been a real ally during the making of this very demanding series" said Ben Bowie, Executive Producer at Darlow Smithson. "They put together a robust workflow that just, well, worked. Flexibility, quality and a can-do attitude have been the hallmarks of the entire post-production process."

Prime Focus colourist Richard Fearon graded the series which uses cutting- edge effects, digitally enhanced NASA footage and live action. Richard commented "It was important to understand the significance of the project and what the client wanted to achieve overall before I started work. The audio also plays a key role, so I sat with dubbing mixer Phitz Hearne, who has done an incredible job with the sound design, to get a sense of the impact of what they’d created. It instantly hit me that it needed to be strong saturated colours and something quite striking, especially in the opening section with the really big sounds. I knew the picture needed to make as big an impact as the audio."

With regard to the look that Richard provided with the grade, he added "We wanted it to look as colourful as possible, and to look out of this world, using colours that you are not used to seeing in a science-based show. For the alien planets, I used lots of purples as we didn't want to use typical blue skies, while the creatures were a yellowy tone. It was trying something completely different; we didn't want to make it look like it was set on Earth."

Dubbing mixer Phitz Hearne in the Prime Focus audio department said "It's a beautiful piece of work and what's interesting is that its trying to illustrate, in layman's terms, some very complicated theories. What we tried to do with the sound was not just add interest to a bunch of CGI, but to use sound to give the audience an idea of our imaginings of aliens and time travel, going through wormholes etc, creating stuff that no one has any experience of. It was a really fun project to work on."

Phitz added "With the mix I've given it a filmic feel, and hearing it in 5.1 is amazing as you have all these planets flying past your head. With a project like this you tend to use the slightly weirder plug-ins that we have at our disposal. Because there is no normal sound, you can do really strange stuff and get some interesting effects. The other challenge was that Stephen Hawking actually voices sections of this through his computer so we had to find a way of segueing between Stephen Hawking and the v/o artist Benedict Cumberbatch's voice so that the audience feels that it is the same person."

Ronnie Newman pre-graded the series in FCP and then post grade onlined it in DS Nitris. Nicola Whitehead was the post producer.