Blancanieves Chosen To Represent Spain For Best Foreign Language Film Oscar

As featured in The Hollywood Reporter, director Pablo Berger's stunning film titled Blancanieves, which was finished using SGO's Mistika at IMASBLUE, has been chosen to represent Spain for the 85th Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination entry.
Mistika was used extensively at Spanish-based post house IMASBLUE from the outset of the project throughout the entire post production process of the film. The Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members chose Blancanieves from a three-film short-list, which is a rewarding testament to SGO and IMASBLUE's high calibre of creativity combined with technological expertise. Blancanieves also recently won Special Jury Prize and the Best Actress "Silver Shell" Award for Macarena García at the 2012 San Sebastián International Film Festival.
Produced by Arcadia Motion Pictures and co-produced by Noodles Productions and Arte France Cinema for Dreamcatcher, Blancanieves is an adaptation of the classic fairy tale of "Snow White" written by the Grimm Brothers. Set in a romantic vision of 1920s Andalusia, the silent black-and-white Spanish film raises the profile of European silent films of a bygone era.
Spain's IMASBLUE is an award-winning post production facility covering film, television and commercials, renown for receiving numerous Goya Awards. With the success of projects that include Salvador Puig Antich, Camino, Pa Negre, amongst many others, IMASBLUE is pushing new boundaries with Mistika, helping to produce stunning European productions of the quality more usually the domain of big budget Hollywood blockbusters.
After being captured on Canon 5D and Go Pro digital cameras, Blancanieves was then post produced at 2K on a 1.85 format, and relied significantly on IMASBLUE's SGO Mistika systems to deliver dramatic cinematic results. In line with excellent direction and outstanding acting performances, the film's success reflects the exceptional facilities at IMASBLUE and their talented Mistika artists.
Mistika's involvement included intensive camera tests to create the stylised filmic look the movie would finally adopt. Once shot and edited, IMASBLUE post produced the whole film using Mistika, which included the conform of all the visual effects, as well as over 500 shots that required detailed quality control (QC), before being scanned and distributed to various post production areas within the facility.
Prior to the visual effects supervision and approvals process, the material was re-conformed at IMASBLUE in Mistika. After the pre-VFX DI phase, layers were then used to integrate the approved effects accordingly, to tie-in with the film's iconic black-and-white historic mode and “feel”. Final results were then checked by the Director using an LUT, to depict a similar visual aspect of how the film would appear in reality. The high quality processing that Mistika provided ensured that the final look exactly matched those of the director's ideas. With challenging story-telling colour tools in shades of black and white, clever use of grading feature-sets were available in Mistika to help recreate the required mood. Mistika enabled the interpretation of the director's vision to be aesthetically realized.
Ferrán Piquer, Visual Effects Supervisor at IMASBLUE explains: "Thanks to Mistika we managed to accelerate lab deliveries for the movie's final conform. Owing to SGO’s Mistika system workflow being really agile, it allowed us to make final adjustments on shots from different platforms, without the need to send them back to VFX."
Every year, since 1956, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences calls for international film industries to select their best feature-length film for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The award is presented annually by the Academy to a film produced outside of the US. The Foreign Language Film Award Committee manages the process and reviews the entries. Nine finalists will be short listed in January, with the final five nominees to be announced on 10 January 2013.
The film trailer can be viewed at here
www.imasblue.es/en/what-we-do