Production: Rooster

Josh Bohoskey on crafting the textured autumnal look on Rooster

Words Adrian Pennington 

Created by Bill Lawrence and Matt Tarses, HBO comedy Rooster stars Steve Carell as an author teaching at an Ivy League university where his daughter is a professor.

The series blends warm autumn tones, soft blown highlights, heavy textures and deliberately imperfect contrast behaviour into an image that’s far removed from the polished Rec. 709 look associated with many contemporary sitcoms.

At the centre of that process was the collaboration between DOP Blake McClure, ASC, colourist Josh Bohoskey, who works for colour boutique Rare Medium, and LA post facility DigitalFilm Tree, where LUT design, dailies, VFX and final grading all existed within the same DaVinci Resolve ecosystem.

“This was never about making comedy look dark or moody,” Bohoskey begins. “The brief was warmth. We kept saying the show should feel like a wool sweater: comforting, nostalgic, textured.”

Initially inspired by the blown highlights and analogue texture of 2023 satire Dream Scenario, McClure and director Jonathan Krisel explored shooting Super 16 before pivoting toward large format 65mm digital capture.

The production ultimately adopted Blackmagic’s URSA Cine 17K 65, shooting primarily in 8K using the full width of the sensor within a 2:1 aspect ratio. McClure paired the camera with Camtec Falcon glass, typically working around a 55mm T1.3 focal length to preserve intimacy while exploiting the compression and spatial rendering of the large sensor.

 

Building the look

Bohoskey first collaborated nearly a decade ago with McClure on pre-taped shorts for Saturday Night Live. He was brought onto Rooster before principal photography began and used DigitalFilm Tree’s Resolve-based workflow to develop the show’s look during lens, wardrobe and exposure testing.

A defining ingredient of the process became the Camtec’s Color-Con filter system, which introduces coloured LED illumination directly into the lens through a matte-box-mounted diffusion system. The Color-Con alters shadow density, highlight roll-off and contrast dynamically depending on exposure.

“The Color-Cons were wild,” Bohoskey explains. “Even small exposure changes would drastically shift the contrast structure. We had to figure out where the image would generally live exposure wise so we could build LUTs around that.”

These filters introduced subtle colour contamination, ‘greens, magentas and warmth shifts’, while simultaneously exaggerating both the lens shading and vignetting across the large format 65mm image circle.

“It completely destroys the image in this incredibly beautiful way,” Bohoskey describes. “There are weird imperfections happening that you wouldn’t intentionally design. That then became part of the show’s identity.”

Blackmagic later developed a Resolve plug-in inspired by the look, but Bohoskey says the production decided to stay committed to the practical filters because of their unpredictability.

“While the plug-in could emulate it closely, the physical filters were doing these strange organic things that felt impossible to fake.”

Contrast and vignetting

The aggressive vignetting generated by the Color-Con system, compounded by the natural edge shading of the large format sensor and lenses, proved the main issue when grading. “Some shots almost looked like you were viewing the world through a pinhole,” Bohoskey says.

DigitalFilm Tree handled dailies and online finishing internally, allowing all the departments to work inside the same shared Resolve project. That was important because the dailies team initially spent time manually compensating for the different shifting vignette patterns.

“They were trying to fight every shot individually,” Bohoskey says. “So I built a reverse-vignette structure that opened the image back up enough for editorial while preserving the character of the look.

“Every shot became this push and pull between removing technical vignetting and then deciding how much creative shaping you wanted back in afterward.”

The integrated Resolve workflow meant VFX updates, editorial revisions and colour changes all appeared in real time without renders or reconforms.

“We were sharing the same Resolve project across departments,” Bohoskey notes. “There was no exporting timelines or constantly sending versions back and forth. VFX drop-ins and reframes would just appear.”

Grading 8K BRAW

Although Bohoskey had worked in Resolve for several years after leaving The Mill, Rooster represented his first major episodic production built entirely around Blackmagic Raw acquisition.

The show shot 8K BRAW using Q3 variable bit rate (VBR) compression to keep storage requirements manageable while still preserving grading flexibility. According to McClure, the resulting files were actually smaller than some recent ALEXA 35 productions.

“We were throwing everything at those images,” he says. “Grain, texture, colour separation and heavy contrast manipulation were all able to be held together beautifully.”

Despite the show’s aggressive grading approach, only one shot across all ten episodes required denoising.

Not to mention, the 8K workflow also provided considerable reframing flexibility in post, especially given the show’s unconventional large format camera. McClure positioned cameras physically closer to actors than would traditionally occur in comedy coverage, exploiting the lack of distortion and the spatial compression of the 65mm sensor.

Creating New England in California

Although Rooster is set within an Ivy League-style East Coast institution, production took place largely in Los Angeles and at the University of the Pacific campus near San Francisco. Recreating the feel of a north-eastern autumn became another collaboration between grading and VFX.

“The biggest challenge was foliage,” Bohoskey says. “We couldn’t just turn trees orange and call it done.”

VFX handled large-scale seasonal transformations and palm tree removals, while Bohoskey refined colour separation and density in the final grade. “We needed subtle variation in the leaves,” he says. “Not just orange blobs. You still needed detail and depth.”

In winter scenes, secondary grading was used to suppress California greenery and shape backgrounds toward colder north-eastern palettes. “Sometimes it was as simple as desaturating green grass in the background or isolating out-of-focus trees in order to push the environment further.”

The approach proved convincing enough that many viewers reportedly assumed the series had genuinely been shot in the Boston area.

Refining the pipeline

By the end of the first season, Bohoskey says the creative team felt they had fully discovered the show’s visual identity. “We actually went back and reviewed our favourite moments from each episode afterward. Episodes 9 and 10 especially felt like we’d really found the language.”

Season 2, which will reportedly move visually past winter and into spring, is already prompting refinements. Bohoskey is developing dailies node structures designed to carry directly into final grading sessions, reducing the need for rebuilds during finishing.

“The goal is to hit the ground running,” he says. “It’s still a comedy at the end of the day, but we wanted it to feel tactile and human, and not polished or sterile. Something warmer and more lived-in.

This article appears in the June/July 2026 issue of Definition