Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man used a digital-to-film-to-digital workflow to give its Netflix feature-length instalment a more textured cinematic finish.
In an interview with TVBEurope, senior colourist Simone Grattarola of Time Based Arts explained how he worked with director Tom Harper and cinematographer George Steel to move the film beyond the desaturated look of the original series. The new brief drew more from 1930s, 1940s and 1950s Technicolor, with a richer palette designed for a theatrical release before the film moves to Netflix.
The unusual step came after digital capture. The team used Cinelab Film & Digital’s digital film development process, recording the digital master onto Kodak 50D negative film using a high-speed 4K film recorder. After photochemical processing, the film was scanned back to digital for a final pass in DaVinci Resolve Studio.
The point was not nostalgia for its own sake. Grattarola said early attempts to emulate film grain and halation with digital tools felt too controlled and too perfect. By passing the image through real film, the team introduced small shifts in colour, skin tone and texture that a colourist might normally be trained to correct. Here, those imperfections became part of the look.
That makes the workflow a useful example of a wider post-production tension. Digital tools are now precise enough to simulate almost anything, but some productions still want the instability of a physical process because it creates variation that is hard to fake convincingly.
For high-end film and episodic work, the lesson is not that every show needs to be recorded out to film and scanned back. It is that “film look” is increasingly a workflow choice rather than a capture format. Productions can shoot digitally, finish digitally and still use a photochemical stage as a creative layer when the image needs something less tidy than software perfection.