Asif Kapadia’s heart-wrenching documentary Amy takes a look at the ill-fated torch singer Amy Winehouse through interviews with associates and a wealth of archival material, from home movies of her as a young girl to some of her final, drug-ravaged performances. Paul Ensby of Company 3 London faced a number of interesting challenges while doing the final grade of the film, which contained footage from multiple formats – many of which are of quite low technical quality – and a lot of supers, including names and lyrics.

“We brought everything into the theater full frame,” he says, noting that he was charged with reframing everything to work within the final 1.85:1 delivery aspect ratio. They also worked with all the supered material as separate layers. “It was important to be able to see all the shots working in context and to have the freedom to change something quickly,” he notes.

Kapadia wanted Amy to look like a film, “not like a TV show,” Ensby adds. “So we went in and made a lot of the material seem more ‘lit.’ We’d highlight people in within the frame and subdue some of the more garish colors in some of the material shot in very old formats. Then we also went through and did everything possible to bring up the quality in some of the older footage and then sometimes even soften some of the brand new HD material to make everything flow together.”