Set in 1869, This Bloody Country tells the story of a rugged guide who leads a Mormon family on a perilous journey to build a new church outpost. After a deadly attack, he and the family’s leader must rally a group of women and children to defend themselves. As danger looms, an unexpected bond forms between the guide and one of the wives.
To bring this visual world to life, director Craig Packard collaborated closely with the film’s finishing colorist and award-winning filmmaker, Michael Lafuente, who used Mistika Boutique and Mistika Ultima to craft the gritty, desaturated, high-contrast aesthetic. The project involved complex conforming, dense compositing, and rapid delivery of masters, all while maintaining a cohesive visual identity.
Developing the Look: A Modern Take on Classic Westerns
Working between Los Angeles and Seattle, the team relied heavily on remote review during look development. After initial in-person discussions during the offline edit, Michael selected key scenes and began generating multiple look variations.
Side-by-side comparisons became essential to the process. As Michael explains, “Everyone who works with me knows I love doing side-by-side comparisons. I built a macro that shows each look full screen and then as splits, sometimes even 3×1 or 4×2. It sounds counterintuitive, but it actually speeds things up. This is especially useful when the look gets really narrowed down and it’s hard to see the subtleties.”
For the look, the film’s director envisioned a harsh, textured atmosphere that reflected the film’s historical setting. Michael notes that Craig sought “a gritty, almost high-contrast desaturated look,” grounded in the brutal experience of frontier travel. Classic westerns like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Jeremiah Johnson” became tonal references, influencing both contrast and palette.
Seamless Transition: From Boutique to Ultima
The project began on Mistika Boutique running on a Mac Pro, later expanding to a Windows setup as the studio grew quickly. However, increasing demands, especially large-scale virtual production plates up to 28K, made it clear that a more powerful solution was needed.
Transitioning to Mistika Ultima on Linux proved to be smooth, intuitive, and gave Michael a significant leap in performance. “The great thing with Mistika is that any project created in Boutique will just open in Ultima with no drama,” said Michael. The OFX plugins, project structures, and even relinking via pop-up provide a unified, scalable workflow.
Tackling most unexpected challenges in Ultima
According to Michael, most of the film takes place outside in the Utah desert. The production team had many surprises, last-minute weather changes, and other unexpected challenges that come with shooting in a harsh environment. “Most of the compositions were quite straightforward: sky replacements, adding/removing background characters and objects, enhancing blood, dust and smoke, etc. In addition, you could tell that the wind was really intense in some of the scenes that were taken on the open plains. The great thing was being able to do it all inside of the Mistika timespace.”
One example highlights how efficiently the system handled unplanned challenges: “An airplane vapor trail appeared in the corner of a wide sky shot. I grabbed the vector paint tool within Mistika and made it disappear in minutes,” described Michael.
A Highlight: The Emotional Flashback Sequence
The film has a scene where the character of Lilith (played by Maggie Gwin) is remembering when she was a child and being forced into a polygamous marriage. “This flashback is an emotionally intense scene where we are focused on young Lilith’s face (played by Lilly Mae Stover). Not only did I change Ms. Stover’s eye color from blue to brown to match Maggie Gwin’s brown eyes, but some additional work on the background to make young Lilith ‘pop’ in the scene – it’s actually 19 layers deep and only on screen for under a minute. But most importantly, it feels natural and complements the scene without anyone knowing it had grading and VFX beauty applied.”
Fast Turnaround for Reviews and Festival Deliverables
Mistika’s stability enabled rapid iteration during client sessions and test screenings. The entire grade was performed in P3-D65, allowing a single color master to feed all other deliverables – HDR, SDR, online screeners, DCP variants, and more – all without altering the base timeline. “Being able to queue up different deliverables without changing the master was incredibly valuable,” said Michael.
The colorist was under a tight festival deadline, and the trailer editor worked from a QuickTime export instead of linked RAW media, meaning edits were based on record time rather than source time. Many systems would struggle with this, but Mistika handled it effortlessly. “Tracing back to the RAWs was no problem,” Michael says and continues, “Mistika re-conformed the timeline via record time and everything just lined up again. In other tools, this would have required the assistance of a conform editor.”
This ability to make quick changes in DI against tight festival deadlines paid off, as the film won the “Audience Choice, Best Feature Award” at the Utah International Film Festival.
Discovering creativity while working on a two-hour feature film
The edit changes and the different deliverables on this feature film helped Michael to evolve with a faster conform workflow as well as a “one color master” workflow. “I really love SGO’s approach to making everything flexible and user customizable. Recently, I used this method on a two-hour feature film and I was able to conform, grade, and turn over a QC’d HDR, SDR, and theatrical master in about 3 weeks. The client was absolutely delighted with the results, and I was happy that I was able to spend time being creative and not chasing technical problems,” concluded Michael.
