When The Woman In Cabin 10 went into production, it presented a creative and technical brief that wasn’t especially forgiving. The psychological thriller – directed by Simon Stone, shot by cinematographer Ben Davis BSC, and finished by Goldcrest – unfolds almost entirely aboard a luxury superyacht at sea. Much of the shoot took place on location: first on the real vessel, out on the water for up to 14 hours at a time, and later across remote coastal locations in Scotland and Norway’s fjords. The story relies on controlled tension, cool tones, and a creeping sense of isolation. The look needed to feel both expensive and oppressive.
Cinelab Film & Digital was asked to deliver digital dailies, dailies colour, HDR grade review, and a custom ACES 2.0 pipeline – while preserving Ben Davis’ intent from set through to editorial and beyond.
The Woman In Cabin 10 . Keira Knightley as Lo in The Woman in Cabin 10. Cr. Parisa Taghizadeh/Netflix © 2025
“The film has a kind of noir, who-done-it feel,” says Darren Rae, Dailies Colourist at Cinelab. “With Ben, there’s always a really strong sense of tone from the outset. My job is to interpret that intent, shape the base look, and then refine it with him in review.”
Close creative collaboration, without physical proximity
Rae has worked with Davis on more than a dozen features, a relationship that set the tone for work in The Woman In Cabin 10 . Instead of waiting for formal notes, Rae began grading each day’s material in line with the direction discussed in prep. Then Davis joined remotely for review sessions, reacted to what he saw in context, and they made adjustments live.
“Ben’s not someone who wants to hand over a rigid list of instructions,” Rae explains. “He’ll speak to me before the project starts, so I understand what we’re going for. Then he’ll see what I’ve done and respond to that. It’s a conversation in pictures, not just in notes.”
This type of collaboration traditionally happened in person, with the cinematographer reviewing from a calibrated environment at the dailies facility. But on The Woman In Cabin 10 , that wasn’t always physically possible. The first half of production took place almost entirely at sea on a privately owned superyacht, with very limited ability to bring equipment on board. Crew could only carry handheld gear; nothing could be rigged or placed on the decks. Later, the production moved into stage work, where sections of the yacht interior were recreated, alongside key locations in England and Scotland. For the majority of the project, Davis was on location, and Rae was based at Cinelab.
The solution was to treat the morning dailies grade review as a live, shared session between Rae in the grading theatre and Davis on location, using RePro’s remote streaming and collaboration platform. “We would go live every morning,” says Rae. “It was like Ben and I were in the same room.”
On set, that connection was anchored by the DIT team. The DIT cart carried HDR reference monitors that received both the live camera signal and the HDR dailies grade streamed via RePro, so Davis and the DIT could compare capture and grade on calibrated displays that matched what Rae was seeing in London.
The Woman In Cabin 10 . (L-R) David Ajala as Ben and Keira Knightley as Lo in The Woman in Cabin 10. Cr. Parisa Taghizadeh/Netflix © 2025
Before adopting this workflow, remote look approval was far slower and more fragmented. A colourist would grade, then send stills to the DoP for comment. The DoP would eventually review those stills, send back notes, and ask for changes. Those changes might not make it into the next day’s dailies if timing didn’t line up. Now the iteration loop is immediate.
“It hasn’t changed the creative workflow,” Rae says. “It’s just made it easier. It lets you keep doing proper supervised dailies sessions – even if you’re nowhere near each other.”
Real-time HDR review for a Netflix HDR deliverable
One of the critical requirements from both production and Netflix was to monitor and approve the look in HDR during dailies as the primary viewing space.
The final release of The Woman In Cabin 10 was mastered entirely in HDR, so Davis wanted to evaluate exposure, contrast, and highlight handling in that space from the start. Editorial, however, was cutting in SDR. That immediately created a familiar challenge: how do you grade for one colour space and hand off to another without visual drift? Cinelab addressed this by building a bespoke ACES 2.0 workflow in collaboration with Netflix and Goldcrest.
“For The Woman In Cabin 10 we worked with Netflix to implement a custom beta version of ACES 2.0 that gave improved HDR-to-SDR mapping,” says Christy Kail, Head of Workflow at Cinelab. “That allowed dailies to be graded in HDR, but editorial to still receive SDR – with accuracy and consistency across every stage of production.”
In practice, Rae graded in HDR. The live signal he and Davis were looking at during review was HDR. Then, using the custom transforms developed with Netflix and Goldcrest, Cinelab generated matched SDR versions of the same material for offline editorial. “I would do all my grades in HDR,” Rae says. “Then I’d just switch to SDR with the same look mapped down. The SDR held up really, really well. It was pretty much seamless.”
That consistent mapping between HDR and SDR was key to keeping intent intact. The production could confidently cut in SDR without losing the mood crafted on set. And Davis could sign off on the look at source, in HDR, knowing what he was approving would translate.
Keeping image integrity across locations
Part of the tension in The Woman In Cabin 10 comes from how the spaces are photographed. The superyacht interiors feel controlled, reflective, and slightly menacing. Cool, metallic surfaces and strategic accents of red heighten the sense of surveillance and unease. Later, when the story moves into darker corners of the ship and more claustrophobic environments, the palette leans harder into that noir influence.
Capturing and protecting that tonal language in dailies was essential. The challenge: much of the production was split between drastically different environments. Some material was captured on the actual yacht. Other sequences were staged later on built sets designed to match and extend the yacht interior. Still others were filmed in dramatic, weather-beaten locations across the UK and Northern Europe.
Because Cinelab was managing colour from day one, and because Davis could review and react to that material in context each morning, that tonal through-line stayed intact. “You’ve got a shoot that starts on a real, extremely high-end yacht where you’re being very careful about what you can physically bring on board,” Rae says. “Then you’re in a studio environment recreating those interiors. Then you’re in remote locations. You can’t afford visual drift. Being able to line up those looks early, in HDR, and sanity-check them together in real time was a big win.”
ACES 2.0 was part of that stability: it offered predictable transforms that didn’t introduce unexpected shifts between scenes lit and captured under very different conditions. “Sometimes in an ACES workflow, you can get situations where something’s not quite right in the transform,” Rae says. “This custom 2.0 work refined that. The mapping from HDR to SDR was excellent.”
The Woman In Cabin 10 . Pippa Bennett-Warner as Karla, Daniel Ings as Adam, Paul Kaye as Danny, Art Malik as Dr. Mehta, David Ajala as Ben, Keira Knightley as Lo, Hannah Waddingham as Heidi, Kaya Scodelario as Grace, and Christopher Rygh as Lars in The Woman in Cabin 10. Cr. Parisa Taghizadeh/Netflix © 2025
Operational simplicity matters
For all the engineering that underpins the pipeline, Rae points out that reliability and lack of friction are what really determine whether a workflow is viable on a feature.
“The strength, for me, is that I don’t have to think about it,” he says. “As long as they’re seeing what I’m seeing – and especially as long as Ben can see the HDR the way I’m seeing it – then it just works. If I’m using something and I don’t have to think about it, that’s it. That’s the win.”
At Cinelab, the setup is now standardised. Rae can run a session from the main grading theatre, an HDR suite, or another review room. The live feed can be routed to whichever environment is needed. On the production side, the cinematographer or other decision-makers can connect from set or on location using lightweight kit and review securely. RePro provides the live, colour-accurate HDR stream and collaborative session layer that makes that possible.
A model for high-stakes, location-heavy production
For The Woman In Cabin 10 Cinelab’s role extended beyond traditional dailies handling. The team – led by Dailies Colourist Darren Rae, Head of Workflow Christy Kail, Dailies Producer Rosie Goodwin, and Dailies Supervisor Fabio Cachucho – effectively built a bridge between on-set decision-making and the needs of post. The result was a dailies pipeline that supported a Netflix HDR release while still feeding SDR editorial, that maintained creative intent across real-world yachts and stage builds, and that allowed the DoP to stay visually close to the grade without physically leaving the set.
The Woman in Cabin 10. Guy Pearce as Bullmer in The Woman in Cabin 10. Cr. Parisa Taghizadeh/Netflix © 2025
Reflecting on the process, Davis credits the remote workflow as a breakthrough for maintaining creative consistency throughout production. “RePro was pivotal for the success of our first remote HDR dailies grading,” he explains. “Its stability and picture quality enabled seamless, real-time collaboration with our colourist, even in remote locations. Streamed from the Lab in London directly onto an HDR reference monitor in the DIT tent or on my iPad while travelling, RePro let me keep creative control and ensured every frame truly reflected our vision.”
From Cinelab’s perspective, this isn’t a niche solution for one unusually challenging shoot. It’s now the expectation.
The Woman in Cabin 10 is now streaming on Netflix.
