Color Commentary

If you saw The Island, this summer’s big-budget sci-fi/action adventure from director Michael Bay and DreamWorks, you’ve seen the current state of the art in digital finishing. Interestingly, if you saw Junebug, an atmospheric release set in the American South from debut director Phil Morrison and Sony Classics, you’ve also seen a digital success story. While The Island is a tweaked-out extravaganza boasting sharp, lush images with deep blacks and saturated colors, Junebug is a straightforward indie-style drama from a director who claims Yasujiro Ozu and Abbas Kiarostami among his influences. The DI helps Michael Bay amplify his high notes, and it helps Morrison modulate his overall tone.

The DI process, undertaken at different budgetary levels, can help studio movies and indies get the best possible image, whether their camera negative is film stock or straight-up digital data. But it’s not a bulletproof process, and to this day some filmmakers remain confused about what a DI is, and what it isn’t. For this story, we contacted industry insiders who have recently taken on a digital intermediate and asked them to share their experiences, lodge some complaints, and explain some best practices, as they see them, for optimizing a DI at any budget level.

For DP Peter Donahue, who shot Junebug in Super 16, Sundance 2005 was a harrowing experience. "I was sitting there in a cold sweat for an hour and a half," he says. "I was crying." At the root of Donahue’s anxiety was the film’s original quasi-DI: a digital finish at D5 resolution that he took to Sundance with high hopes.

"We saw it in post, and they said that’s what we would see when it was projected," he recalls. "But we saw it four times at four different [Sundance] venues, and each time it was a different look." Donahue suffered through those screenings, but when Junebug was accepted for the New Directors/New Films series in New York, and with Cannes right around the corner, he knew a proper DI had to be done, and quickly. "They don’t project video, so we had to get a print made – and if we had a print made of the HD version it would have been a disaster."

So Junebug ended up at PostWorks in New York, where colorist John Crowley evaluated the unsatisfactory HD master. "Right away, you could tell a lot of noise reduction was used," Crowley recalls. "The artifacts were out of control. It looked very, very electronic. We decided to rescan the film at 2K resolution [on a Thomson Spirit datacine] using the Scream grain reducer. We used the setting that was called for according to the stock that was shot [Kodak 5218] and looked at it on the big screen. With Scream, the reduction is done on the film chain level, but if we had needed to add more, we could have done that on the iQ."

Crowley worked together with Donahue to gain an understanding of the visual strategy, then used power windows and vignettes on a Pandora Pogle system to refine and complete the looks that were indicated on the D5 master, applying them to the 2K data files. The color-corrected files went back to PostWorks editor George Bunce for dust-busting and compositing on the iQ system.

The film’s look wasn’t changed dramatically in the DI process, Donahue notes, which was always the point. "The HD version did not represent what we shot," he says. But the production had decided it was important to do a digital blow-up early on, so the director could relax a little bit on set, confident that even performances that were shot at different times and under different conditions could be easily matched during the DI process. "Knowing he was going to do a DI, it was heaven," says Donahue.

Donahue says he’d still advise anyone shooting a feature in Super 16 to use a DI rather than an optical blow-up, but says filmmakers need to do their homework before starting out. "There’s a lot of ambiguity, a lot of people getting their sea legs in the digital transfer world- there’s too many people pretending, and you’ve just got to know what the real story is," he says.

Da Vinci’s Rich Montez, senior colorist and director of the Da Vinci Academy, agrees that the only insurance policy against a messy DI process is solid experience. "What I’ve seen is that there are now people who call themselves DI specialists, and I’m not sure if they are DI specialists," he says. "I know of one in particular who says they’re a DI colorist. Well, they weren’t a colorist before, so I don’t know how they’re a DI colorist now."

The challenges increase with the complexity of a product. On a studio picture, where production and post may take place thousands of miles away from each other, it’s of the utmost importance that systems be calibrated so that the colorist is working in the same color space that the DP sees when dailies are projected. On Kingdom of Heaven, according to Technicolor’s Marco Bario, the DI was performed at Technicolor’s facilities in London, but the film prints were recorded in Hollywood, where capacity is higher. Because Technicolor runs both facilities and keeps them calibrated, the process was seamless.

But what happens when you bring a third party into the mix? VFX artists are increasingly finding themselves on the spot when it comes time to deliver shots for a movie whose final look may be far from locked in. Gray Marshall of Gray Matter FX is working through these issues as he moves from project to project. VFX facilities working on features usually get flat film scans, with no color timing applied, to work from. And when a DI facility is involved in the project, Marshall notes, they generally ask the VFX vendors not to adjust the color at all. "I have no problem with that," Marshall says. "But it leads to the obvious conclusion that it would be nice if, before they turn over those elements, they would actually go ahead and do some preliminary color on it under the supervision of the DP or another color-approval person."

Marshall says last-minute color tweaks in the DI suite can have specific and detrimental effects on VFX work. "This came up for the first time in a film when we were asked to put in some delicate smoke FX that were just below the threshold of white," he says. "There was a blown-out white sky, and we put in our delicate FX. But when the preliminary DI came back, they had grabbed the sky and brought out the color in the sky to make it darker and more blue. Suddenly, our delicate, pale wisps became solid gray masses. And that’s when I vowed that I needed to know the context in which this work is all being done now."

So Marshall is agitating for an early commitment to color decisions in the course of making any film, whether studio or independent, that requires VFX work. "Different facilities have different systems that are all being used to great effect, so the question is, how does a person outside that particular loop maintain that consistency?" The answer, he says, is for DI houses to specify color decisions before the VFX houses start to work. On Lords of Dogtown, Marshall actually negotiated this point with the studio and the DP, Elliot Davis. For a key sequence in which Gray Matter had to re-create the Pacific Ocean Park Pier, Marshall ensured that Davis would do a color-correction pass on the footage at DI facility Fotokem before turning the sequence over to the VFX team.

"It isn’t necessary that it be 100 percent, but it needs to be in the ballpark," Marshall says. "And that means that, no matter what the viewing environment, if the VFX facility treats the image cleanly and with respect, the colors are already built in and produce a consistent effect that can be relied upon for color truthfulness."

VFX supervisor Eric Brevig, who just finished work on The Island, agrees that current DI methodology can compromise the quality of VFX. "Technically, one has to be careful," he says. "You don’t take the digital data and, in the course of doing your effects work, reduce the color depth or contrast range, because you never know how it’s going to go. That’s a self-defense approach, which I hate, but that’s what I’m doing these days.

"The better approach is to try and inform the filmmaker that, for the same amount of money, he can have a great looking shot or a shot that doesn’t look as good. Isn’t it to his benefit to ensure that the highest quality shot is in his movie for the same price? There would be intermediate checks and balances where the work is previewed in an accurate viewing venue, which is probably the DI house. Maybe he wishes it was six stops bluer and much darker. If you have that advance warning, you can work in that color space and only that color space. That’s riskier, because in the last few minutes of looking at a whole movie a reel may not look right and get changed a lot. But everyone isn’t spending man hours trying to cover all bases."

Dan Schmit, VFX cinematographer at Engine Room, says that, like so much of the business, the respect afforded a VFX artist is at least partly a function of relationships. "If the VFX supervisor has done his job really well, and has mind-melded with the director so that they share a common vision, the director is going to fight for the effects," Schmit says.

As much as VFX artists may get headaches trying to make their own shots bulletproof, colorists do their own share of head-banging when the effects arrive. "Quite often, you’ll be coloring an entire project without seeing a lot of the visual effects," says Siggy Ferstl, a senior colorist at Riot Santa Monica who does DI work at Company 3. "When the VFX shots are dropped in, they may look nothing like the shots on either side, so you have to try and blend them in. I’ve also had experiences with VFX companies who have not had their monitoring calibrated very accurately, and they’ll look at what they’ve done on our projection screen and say,‘Well, it doesn’t look like that on my screen.’ One lesson is for the VFX company to try and work with the DI facility to align their calibration to ours, whether it’s a job-specific thing or a general policy. But I’m having to spend time on trying to make these shots work, and sometimes it does compromise what they have done. The end result is probably not what anyone would hope for."

How early can color decisions be made? One implication of new digital workflows is that the DI process can begin during the timing of the first digital dailies. "What we’ve had some really good success with is to think of the DI as starting in the dailies process," says Technicolor’s Bario. "If the show does HD dailies, they’ll always do HD previews, and if they go to a test screening, there’s always color-correction done. In these cases our dailies colorist had done the color for the previews, so that’s a first run for the DI. If you get everyone on board, there are no surprises when you get into the DI suite."

And in many cases, DPs communicate with colorists by working through their color decisions on set, either by taking digital snapshots and manipulating them in Photoshop before emailing them along, or by using a more sophisticated look-management system like those from Kodak (KLMS), Gamma & Density (3cP) and a new entrant from Iridas (SpeedGrade OnSet; see Tools of the Trade, pg. 37).

"The unsolved challenge is getting better on-set visualization and a better understanding of where things can go as you’re shooting, to make adjustments in terms of capture," says Maurice Patel of Autodesk. "We showed a prototype at NAB of a G4 laptop-based software product we’re developing. We’re showing it to DPs and other above-the-line people to see what kind of problems we need to be solving, because the problems are still not well-defined."

"[On-set color correction] is another communication tool and, for a long time, still photos have been the best," says Da Vinci’s Montez, noting that DPs can run a software-based version of Da Vinci’s new Resolve system on a laptop and adjust the color of digital stills, creating a color decision list that can be saved on a USB stick or floppy and loaded up in the DI suite. "Now they can be more creative with more looks, and they’re taking advantage of it," he says.

Brevig says any discussion of new VFX workflows has to take into account the financial realities of production and post. "The dream solution is that they should invite us down and we’ll watch the whole thing and argue with the DP and the colorist about how to make the work look the best," he says. "But, especially in these days of extremely short post-production periods, you can’t get down there because you’re busy trying to finish the movie. And it isn’t going to be embraced by the producers who don’t want to pay you to sit at the post facility, just like they don’t want to pay the DPs to do the same thing." Maybe, Brevig suggests, it should be standard practice for the DI colorist to spend a day or two on set, checking out lights and gels and getting a feel for the look of a given movie, the same way a sound designer might want to spend time watching production.

Engine Room’s Dan Schmit takes a pragmatic approach, noting that no matter how early on in a production you design your look, well, plans can change. When that happens, all bets are off. "VFX is the last thing to get dropped in, they color correct after they’re done, and you’re never invited," says Schmit. "Suddenly, at the last minute, they make a big stylistic decision:‘Let’s make this scene really dark!’ And they’ll all be grooving on it, but when they do that, they’re crushing all the detail out of the effects they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating. I feel the pain. But in the filmmaking process, there are times when the plan has to go away and you have to deal with what you’ve got."