That '70s Horror Grain

Post Logic colorist Lou Levinson teamed up with Rob Zombie for the second time for the DI on Halloween. Their first collaboration was on Werewolf Women of the SS, Zombie’s faux
movie trailer that screened in the middle of the Quentin Tarantino/Robert
Rodriguez-directed Grindhouse double feature. Levinson talks about the DI workflow and acheiving the film grain Zombie was after.
STUDIODAILY:Post Logic did the dailies, 2D effects and delivered Halloween in addition to doing the DI, how did having all that other work done in-house benefit your work as a colorist?

When you see something like a VFX that doesn't quite make it 25 ft across, or a shot that doesn't look like it belongs where it is and Inferno is across the hall and Halloween editorial is one floor up, issues tend to be resolved much more quickly. Communication between the various post factions tends to be much smoother when you can pick up the phone and say, "Can you come down and look at this and tell me if it's correct?"

Were there things you saw in the dailies that you mentioned to the production, in terms of how they could/should shoot in order to give you what you needed to acheive the appropriate look in the DI?

We spent a fair amount of time working out some general looks for the film, exploring and doing test film-outs before shooting as a sort of previz. Rob new he wanted a 70's kind of look early on.

Halloween has that '70s look. How did you, along with the director and the DP, determine that look should be in terms of aethetics?

It helps a colorist put the finish on when the production design, wardrobe, lighting, etc., have all helped to get on the desired road. There were no special tricks, look-up tables, etc., at the DI stage, just refining and applying ideas discussed earlier. And, of course, moving away from some pre-concieved ideas as needed and as the project evolved and took on it's own life.

Technically, how was this look achieved. Did you use a specific tool to get the heavy film grain?

Grain and grain management was an issue from the get go and we even looked into re-graining the whole picture with a Furnace plug-in on the Baselight to help the look. In the end taking a 2.39 extraction from spherical photography in conjunction with the contrast we were running gave us the grain Rob was looking for without having to resort to digital measures that don't always work believably, or controllably on the scale we were going to use them.

What was the DI workflow pipeline.

3 Perf S35 film scanned on a Northlight scanner. 2k files moved into Baselight8 for DI. EDL's from Halloween editorial checked in Smoke against Avid outputs and then the timelines were recreated on Baselight8. Renders of final reel versions back to Halloween editorial for confirm. Scans to Inferno and back over PL's network. Scans to MTI dust-busting and back over PL network, filmout on Arrilaser mapping 2048 pixels across academy picture area as anamorphic frames. Render reels into DCI P3 color for D-cinema release. Check and trim dci and render as XYZ, 16 bit tiff files and export on Firewire for D-cinema authoring. Render and export 2k files as source for video deliverables.