Toxic Norway's Oystein Larsen explains how, with a single plug-in, he keeps production looks and colors consistent throughout the DI process on the upcoming WWII epic Max Manus.

With the legions of iconic American- and British-made World War II movies forever lodged in our collective memory, it’s easy to forget that the war raged well beyond the European and Pacific theaters. It’s even easier to think that big-budget WWII epics can only be made in Hollywood.
Filmkameratene and Miso Film’s Danish/Norwegian co-production, Max Manus, aims to change that. The film, slated for a Scandinavian release this December and now in the final stages of post, tells the true story of a Norwegian resistance fighter who battles the Communists in Finland before returning to Norway to fight the occupying Nazis during World War II. Though the film’s $26 million budget is modest by recent Hollywood standards, it is nonetheless the largest ever for a Norwegian film.
For the production’s Visual Effects Supervisor, Oystein Larsen of Toxic Norway, the bigger budget means dealing with more complex CGI shots, many of which had to be created from scratch. It also means dealing with more than one visual effects shop in the mix. “This is the first Norwegian film to have several VFX studios collaborating on a single project,” Larsen says. “It was vital for us to find tools that let them all work in the same manner without compromising image quality and bit depth.”
Larsen’s saving grace came in the form of Duiker Research’s plug-in Color Symmetry, a tool he used with its creator Haarm-Pieter Duiker when the two worked on The Matrix Reloaded (which, in contrast, had a reported budget of about $127 million) in 2003. For Max Manus, Larsen’s studio is using v2.0, which can handle RAW formats from RED, Dalsa, Panavision and ARRI cameras and can read, export and convert color data from a variety of industry-standard and ASC-compliant Look-Up Tables (LUTs). It is expected to begin shipping this fall.
“Color Symmetry lets you preview the look of film throughout the entire DI process,” adds Larsen, “and for this project, that means we could effortlessly deploy the suite to handle this across all the studios involved, no matter what tools they were using, be it Maya, mental ray, Renderman, Shake, Nuke, Fusion—to name only a few of the supported packages—running on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, 32- or 64-bit. Before this, we would try to match up the log plates without any LUTs.”
Sinking Ships, One Pixel at a Time
A member of the so-called Oslo Gang, Max Manus evolved into a cunning saboteur, helping to sink the SS Donau, a German troop ship that had at one time transported Norwegian Jews to a concentration camp in Stettin before they were sent on to Auschwitz.
Larsen and his team were asked to recreate the Donau digitally, as well as most of the other ships, fighter planes and burning cityscapes that appear throughout the film. “The Donau is completely computer generated, as are the German planes and boats shown here in the harbor at night,” says Larsen. “The overview of the city was shot in front of a bluescreen and is a CG/matte paint combination. But the entire mid-ground in that shot is 3D.” [Note: All images shown here are not finals and have not yet been color graded.]
These effects shots will be cut with live action shots filmed in multiple locations in Norway, Scotland and England. “Color Symmetry has been an invaluable tool for us,” says Larsen. “I’m used to this pipeline, and I’m glad I can bring what I’ve learned in Hollywood back to the Norwegian film community and VFX scene here. Without this plug-in, I honestly don’t think we would have been able to keep to our tight deadline, especially on such an elaborate project. Color Symmetry takes all the guess-work out of it. Now all I have to do is calibrate my monitor.”
Check out Toxic Norway’s other work in television and film here. Learn more about Color Symmetry v.2.0 here, or visit the Duiker Research site here.