The neat thing about Dune
was we were tasked with creating this
traditional film look.
From the beginning, they did some testing.
They shot large format film in the desert.
That was immediately evocative of Lawrence of Arabia.
People have become used to the digital level of accuracy,
but they still want that filmic feel.
So we developed this new process where we created a way
to efficiently take the digital portion of the film, bring it
back to film, scan it back in and have the color match the
original as it was digitally created, but still
provide a lot of the different effects that would have been
natural to film.
So there was a lot of tests to make sure that we maximized
that negative as a data storage device.
And then there was a lot of R&D that went into the color
science of actually being able to analyze that negative and
bring it back to the original digital file so that we only
had to do a little bit of creative eyeballing at the very
end because all of the heavy lifting was done procedurally.
And it turned out that the way it was done very naturally
mimicked the grain in size patterns that were used on
large format film.
The film feel and the film characteristics of Dune are
very evocative of these large format 65 millimeter original
acquisition shots of desert.
The kind of things that you would have seen in
Lawrence of Arabia.
It was really neat to be able to create a technology that
allowed the use of all of this advanced digital
onset technology, but still gave you a lot of the
properties that were intrinsic to the cinematic language of
this sprawling desert scape.
It was creating that process that allowed this analog
intermediate element to be used in a way that
facilitates digital filmmaking.
Super cool to work on.
It was exciting to be able to do something new.
I mean, to really get the time and to make a brand new film
process that helps tell stories in the digital age.
It was a lot of work, but it turned out fantastic.
We graded it a number of times to find the right feel and
experimented and really thought creatively about what we were
trying to do with color.
That's why being a colorist is the best job in the world.
You get paid to be creative and have fun and make movies
with amazing filmmakers.
What more could you want?
When they were shooting the movie and doing their
production design, I think that they did a lot of
really bold choices.
And I think that that attitude carried on into the color.
And I think that it was really about making big swings and
being aggressive and doing things that were fun and
interesting and bold and maybe a little scary sometimes.
That was a movie where we went very dark in scenes and we
rode a line of darkness where things were barely visible,
maybe just a couple of eye lights poking
through complete darkness.
And to me, that was the kind of scene where I think having an
accurate color environment at home is critical because those
little subtleties are only going to come across if the TV is
set up correctly.
If your TV is not looking right, you might be
looking at mush.
And for me, it just gets to this idea that color as an
artistic medium needs to be exhibited correctly because all
of those little choices that were made won't make any sense
if your TV's not set up right.
There's a scene where the queen starts reading the letter from
the Green Knight and we shifted all of the tonality green that
wasn't done in camera, that was done in DI (Digital Intermediate).
And we enhanced her eyes.
So their eyes read a certain way.
And there were so many moments in that scene where color was
so important and so thought out of and really helped tell the
story the way Andrew and David wanted.
And it was exhilarating.
It was fun.
We had fun.
We were looking at things in ways that we didn't always
think of originally and really taking the time to discuss what
we were doing by doing sometimes very small changes.
I also think that the Green Knight's an interesting
project too, and then that it was also for the HDR finish was
also very aggressively graded.
So HDR technology for those you don't know allows for
televisions or display devices to produce colors that are just
simply brighter than were ever possible before.
And this unleashed a whole new range of creative opportunity.
And in the beginning, just because the
technology's there, the creators want to explore it,
but they really need help in understanding what the edges
are or the contours, how it relates to their stories.
We graded on a Dolby Pulsar that runs at 4000 nits, which is
about 40 times brighter than your normal TV.
And it shows. There's lightning flashes and scenes in there
that are peaking at peak brightness.
But then there's also scenes that are dim
And you can barely make out what's happening.
And again, a lot of thought was put into what we did and how we
embraced that medium.
So many proud moments.
I think that the opening scene where the Green Knight is
introduced in the Great Hall was a scene that was really
enhanced with color.
And I think that Andrew did a great job shooting it, and a
lot of the work we did together was a lot of
just enhancements, like really bringing out eyes and like
shaping the frame so that your eye went to the right place,
but also like very subtle enhancements of tweaking the
color of all of the fire so that it perfectly complemented
the blue tones in the production design.
Everybody is super excited about it, and I think it's one
of the most beautiful movies I've ever had the privilege
of collaborating on.
The Red Rocket is a film that I just finished with Sean Baker
and the DP Drew Daniels, and it's a really neat color movie as well
in that they did shoot on Super 16 film.
And even more interesting, they shot Anamorphic Super 16,
which is super special that I think there is just one set of
lenses that Panavision made that could do that.
And again, this just shows you the thought filmmakers put into
making things like everything's intentional.
They're choosing all of these different mediums for a reason
in terms of their storytelling.
The Red Rocket is
amazing, too, because it's a really bold looking movie.
One of the tools I use, which is DaVinci Resolve,
one of the things I like about it is it's kind of a sandbox,
and I like making my sandcastles a certain way.
One of the really powerful things was that it lets me build
my own workflows and color pipelines that are
unique to myself.
And one of the things I like about that is it makes every
movie unique in that by not using these predefined looks
and pre-defined color workspaces and workflows is
that I don't have to do anything that I don't want
to do, and I want to do what's best for the film and for the
filmmakers to help them execute that in the most elegant
and beautiful fashion.
One of the things I'm very proud of, is that over the
years I've worked with our head color scientist Joseph Slomka,
to build my own color pipeline and my own color management.
And I do this for every movie I work on now, and it gives me a
creative flexibility that I found invigorating,
enlightening and freeing.
And because I don't like to paint within the lines,
I've been able to come up with a color pipeline that lets me
paint wherever I want.
There was nothing like Star Wars.
Star Wars was just always huge and loomed large and just took
up so much
imagination space.
And to be able to be part of the new stories
is just fantastic.
It's a little kids dream.
It's using my adult skills to fulfill the dreams of a little
kid to be part of these stories.
The process of integrating the film and the digital together
in a seamless matter was started from the
beginning of production.
A lot of testing was done to understand how film reacts and
how digital cameras react to the look for the Last Jedi was
altered to tell the new story.
So it wasn't exactly a direct match to what it would have
been as a film print, but it was modified in a way that told
the story better through the new digital mediums for
modern day exhibition.
The idea is that there's something really new that no
one has been able to create before, and everyone's
going to look at it.
Color matters because it conveys emotion and it's a
story that had a lot of emotion in it.
Specifically, you look at the Red Room.
That was a visually striking scene where color was pushed to
the edge of what could be produced in cinema
high dynamic range color gamuts.
The Last Jedi is really at this block, in this cusp of
where the old technology and new technology are meeting.
One of the coolest things that happened at one point,
a specific camera test was sent to us by Lucasfilm
for digitisation, so they would be able to have a scan
to look at.
And it was a series of camera tests that were performed from
the original show.
So I'm sitting there with a can of film from the
original trilogy, with the original notes written in it,
and you could see the laboratory notes and you could
see the production notes.
It was pretty cool to have that physical element and be like,
Oh, that's, that's what's in this can.
I need to make this new thing look like this one.
This film really helps bridge the idea of bringing that
cinematic language of film and that physical artifact of film
into the digital realm with a great deal of thought.
It's a bridge between the analog world and
the digital world.
That was done at a very high level with a lot of effort and
a lot of deliberate intention.
The idea is to make sure that those aspects of cinematic
language are translated in a way that's appropriate for the
new story that make it feel right, that make it feel
like cinema and not a video and not a video game and not
a computer render.
But those things happened in a way that connects this film
with cinematic history.
People watch movies to feel things and everybody should
know that color helps you feel things.
If you're not getting the right color, you might not be
feeling the right things.
The color accuracy and color calibration tools are
very important, and they're something that's used literally
at every step along the chain with the idea that you
can't collaborate, you can't be part of a full experience if
you can't trust what you're looking at.
I love color and I love that people are starting to
appreciate it and I love that there's starting to be tools and
displays and environments now that people can take it on in
their own fashion sometimes.
My hope is that the part that I helped with is communicated
well and that it helps move you and it helps tell the story
better and it helps make the experience of watching movies
that much more magical.