Colorist David Rivero has been based in China since 2013 and opened his own grading/DI studio - Black Peak - two years ago. His credits include work on Peter Chan's latest film, She's Got No Name, which premiered last year at Cannes. The film is crime-drama that tells the true story of an unsolved murder case in Shanghai in the 1940s, when a housewife was accused of murdering her husband.
The feature was shot by cinematographer Jake Pollock, and Rivero graded the feature using Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve 18, working in a suite that features a nine-meter-wide Harkness cinema screen, and a Christie CP2215 projector with a Xenon Lamp.
Rivero (pictured) designed the LUTs during preproduction, which were then used for dailies and editing. According to the colorist, the LUTs were built to work on Arri LogC4. For the feature's cinema release, he created Dolby Vision Cinema (108-nits), Cinity (110-nits) and Cinity LED (300-plus-nit) versions.
"For this film, every stylistic choice was based on the script," shares Pollock. "How I wanted to visualize the emotional conflict of the characters. How to represent a modern version of an historical period, especially one that has been filmed countless times. I quickly decided that some of the attributes of Kodachrome and E-6 photography would be appropriate for the look I had in mind. Extreme contrast and strong color, especially the way chrome reacts to cooler temperature and mixed color. Once that idea formed, everything about the photography and the grade was a focused pursuit of the look I had in mind. There was a considerable amount of experimentation and evaluation of how that look worked for the story and almost no wavering from the original idea. It’s rare that I am so driven to achieve such a specific look.
Pollock says with each project he shoots, he works hard to capture the film's look on-set and in-camera.
"Of course, LUT development is critical to that," he notes. "The look of a film has a huge impact on the rhythm of a scene, so I want the director and editor to have an accurate image to edit with. David and I did extensive tests before shooting to finesse the LUT. I even shot some tests for the opening scene. Having the look so well developed helped the art department and the costume designer enormously. But the biggest surprise was how that impacted the shooting itself. The actors had more confidence in the film because the images on-set already looked so good."
Rivero also likes to have an established look and LUT before shooting begins.
“It doesn’t have to be final, it never is, but even something that is close to halfway there already helps to define and shape a rough approach for the final aesthetic of the image, which in turn helps with the lighting choices, art design, costumes, etc. It can change a lot during the DI process, but even so, having a basis already eliminates a lot of guessing about where to go with it, and this helps to either speed up the grading process or to have more time experimenting in the right direction for the look.”
In the case of She's Got No Name, the look evolved as the shoot progressed.
“You see how the color works for each scene, but you also see where it can be too much or not enough,” says Pollock. “I try to adapt my lighting and exposure choices to work for the way the emotional response to the image evolves throughout the shoot. However, I know once I get to the grade, that will also change. Once the colorist and I settle on the look for the film, there’s a three-step process: experimentation, evolution, evaluation. We will find how far we want to push the color, then from scene to scene those experiments will lead us to evolve the color into something more cohesive and mature. Then, finally, we will do another pass or two where we evaluate ways to make the color more and more subtle. I find those reductions in the stylistic intensity helps make the color a part of the emotion of the film. The cleaner and more organic the color becomes, the more details you notice about the sets but also about the acting. The color should be a gateway to empathize with the characters.”
Rivero agrees with Pollock’s three-step process.
“We did most of the experimentation beforehand, that which created the LUTs,” says the colorist. “Then, based on that, once we are grading, we would evolve that to adapt to the scenes in context, I like to compare this to a musical process, where you decide if the same melody keeps playing, or if you switch to a different one to make a counterpoint, or start introducing subtle changes up and down the scale, in intensity, etc., all while the harmony is being created by the temporal play of these decisions. For this, I think our perspective as viewers influences as much as the editing. So having different passes at the color stage helps with that evolution, where subtle changes keep compounding. Our final pass, evaluating it with fresh eyes, helps to give it even more maturity. It’s about make it more clean and cohesive.”
For She's Got No Name, it was the flashback sequences that were some of the most challenging to achieve.
“Initially we wanted all the flashbacks to look like colorized black & white,” says Pollock. “And that’s a very, very difficult thing to achieve with an on-set LUT. David and I did several iterations of the LUT trying to constrict each color channel and saturation to specific exposure values. And in the grade, we spent a lot of time to get a color that was like the Peter Jackson documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. We finally got a look that was very close to what that looks like. However, the director felt that it was ‘too colorful’ and so we wound up limiting the color even more. The final look is closer to black & white, but there are still parts of the skin tone that has warm colors. At the end of the day, the grade has to serve the needs of the story and the film itself.”
According to Rivero, the team even experimented with AI to colorize a black & white version of the footage.
“Eventually we created a LUT that was actually very close to that,” says the colorist. “Part of the magic was the LUT itself. This was a bit of a technical exploit, since we used the limitations in data of a LUT (by the amount of points it has) to boost that ‘artificial’ interpolation between colors.”
The film’s first interrogation scene also presented a challenge.
“I had a look layer that we could tweak in almost every aspect,” says Rivero, who also used masks to protect the skin tones while affecting other parts of the image. “I wanted to treat it as it was ‘stock’ - deal with the whole image in a more organic fashion. We would still have our normal nodes to isolate certain elements, but this was happening before the look. For the first interrogation scene, the mix of smoke, daylight coming from the exterior, plus a mix of warm and cold tones indoors, made the skins messy in some shots. It took a while balancing every shot or every angle with different white points, different values of the skin pass and playing with the saturation levels to achieve a clean scene that would match and look clean in those few shots, but I felt that process helped to make it look so organic and gorgeous. Maybe if I had approached it in a way where we could’ve just made some windows and masked easily the different passes of our look it may have looked cleaner quickly, but in a more ‘digital’ way, making it less organic, less ‘natural.’”