The Long Walk from Lionsgate is a new feature film based on the novel by Stephen King. Directed by Francis Lawrence, the film details a contest between young men, where they are instructed to walk or die. There is no finish line and contestants must maintain a pace of at least three miles per hour. The winner is the last one walking.
Jo Willems served as director of photography on the project, which was color graded by Company 3’s Dave Hussey. Lawrence and Willems collaborated on The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirs & Snakes and have both worked with Hussey on a number of projects leading up to The Long Walk. In fact, Hussey's collaboration with Lawrence goes back to the director's early short-form work.
The film was shot in multiple locations as the walk progresses. While not low-budget, the film has far fewer VFX than a Hunger Games-type feature. A significant portion of the film involved on-location, day-time exteriors, and Willems employed minimal lighting equipment. He shot with an Arri Alexa 35, and credits its ability to capture multiple walkers of a wide variety of skin tones. The outdoor conditions also ranged from overcast to harsh sun, and it was Hussey who helped create a continuity in the grade.
Prior to principal photography, Lawrence and Willems had discussed the idea of an overarching look for the film, and found inspiration in the novel and in the era of its initial conception - the 1960s - when film and photos from Vietnam were ubiquitous.
"They wanted a bit of a vintage look in the final film," says Hussey, who has graded the project using Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve - a tool he’s been using for much of his 30-plus-year career.
The Vietnam reference material helped define the day exteriors, while additional color photography of the era served as inspiration for the night work. Hussey created a show LUT to use during production that was not too strong.
“We always want to leave a lot of room in the final grade," says Hussey.
The show LUT could be used with the Arri Alexas to provide a filmic curve and a basic overall sense of the direction the look would take, but not so pronounced that it would be constricting later.
THE FINAL GRADE
Hussey primarily relies on the tools within Resolve that he's used for years, unless there is a very strong reason to go with some of the newer features. He uses lift and gain, power windows and keys, primarily luma and chroma. He did make extensive use of Resolve's grain features to add a photochemical feel to a lot of the imagery and to make it look less modern. There were images where he isolated greenery and pushed in some lush color, but he avoided letting any of that affect the characters themselves, who are on an increasingly-brutal journey as the film progresses.
HANDLING THE WEATHER
When the production originally scouted the Manitoba, British Columbia, locations, ‘They had all these beautiful blue skies and white puffy clouds," Hussey recalls. "But by the time they shot later in the summer, there were massive fires and the skies became kind of ominous, so we blended that into the look of the movie."
Since the filmmakers shot rain or shine, that created a lot for Hussey to handle in post. With bright sun harshly the hitting actors, he would go through and isolate bright patches and bring them down in intensity and contrast. In very flat-lit conditions, he might highlight portions of the scene, or just parts of an actor, and bring areas up a bit to create a bit of contrast. For the veteran colorist, it involved building a lot of "tricky windows." In fact, he spent a few days just doing a "sky pass" to make skies as consistent as possible from shot-to-shot. With the exception of a handful of wide shots, the show relied on little sky replacement.
"It was all about grading what was there," says Hussey.
Additional color grading was performed to help set the time of day for different shots, so footage would have different color temperatures around sunrise, midday, the magic hour or sunset.
"It isn't about swinging the whole shot in one direction or another,” Hussey explains. “It would be about sometimes just cooling things off in the blacks, or not changing the blacks and just dealing with the highlights."
The way he likes to work with Willems and Lawrence is to get it close to where they think it should be, and then to perform another pass, tweaking it a little more.
“It's more like working up to a sort of visual statement, rather than coming out full blast with something and then pulling it back," he shares of the process.
While Hussey enjoys collaborating with Lawrence and Willems on VFX-intense projects, he found this film to be a refreshing change. Rather than working as VFX come in and are replaced by new iterations, whereby a lot of the work is about bringing real life and CG together, this was more of an old school process.
"It's a nice feeling to just have some beautifully shot - I want to say film, but let's say data - and just spend time with it...and bringing it together into this kind of powerful story."