Santa Monica-based Company 3 used Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve for colour grading for four different versions of 20th Century Fox’s 3D movie, Prometheus. Director Ridley Scott chose Company 3 to help enhance the visual style for the film, shot by renowned cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, ASC.
Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green and South Africa’s Charlize Theron, Prometheus is set on another planet and has a feeling of lifelessness, with much of the action occurring in dark environments.
Colourist Stephen Nakamura of Company 3 helped enhance the feeling of Wolski’s imagery by further desaturating the already minimal colour in the sequences. The filmmakers wanted the environment’s darkness to feel somewhat oppressive but not so all encompassing that it would obscure the incredible details of this alien world and the technology employed by the characters.
Nakamura combined Resolve’s tracking tools and Power Windows with the aperture correction feature to emphasise specific objects in the frame with some additional sharpening.
“The filmmakers’ vision was of a burnt, almost ashen like look. Everything had to be muted and cold looking,’ says Nakamura, who previously worked with Scott on Robin Hood, “but the actors still needed to maintain their human qualities, and be seen in warm light without causing the darkness around them to appear muddy. To accomplish this in his films, and with Prometheus in particular, Ridley likes to make use of the aperture correction feature to subtly enhance the sense that the images have a more limited depth of field. It helps direct the viewer’s eye right to a specific person or object without looking like a special effect.’
“Interestingly, aperture correction that worked well in 3D viewing situations did not work as well in 2D,’ Nakamura continues. “The 3D glasses act as sort of a softening filter so that the amount of sharpness that looks subtle and natural under those conditions can look extreme when watching the film in 2D without glasses.’
Because of the node based setup of Resolve, he adds, “it was not that complicated, for the 2D version, to go through the footage and just selectively pull back on the sharpening effect without affecting the rest of the image.’
Nakamura also made use of Resolve’s Power Windows to help shape some of the virtual “lighting’ in environments that couldn’t really be illuminated with traditional approaches, such as creating a kind of “lighting’ inside characters’ spacesuits to bring out the actors’ faces amid the lifeless environment. “I created Power Windows for walls and across the sides of caves,’ said Nakamura, “and built soft orbs of “light’ around the characters that might not be “motivated’ in the traditional sense, but made sense within the world of Prometheus.’
Company 3 also worked with the Prometheus stereography team to refine shot to shot convergence for the 3D version, a very important facet of refining the 3D effect and smoothing out what could otherwise be jarring transitions.
Resolve was also used extensively to prepare the film to be exhibited in a variety of different 3D venues. Different 3D projection systems bring varying levels of light (and therefore contrast) to the displayed images. Company 3 was able to build look up tables (LUTs) within Resolve to partially translate the work done for the lower brightness systems and create an additional master designed to make the most of the greater contrast range offered by the higher brightness projection.
Screen Africa magazine – July 2012
