Four years after it made headlines, the harrowing ordeal of commercial shipping
captain Richard Phillips gets the big screen treatment, care of docudrama specialist
Paul Greengrass, in Captain Phillips.
Barry Akroyd was the cinematographer on this intense, high stakes drama telling the
true-life story of an American shipping captain swept up in a hostage ordeal after
Somali pirates hijacked his ship. The film’s main protagonists are the ship Maersk
Alabama’s commanding officer, Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), and his Somali
counterpart, Muse (Barkhad Abdi).
Digital intermediate (DI) on Captain Phillips was carried out by Company 3’s senior
colourist Rob Pizzey, who reflects on his latest opportunity to work with Akroyd and
director Paul Greengrass and the challenge of grading a big “day for night’ (making
footage shot during the day look like night time) climax.
“It was great to team up again with Paul and Barry after working on Greenzone with
Paul and having done the DI on Barry’s last two features,’ says Pizzey. “Barry has a
naturalistic style of shooting and Captain Phillips was no different. Everything is
filmed handheld so there are never any locked off shots during the film. Because the
camera is always moving, Barry is right on top of the action. You almost feel like a
part of the film.
“His background in documentary filmmaking means he prefers a more natural feel with
lots of great looking pictures. And that is exactly what you get with Captain
Phillips.’
During the grade Pizzey had to differentiate between the film’s start, where the
audience first meets Captain Phillips in his house and traveling on his way to the
airport, and the scenes in Somalia where the pirates are first seen. The film starts
with a cooler looking colour palette and then it cuts to Somalia, shot on super 16,
which is really warm.
Monster job
Pizzey continues: “The biggest challenge on Captain Phillips was the film’s climax,
which takes place at night. Most of the climax was actually shot in the day with just
a few shots filmed at night, which created a big challenge in the grade, making the
day shots filmed on various formats match the night shots.
“You have footage filmed at night and then you’ve got bright day footage shot in a
water tank at Pinewood Studios and then you have other material filmed at sea
during the day, literally cut next to each other. Barry and I discussed this pre-shoot
and decided we could make it work, although it would be a monster of a job.’
A month before the DI, Akroyd and Pizzey had the chance to work on the conformed
“day for night’ scenes, allowing them to start setting the look.
“We worked through the scenes making sure we could achieve what we wanted and
flagged areas where we could do with some help from VFX,’ says Pizzey. “DaVinci
Resolve’s unlimited nodes and auto tracking capabilities were a big help during the
grade of the film’s big day for night scenes.
“The camera is moving around all over the place because you’re at sea, so the
tracking tool was perfect because I could hand draw shapes and then grade within
that area. Then the auto tracking would map to the movement of the camera so we
could get on with grading the day shots to match the night footage. It was also
really useful for lining up faces and pulling out eyes. With the auto tracking, you get
the shape on there and it maps it all the way through. It really did save me a lot of
time.’
That session took a week, followed by the rendering of the DPX files with the grade
baked on. This was sent to the visual effects house that was able to help in areas
where Pizzey had darkened bits down, by adding in lights onto the boats or removing
clouds in the sky to help sell the look.
When those shots came back into the timeline for the main DI they were 90% final.
The main DI took three and a half weeks and was attended by Akroyd for the first
seven days. During that time the he and Pizzey set the look and mood for all the
scenes and graded the climax of the film in full.
“When Barry left to shoot his next project I was left to carry on matching everything
up. Once finished, Paul and Barry came back to have a final pass of the film where
we carried out very minor tweaks on a couple of shots, then we wrapped,’ he adds.
