Major Production - Contacting Colour Graders - Peter Doyle

I thought it would be wise and give me a great insight into the world of colour grading by  contacting colour graders. I'd already done this process with some cinematographers, and was very fortunate to receive some really vital knowledge on the discipline and how to approach it coming into this project, so through that experience I decided to do the same. First on my list that I conversed with was - 

Peter Doyle

Supervising Visual Colourist, Technicolor, London

Peter Doyle is one of film industry’s most distinguished supervising colourists, performing magic when colour grading for Academy Award-winning cinematographers and directors such as Andrew Lesnie and Bruno Delbonnel, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton to name a few. 

THEIR WORK - DISSECTED - HOW IT INFLUENCED MY DECISIONS

The colour grade for Lord of The Rings was extremely powerful in it's use of getting the most from its colours, which resulted in it really bringing to life the vast surrounding spaces and mis en scene created for each particular scene. Lord of The Rings was exceptionally clever for the ways it distinguished who were the good and who were the bad. You have the bright, saturated warm colour palettes displayed when we are presented with the main 'good' protagonists, stated above, Aragon for example. This is in contrast to when we see the 'bad' characters, mainly the orcs as when they're presented to us/the audience the colour grade is usually extremely grey and dark, scorching any warm colours and ripping them out of it to really play into the fact that these creatures are truly evil, that no light or hope of anything positive feeds into these frames as these characters perpetuate hate and evil. 

Here is a great example of what I meant by this, this shot and the frame of Aragon completely juxtapose one another in the way that the colours are used for both. We have the grey, deathly look of this orc, yet the warm vibrate, comforting and secure colour tones of Aragon, therefore the colour grade is hugely important in conveying to the audience how we perceive these characters and what we think about them. This doesn't just apply to individual characters though, this can be applied to vast locations within the films as well. We have Mordor, the orc origin where they protect the ever present eye. This location is only ever seen with the fiery orange that is emitted from the terrorfying eye and blackness from the pits of ash being shot out of the volcanoes surrounding it. The land is desolate and rough, with the colour grade accentuating all of this by amplifying the dark tones with it's use of saturation of the grey and making everything seem so visibly run down and destroyed. This image is stated below - 

 This totally contrasts to other vast landscape sequences that we see throughout the films, especially when we see the main protagonists go to Gondor. We as the audience are able to experience the sheer beauty and scale of it on this horse ride along the glorious mountains, with the colours so highly saturated with greens, reds, browns and yellows. They're all very earthy, wholesome colours which add a lot of warmth and comfort to the journey. You don't just feel safe because we're watching and on this journey with the main protagonists but you feel safe because the vast surroundings look safe and secure as well. This is the power that the colour grade can have on a sequence and that's what I want to take away from this conversation with Peter.

After researching this and seeing how simple a trick it is to make you you distinguish between the good and the bad, its left me with some great concepts to apply to our project for the colour grade. For the penguin scene and the hallucination scenes, I'll look at trying to mask a negative colour grade over the monster in each of the hallucination scenes to try and let the audience know that this is the evil spirit within their minds. Also with the penguin scene, I'll attempt to try and surround/place over the penguin something that would convey to the audience that this thing is making the boys trip out and it is indeed a bad demon. Also for each of the locations i'll have to think of a way of trying to make them look as if they're really out of this world and as surreal as possible. This will heighten the tripping experience for the audience and also the authenticity of the project, by making the scenes more far fetched and more dynamic, which I think will be a necessity with these particular scenes. 

Q.1  HOW DID YOU START OUT IN POST AND BECOME A COLOURIST

'Originally I was focused on visual effects, working as a visual effects supervisor and compositor, and in the mid-90s I took on some consulting work with Kodak in Rochester on a new system that they were developing for film scanning and recording back to film. That later became the Cineon Digital Intermediate system.

Part of the project was the ability to manipulate colour, and this proved to be a turning point for me. My work as a compositor was always very colour or design orientated.

The high-resolution digitisation of film made the idea of extensive colour grading for film possible. Because of that, my colleagues and I took on various colour intensive visual effects work, one of which was Dark City for Alex Proyas, involving grading an end sequence of the film for a hyper-real perfect sun rise, then The Matrix for the Wachowskis.

Andy and Lana wanted to bleach by-pass the camera negative. That’s somewhat of a permanent thing to do, and the studio WB wasn’t necessarily comfortable with the idea. I suggested we could digitally emulate that process.

We ran a proof of concept against the Lab process, proved it was possible and graded an entire reel of the film.

The producer, Barrie Osborne, then moved on to The Lord of the Rings with Peter Jackson.

I had also worked with the Australian DoP Andrew Lesnie, on various colour effects for Babe: Pig in the City. He needed quite a lot of colour work to match time of day and weather: not colour grading in terms of look, it was more in terms of authenticity and consistency.

Andrew Lesnie also moved on to The Lord of the Rings. We were all talking with Peter, and creatively there was the question about how to make New Zealand, with its southern hemisphere light, match England, with its soft northern European light. So based on Barrie’s experience of what I had done with The Matrix and Andrew’s experience with Babe, we came up with the idea that we could colour grade a feature film, but there was no existing software that could handle the demands of a full feature film.

We all went to New Zealand, had some custom code built, and sat down to decide what was colour grading and what was visual effects – what specifically was it we would expect to do when sat in front of this particular workstation. With a brief of what we wanted to do, I commissioned the package to be built.

Because The Lord of the Rings was so intense in terms of colour design we had a team of three colourists grading. I would set the look with Peter and Andrew and define how we would go about the process, and the team would come in and grade the sequences. So ultimately that’s how I ended up being a colourist, in that we went about treating The Lord of the Rings with a kind of visual effects mindset, but it was really about colour. '

Q2. DO YOU PREFER GRADING ON YOUR OWN OR WITH A DOP OR DIRECTOR? 

The whole process is a hugely collaborative thing and the route to the best result is always to be spring boarding ideas – fighting it out if necessary! Everyone wants to watch the final film, be it on a cinema screen or an iPhone, and know they did the best they could. We always try to be involved from before the shoot – so working with DoPs, especially with references, style-finding grades and LUTs created for on-set are all a big part of it.

It’s also critical, however, for the team to be able to have a perspective – to leave the suite and come back fresh – so I think it’s always important to not slavishly have anyone stuck in the suite. Normally we will have a patch of time where I flesh out some reels and then we review, which I find can help a lot of people get where they want to go quicker. It’s easy to get snow blinded quickly. I always take peoples’ first reaction as vital on reviews as well. Too many times you can go back to a shot that jolted someone and have them say, “oh, maybe I was imagining it” when they see the clip repeated 20 times upon investigation. But it’s all about the run - if it felt odd having watched the previous five minutes it will be there the next time you see it.

Q.3 WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE SOMEONE LOOKING TO START A CAREER AS A COLOURIST AND WHAT NATURAL SKILLS DO YOU THINK YOU NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL

'The first thing is to not be afraid of technology – really embrace it. That’s not to say you necessarily need to know how to programme or to have a masters in colour science, but to have a strong technical understanding and appreciation. To put it another way, do not discount the technology or the advantages of understanding colour science.

It should be considered a craft as much as being able to match two shots. Certainly the way to think of it is that colour grading is a very manual process – you’re basically matching the colour of shots by hand. If you have an appreciation of the technology, e.g. a Histogram equalizer, you could possibly have the shots matched automatically. Certain processes become much easier.

Secondly try and spend as much time on a set as possible, and learn everything you possibly can about lighting. To understand what goes on before it comes to you means you can then have an informed discussion with the DoP and director. It’s all about knowing your craft.'

Q.4 WHO IS YOUR INSPIRATION?

There are many, many photographers who have had big impact on my work – Ernst Hass is one, Richard Misrach is another. Gordan Parks, Fan Ho, too.

Ultimately, the Dusseldorf School of Photography is absolutely a strong influence – both for me and for some of the directors and DoPs that I have been lucky enough to work with.

WHY THIS IS USEFUL INFORMATION? Evaluate 

I found this open dialogue with peter to be extremely insightful to my approach to the colour grade as it made me concentrate more on the narrative of the piece and what the characters are trying to achieve. It made me realise that I was right to be thinking about the colour grade whilst I was filming, as throughout the shootweek I was constantly thinking about how this is going to look in post production in terms of the colour grade and am I making the right choices with the lighting. I'll also get more people to look in at my colour grade as I like how peter described it 'to leave the suite and come back fresh – so I think it’s always important to not slavishly have anyone stuck in the suite.' Because i'll be working on this for that long I might lose sight of what actually needs to be done, so i'll get Will or Callum to have a look over to see if i'm on the right track with the colour grade. It's always great to receive a response from a professional, so i'm going to take on board everything he's said and try to apply this knowledge appropriately. He mentions how useful a histogram equalizer is, which I love as I used one over the shoot week, so this fills me with confidence.   

I've already applied some of this conversation to my own colour grade, i.e finding the lut that will enhance and progress our narrative in the right way. I believe that the Amira Default LUT is the correct choice and my team agrees with me.