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Reader SurveyTrue Colors
Jun 9, 2007 1:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
A look at color grading and cinematography on Ratatouille, Shrek the Third, and Surf's Up.
A major challenge in Ratatouille involved painstaking work to create old, cracked, and degraded textures that would believably depict the age of buildings and surfaces in Paris.
©Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios. All Rights Reserved.
A rat in the kitchen
At Pixar, Sharon Calahan is a principal architect of the final lighting and color scheme for Ratatouille — hence the official credit of director of photography. She also served as the movie's colorist (working on a Lustre 3.1 system) so she was involved in the development of the color palette for the movie from its earliest development phase.
“Overall, I wanted the movie to have fat, rich colors and nice, warm tones — especially in the darks,” she says. “There are cool scenes, but overall, it's definitely a warm movie — warm and with nice detail in the darks.”
Pixar more or less followed the basic steps of having art directors design a color scheme; building a preliminary color script; creating color keys, or tone paintings, for major sequences to offer lighting artists a guide for applying those lighting schemes in 3D space; testing the imagery to determine how it would look when exhibited both digitally and on film; and then running it through a final color-grading session.
Watch the exclusive video interview with Randy Thom on the making of Ratatouille at mixonline.com/video.
“The color script is usually an early overview of some of the color arcs in the film and how they relate to the story,” Calahan says. “They tend to be stakes in the ground, but not something we are strictly locked into. For us, they are more for exploration, and then we'll move on in different directions. For Ratatouille, actually, we didn't even finish the color script because the story changed late in the game, and so we moved forward and concentrated on doing lighting studies instead.
“Then we do pastels — what other people might call color keys. Those are more direct to something specific like a scene or a shot. They more accurately reflect what the final image is like, in some cases, but in others, they are a jumping-off point. How many of them we do depends on the complexity of things, how much time we have, and who is on the show.
“Then comes lighting — the funnel through which other departments all come together — and after that, the rendering department takes the final data and renders the images and gets them delivered to image mastering, and that is where I do my color timing.”
Often, depending on the distribution plan for a particular film, that final color-grading session will be repeated more than once to create different versions for multiple release formats.
That last point is an important one, according to Calahan, who ran Ratatouille through multiple grades for several different output media. Calahan says she normally creates fundamental grading elements that can be shared or translated between media before delving into each version specifically.
“I'll do a global pass between all of them that would work for any output, and then I customize that for each specific medium,” she says. “But the point is, you want to make each version look as good as you can for that specific medium, rather than trying to make them all fit into one vanilla box. There is no one common denominator. They all get their own treatment. I am very lucky. Working in CG at Pixar, I do the color work for all output mediums. A live-action DP isn't always hired to supervise color.”
Calahan offers major kudos to Pixar's image mastering department for developing sophisticated tools to allow her to match her monitor (a NEC Multisync FP2141 SB) to film and other output media.
“We have excellent software named ‘Amethyst,’ developed inhouse specifically for color matching between our monitors and film, which obviously has a different color space than our monitors,” Calahan says. “We have sophisticated preview tools for how things translate to film — I can view on a digital projector a very close approximation of what film's color space looks like, and I color correct accordingly. But even before that preview, the software does a great job translating one color space to another, so I can make output images look as close as possible to original source material. That's a huge thing. Before we had any of these tools, back on Toy Story, we would have a beautiful blue on a monitor that looked fine, and then it would just go nuclear, absolutely crazy, on film. Brilliant green on the monitor would look like dead lettuce on film. We were always struggling to get colors to translate and look right. All of those problems have gone away with the work done by our development people.”
Pixar, of course, is not the only major studio with a sophisticated development program. That means, logically, everyone uses what Calahan calls “homegrown stuff.” “We all have our own process, and we're happy with it,” she says.
She says that inhouse development makes the most sense for studios such as Pixar, and it leads to a great deal of innovation.
“We all develop our own software,” she says. “Every studio wants to do it their own way, and there is such a small number of competing studios that no one spends much time developing [LUTs and color-matching software] for us. So we all invest in our own, and then after all that effort and expense, we don't want to share it. We have learned that we need to plan up-front for it. We did not do [a digital intermediate] on Finding Nemo largely because it did not make sense back then. It made more sense to make a few shots better and buy time for ourselves in the lab's schedule than to rush shots that did not look good in order to try a DI. So it's always a tradeoff.”
