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MillimeterTrue 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.
Pixar designed Ratatouille to evoke a realistic sense of Paris in terms of color and surface textures and in the romance of the city. "When I joined the project, one of my goals was to get [the characters] out of the kitchen and show more of Paris," says director Brad Bird.
©Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios. All Rights Reserved.
According to Tim Peeler, few constituencies are more devoted to the growth of digital cinema and the maturation of the digital intermediate process than the animation community. Peeler ought to know — animation people are his primary constituency. As a digital colorist at Technicolor Digital Intermediates, Burbank, Calif., Peeler has probably digitally color graded more animated features in the last several years than anyone — dating back to Disney's Tarzan in 1999, one of the first digital cinema releases. He recently performed digital color correction for the digital cinema and home entertainment versions of Shrek the Third, and at press time, he was working on Enchanted; doing tests for Bee Movie, which he expects to work on later this year (see sidebar on p. 18); starting The Simpsons Movie; and preparing for Beowulf.
Watch the exclusive video interview with Randy Thom on the making of Ratatouille at mixonline.com/video.
“[Tarzan] was the turning point,” Peeler says. “We were trying to do a full-blown digital cinema version, and it was the first time I had ever seen a digital projector. We did a test for Disney with an early [digital] projector in a telecine bay — this was just after [Texas Instruments] had come out with [DLP projector technology]. We had our color corrector panels on a folding table, with cables connected to a mainframe, and the projector behind us, and it was so loud we could barely hear each other talk. It was an interesting experience, but that wasn't all that long ago — less than 10 years. When you think how far we've come from that type of system to a full-blown DI for film and digital cinema in such a short time, it's pretty remarkable.
“Digital cinema has a real good fan base now with animators. They are seeing exactly what they want to see, and how they want to see it — the way they created it to be seen originally. The truth is, with the nature of CG films today, they can only get what they are trying to get digitally. The technology just isn't there in [a photochemical lab] to give animators what they are expecting today. Essentially [an Adobe] Photoshop session through the digital cinema format, they are getting the color correction they want, and then they expect to see that on the big screen. Pixar has gone that route; DreamWorks, Disney, Imageworks — just about everyone. It's not yet seamless, but [digital color timing] for these [animated] films is quicker, and gives filmmakers more options.”
Pixar led the way to drag CG films into the DI process, of course. According to Sharon Calahan, officially credited director of photography/lighting on Brad Bird's new movie, Ratatouille, the company was pursuing the DI agenda as far back as A Bug's Life (1998).
“In some ways, DI is a misnomer at Pixar because there is no intermediate step or scanning involved,” Calahan says. “We are working with our original digital source material directly and release printing off a direct recording of that.
“During the original Toy Story [1995], there was no digital cinema back then, of course. So everything was output to film. We output each shot individually — splicing the negative together one shot at a time and doing color correction at the lab shot to shot. It was very painful. It would take us about two-and-a-half months making two shots that were meant to be identical look even close together, after they were filmed out months apart. The camera drifted; the lab drifted. It was very hard getting it all to look smooth.
“When A Bug's Life came along, we experimented with filming out some sequences in little bigger chunks if we could, and we did that a couple of times. The difference in color showed up immediately. We learned we could do a bigger chunk, and not do everything shot-to-shot. That gave us confidence that maybe we could film out entire sequences or even entire reels. That's when we came up with the idea of doing first-generation release prints — digital intermediates. Of course, we didn't have the tools to do it back then, but that became our goal, spearheaded by Bill Kinder, director of editorial and postproduction.”
Pixar then made strides on Toy Story 2 (1999) and Monsters, Inc. (2001), as the company figured out how to use embryonic inhouse color correction tools to make longer chunks of the movies consistent.
“After that was Finding Nemo [2003], and that was the first film where we really decided to make a DI be our official goal,” she says. “Unfortunately, the deadline was such that we didn't have time to get first-generation prints out of it. But we did film out entire reels and do only minimal splicing, while doing a lot of inhouse color correction on [ancestral versions of Autodesk Lustre — 5D ColorFront, then Colossus]. But, at that point, there were technical problems that prevented us from digitally color-timing the entire movie — banding and stuff like that.
“So, The Incredibles [2004] was the movie where we made it all happen for the first time using Lustre, and we were totally splice-free for that movie. We made first-generation prints. And that's what we have been doing ever since.”
There is still no single industry-standard process; proprietary tools, specific participants, and workflow details vary widely from facility to facility. Despite those issues, virtually all the purveyors of major CG movies these days are well entrenched in the DI process.
Indeed, when Shrek the Third wrapped too close to its release date to do a DI for the film version this year, the movie's production designer and official color guru, Guillaume Aretos, swore an oath to limit himself to the DI process in the future.
“We were modifying the movie until the very last second, completely against the wire,” Aretos says. “That left us with no time to do a DI [for the film release], but we did do it for the digital cinema version [with Peeler handling color-grading chores] and the DVD, and that gave us an opportunity to correct some things we couldn't get exactly right on the film version. But my preference would be to always do digital color timing in the future. That's because the digital color-timing process allows us to do some fairly drastic things. [For the digital cinema version], we changed time of day for three sequences by altering key light in all of them, for instance. Digitally, it was perfectly doable. We got it done in the lab [for the film version], but it was a lot more hazardous. And the truth is, the digital cinema version looks a bit different from the film version.”
Indeed, colorists on animated films face two driving objectives: to produce pristine color schemes that exactly match the filmmaker's vision and to have those colors consistently hold up on cinema screens across the globe. This has left the industry in an interesting transition period in which the visual impact of CG movies routinely varies from release format to release format and screen to screen.
This summer, several major CG animated films are hitting theaters, so millimeter caught up with the principal architects of the color schemes for three prominent ones — Ratatouille, Surf's Up, and Shrek the Third — to learn more about the process of designing, building, and executing complicated color palettes for such movies.
