Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterThe Colors of Munich
Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
The color design strategically planned for Steven Spielberg's historical drama about the consequences of terrorism, Munich, was so important to the story that it can almost be considered a character within the piece. Indeed, Spielberg's longtime collaborator, DP Janusz Kaminski, reports he was plotting the film's color scheme long before he started formally working on it, while still finishing up War of the Worlds in 2004.
“This movie takes place in several countries, so a very specific color scheme was crucial, and we planned different palettes for different locations,” Kaminski explains. “Cyprus feels yellow, very warm; Beirut is blue-green; Paris is desaturated; Rome is warmer; Israel is warmer; everything in the Mediterranean is brighter and warmer, generally. Everything in Europe is softer — even if it is sunny, that sun is more desaturated. The violent scenes are stripped of any romanticism and feel gritty and dirty, almost colorless, and very realistic. There is one classic romantic scene in a bar that we used long lenses, soft light, and filters, but other than that, there is nothing pretty about this movie. It's a little bit ugly. Very raw. Generally, we were inspired by classic thrillers from the 1970s.”
Kaminski knew even before he got deep into a series of tests in Paris in late 2004 for Spielberg that the movie would require this kind of complicated treatment, and that he would be accomplishing it without benefit of a digital intermediate — a process the outspoken cinematographer continues to resist. Instead, Kaminski relied on his own skill and tender photochemical manipulations of his negative, particularly relying on ENR and bleach bypass processing techniques in collaboration with Dale Grahn, his longtime color timer at Technicolor, North Hollywood, Calif.
Grahn helped Kaminski treat every print of the entire film with the ENR process. ENR basically uses chemical bath treatments during the printing process to retain a controlled amount of silver in the negative, adding density and contrast to shadows and blacks generally. Also, pushing for an even harsher look for selected scenes, filmmakers added a bleach bypass treatment on top of the ENR look for those sequences. Both are processes Kaminski has used extensively in the past for Spielberg, such as in the famous opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.
“The ENR process totally depends on how closely the cinematographer and the color timer work together,” says Grahn. “It was what Steven and Janusz wanted for this film, because the harsher look — the additional contrast — fit with their story. But if the cinematographer does not expose the negative properly in-camera, you will end up with something too harsh or not exactly what you want for the ENR process. It is designed to give you a boost, so Janusz had to allow for that while shooting. This film is an excellent work of cinematography on his part, and that is why we were able to use it so effectively. The bleach bypass is even more stark, and it would have looked fake if we had tried to do it through a digital LUT. For certain scenes, especially violent scenes, the gift bleach bypass gave us was a sense of tenseness, a sense of rawness.”
Kaminski insists this approach helped him maintain the integrity of his original camera negative down the chain from work prints to release prints. “[This was] all that was needed to get across different emotional states [to viewers],” he says. Had he attempted a digital intermediate on the piece instead, the film would have been very different, and not likely better, in Kaminski's opinion.
“There was no reason for [a DI] — not because we didn't want a stylized look, but because we knew how to achieve it already,” he says. “Take the scenes showing the terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympians. At the start of the movie, the scenes are shown without bleach bypass. In the flashbacks to those events, we did bleach bypass to the negative. Automatically, that's two different emotional states. They were shot at the same time, but they feel totally different — the same scene in some cases, yet it's not. The flashbacks are more violent, and that allows for us to make the images less perfect, more grainy, and to bleach out the colors, making it very dirty. The way we did it in the lab is similar to [the opening sequence of] Saving Private Ryan, and yet it looks totally different. The philosophy is to involve the emotions of the audience, but each story is different. The amount of blue, the amount of grain — that is all individual for each movie, each scene, depending on the story.”
DP Janusz Kaminski supervised the application of ENR and bleach bypass processes to his negative for Munich in order to achieve a strategically designed color palette for the film.
Instinct
Kaminski's main point is that color timing a piece like Munich was largely a matter of communication, instinct, and subtleties as he worked with Grahn to achieve his goals.
Kaminski says his confidence in this approach is mainly why he and Spielberg continue to avoid the DI process, at least for now. They have collaborated as they did on Munich on 10 consecutive films together, with the exception being 2004's The Terminal — a film that was color timed in both the lab and the DI suite “as an experiment,” Kaminski insists, although the DI version was the one eventually released.
“I agreed to do that because there are some things we did in Terminal [for which], because of the scope of the [airport terminal] set that we built, I was not always able to control lighting to the degree I wanted on our schedule,” says Kaminski. “We spent tremendous amounts of money trying to create daylight within the set, but there were some places where we knew we would have to burn out some imperfections electronically. In that case, for those shots, it gave me better control. That let my lighting become broader, and I was able to put [Power Windows] on the image to manipulate the things we were not able to get done on set.
“But it was very specific, and even with that experience, I will never do digital timing again unless I'm working with a colorist who has color timed a movie conventionally in the past. If I'm going to color time digitally, I want it to be with someone who understands the limitations of film, and the organic sense of film, rather than someone who is simply used to manipulating electronic images that, in their minds, might resemble film, but do not really. They have to understand that what comes out of the printer on the other end will not resemble the original image you have captured, and that you will need to correct for that before your final prints look right.”
Grahn, like Kaminski and Spielberg, strongly believes a traditional laboratory is the best place for instinct to take over on jobs like Munich. He says, “As a color timer [in the lab], I would love to have some of the digital tools they use [in the DI suite], such as Power Windows.” But he also suggests that the instinctual method of achieving a particular aesthetic is largely being left out of the industry's rapid transition to the DI process.
“The [digital] tools are wonderful, but skills and understanding are being lost,” Grahn says. “If we are going to be in an all-digital world, then I think it simply makes sense for [video colorists] to understand film. In the lab, the color timer's work is all done blind. By that, I mean, you look at the image and know instantly in your mind what it needs, and then you make the appropriate changes, knowing you won't see those changes until much later. When the digital colorist works, you have infinite degrees of color you can apply slowly, drop by drop, and you can see changes instantly. That can be very effective, but that colorist does not get the benefit of turning the light off and then turning it back on later — to walk away and then, from a fresh perspective, come back and see it anew later. Working directly on film negative that way teaches you a great deal, because you have to learn how to find that sweet spot where the negative will expose perfectly. Then, you can determine printer lights and the negative will look the best that it can look.
“That is, in my opinion, definitely a skill that would be helpful to a digital colorist. They see whatever they want to see immediately, and many of them have trouble imagining things in a different way. That, in turn, means they move in a particular direction, but because the eye is always reactive, it gets used to the red or the yellow they are adding, and they often become attached to it. But they have no standard, and, therefore, they can get lost. Their process is reactive, rather than proactive, passive, rather than aggressive. But if you didn't get a chance to see all those colors first, you have to imagine them for particular scenes. And, over time, with experience, you develop an instinct, a skill, for how best to take the film in the right direction. That would be an important skill for video colorists to learn. They would bring more ideas to the table if they had this training. Right now, in my opinion, a lot of digitally timed films have images that are obviously forced and don't look quite right. What some of them need to learn is the skill of a traditional color timer — to see something for the very first time and immediately give an opinion on color.”
After his work on Munich was finished, Grahn left Technicolor in order to become an independent freelancer. He feels so strongly about digital colorists' skills that, at press time, he was negotiating with another company to try to launch a formal training program for DI colorists, designed to educate them about the unique properties of film and to help them develop ways to react instinctively to imagery.
“I just believe there is a great deal that [traditional] color timers can contribute to the new digital world, in terms of helping guys to understand images better,” he adds.
The Future
Kaminski firmly agrees with Grahn's point. The DP says, “[Colorists] should first learn to play classical piano before they try jazz. Since they are largely reconstructing and then changing what is on the camera negative, they need to learn how to properly understand and represent film images — only then can they try to reconstruct those images digitally.”
Still, although he and Spielberg have always collaborated traditionally, Kaminski says, “Unfortunately, they won't keep doing the photochemical process on feature films much longer. We'll probably be doing DIs within two years. But we want to avoid having our films done by digital colorists that have no idea what film looks like. Many of them are not trained on film, and they will end up creating another art form, but it won't be one that resembles film. There is a big need for professional training for DI colorists, conducted by people with great experience in conventional timing, who can show them what film looks like. If they get that training, they will be better suited to manipulate things that we were unable to manipulate during production. But the moment you try to manipulate the scene to look different from what you shot during production, then it becomes an electronic image, and that is a different thing entirely.
“We also have to get rid of this idea that it's faster and cheaper, or that you don't need to spend additional time on the DVD release. We color timed Munich over five or six sessions in about two-and-a-half or three weeks, and, I guarantee you, to do a really high-end DI will require at least four weeks of really intensive work, and then additional time on the other deliverables.”
Plus, Kaminski continues, several ancillary issues also need to be addressed. Foremost among them, in his opinion: a formalization of the role and compensation for the DP in the DI process.
“Roger [Deakins] can get paid for a DI, I could get paid, a few others can get paid, but most cinematographers don't get paid for however long it takes, and they have to choose between being there to supervise the process and passing up other work,” he says. “Right now, studios and executives run all this. The studios think the colorist is sufficient in many cases, and our union gave up our right to profit participation long ago, which is very unfortunate. That has led to the significance of the DP being eroded in postproduction — we are being replaced by the colorist. In life, if you are paid, you are respected, and they need to respect [the cinematographer] and understand it is essential we participate in every moment of the color timing process. Right now, doing it in the lab with a color timer I trust, I can do that. With the DI situation, who knows?
“I work with Steven Spielberg and get treated fairly by him, so, in my case, I'm sure we would work it out — I've always had the privilege of working with the most talented colorists. But for the industry generally? There are too many people out there resisting having the cinematographer be part of the DI process by compensating him, relying instead on colorists who have more experience on commercials than feature films. I don't mean everybody — there are many very talented digital colorists out there, interested in creating images true to what the cinematographer shot. But there are many more who are not nearly that great, and you can see that reflected in lots of movies today. It's essential that the cinematographer be fully part of the entire process, and it's essential we properly train this new generation of digital colorists.”
