• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Podcast Show Notes
• Events

True 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.

           

Photo by Deborah Coleman/Pixar ©Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Bird's View of Paris

When he joined Ratatouille, Brad Bird's mission was to painstakingly craft a CG homage to the colors and textures of the city of Paris.

“I'm much more knowledgeable about CG now, because you can't go through an experience like The Incredibles without learning something,” Bird says. “But the most important thing as the director is to know what you want. If I can tell people what the sequence needs in terms of ebb and flow and emotion and color, if I can verbalize that, there are plenty of people [at Pixar] who can decipher that. But the director can sometimes find solutions that individuals concentrating on specific areas don't come up with, because he has more of a satellite view.

“Paris is a very old city — the surfaces are old. They are cracked. They have little stains. So you have to see those cracks and details and the age of things. The struggle was, the computer wants to do perfection. To age surfaces, to give them history, you literally have to beat on [the computer] and force it down that road. Food was even trickier, to make it look edible. Everything you see in a CG animated film is [strategically] put there and discussed and designed. Everything about how something ages is created — that's an enormous job.”

Bird says the company made major progress in seamlessly matching the movie's digital and film versions, largely because Pixar's approach to the film's color design was conducive to finding visceral common ground between film color space and digital color space, rather than technical common ground.

“One assumption we did away with was adhering to numbers — measuring light on the monitor and trying to get film to come as close to those numbers as possible,” he says. “Each medium has its own strength and weakness. So our thought was to stop relying on a machine to tell us where to go. Let's acknowledge [that film and digital] are two different things and do the best digital version and the best film version we can. Sharon [Calahan, the film's director of photography/lighting] and I are both fans of cinematography, so it was wonderful to talk about lighting styles and [famous cinematographers], and have her immediately know what I was talking about. We could talk about lighting in shorthand that way.”

Still, although satisfied with the strength of the film release, Bird is gratified to see digital exhibition finally picking up steam.

“As an artist, the nice thing I appreciate about digital [exhibition] is that the prints don't wear out,” he says. “I love film, but I do appreciate the fact that digital is hearty. It will give you the experience of a brand new print that is lovingly handled. It bulletproofs the film against horrible exhibition. That's one of the good changes in the world of cinema.”
— M.G.