In Amazon Prime’s holiday comedy Candy Cane Lane, Eddie Murphy is a dad intent on winning the lucrative prize for the neighborhood’s best-decorated house. He makes a pact with a mysterious elf to help him win and ends up being rescued by some strange magical ornaments when havoc ensues.
Director Reginald Hudlin wanted a film that harkens back to the era of classic Christmas movies and songs of the ’50s and ’60s. Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC, who’d previously shot Marshall for Hudlin, says they also wanted a warm and modeled look, giving the colorful Christmas lights a strong, continuous presence — even when they are in the deep background and out of focus.
Sigel and Company 3 Santa Monica senior colorist Jill Bogdanowicz built a custom show LUT in Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve. It was designed to accommodate all the imagery, including night exteriors and situations where a warm look might not be beneficial, into this general framework.
As with any custom LUT, Bogdanowicz would need to know exactly how the camera sensor handled imagery pre-LUT. Sigel knew that the look for this Christmas comedy would be well served by shooting with gear that met two technical criteria: a sensor that could hold onto all those colorful lights, even if they read significantly over key; and a set of optics that in addition to rendering skin tones and costumes nicely, had interesting bokeh characteristics to ensure that the out-of-focus lights in the frame would read in a pleasant, soft way.
Newton Thomas Sigel
Sigel tested the then-new ARRI Alexa 35, which he recalls, offered “a more pleasing, naturalistic relationship between highlight and shadow. Because it’s a very fine line between letting the colorful highlights have presence and sparkle — that twinkling star-in-the-sky quality that we associate with Christmas — and not having them dominate the actors’ performances. I didn’t detect really much of a difference in the bottom end of the exposure with the sensor, but without question, it felt like there was more information in that highlight area. And as such, I was able to overexpose more to get some of the main action out of the shadowy area and still retain detail in the Christmas lights. You can easily get away with something being five or six stops under or over [key] and have it still be a good image.”
As for optics, Sigel explains, “I chose lenses in no small part because of the way they focus and the bokeh. The Christmas lights, which would often be out of focus in shots, were going to be so much a part of my background and create color and mood that I looked for a lens that gave me a very interesting treatment of those backgrounds.”
Since this would be a multi-camera show and comedy, he didn’t want to go with vintage lenses that might fit the bill but not exactly match the other cameras and could present other issues. “So, with all of those considerations, I landed on the Hawk — what they call the MiniHawk Hybrid Anamorphic Primes,” a rather confusing name for a lens, which is in fact spherical but makes use of an oval-shaped iris specifically to emulate the bokeh characteristics of anamorphic lenses.
Jill Bogdanowicz
Sigel shot extensive tests with this Alexa 35/Hawk combo and sent them over to Bogdanowicz to grade. Everyone was pleased with the results. The colorist then used the tests as a basis for the show LUT, building and factoring in the sensor’s impressive dynamic range, its rendering of colors, etc. and mapping the look Sigel had spoken to her about.
“He sent me a bunch of pictures as reference,” recalls Bogdanowicz. “Mostly, everything was from that general 1950s or 1960s period, the look of a postcard from that time.”
“The LUT was fairly stylized,” Sigel notes. Conversations he’d had with Hudlin resulted in the idea of “a somewhat period, almost nostalgic quality in terms of keeping the color a little more separated from one another than we’re used to seeing today. There’s a kind of golden tonality overall but the different colors sort of ‘stay in their lane,’ as Jill says.”
“We had less modern blending of your primaries,” elaborates Bogdanowicz. “It’s about keeping them away from an electric kind of feel and going more toward a nostalgic quality for the primaries.”
Final Grade
As the final grade got underway, Sigel and Bogdanowicz took advantage of the additional color information and detail in all the Christmas lights, both in and out of focus, throughout the frame, allowing them to be a character of their own — pushing the festive, colorful feeling.
In the film, when the other shoe drops, the mysterious Christmas ornaments come to life, causing trouble for Murphy’s character and his family. The colorist and cinematographer took the time during the grade to carefully massage these CG characters in with the live action to help blend all the elements together seamlessly into a warm, nostalgic world.
Bogdanowicz graded in Dolby Vision HDR first, deriving other deliverables such as P3 and Rec.709 from that master. “The Christmas lights are something that you’d want to really take advantage of in HDR,” she says, noting that the extra high end, made possible by the ARRI 35 sensor, provided more information to work with in all the colorful Christmas lights.
That said, neither she nor Sigel felt it would be appropriate to place those highlights as far as they theoretically could be pushed. They set the roll-off in the HDR version at considerably below the possible maximum level. “We use HDR to give them a nice presence, but nothing goes to 1,000 nits or anything like that,” he says. “With all due respect to HDR, I don’t want anything to be so bright it’s blinding.
“With that kind of limit,” he concludes, “we still benefitted from the Alexa 35 sensor because there is so much detail in the high end, we could roll it off and never get that sort of grayed-out, dull kind of highlight. All those lights really look nice in HDR without overpowering everything else in the shots.”
