Laurel Parmet, writer/director of indie feature The Starling Girl, and cinematographer Brian Lannin had definite ideas about the coming-of-age film. It focuses on Jem (Eliza Scanlen of Little Women and Sharp Objects), a teenage girl within a very strict Christian sect who becomes entangled in a relationship that causes her serious trouble with her family and the entire community. It also stars Lewis Pullman and Jimmi Simpson.

Laurel Parmet on-set

From preproduction through the final grade, Parmet, who had spent time in real life observing members of a similar society, had ideas about the look she was after based on her observation of her time among a similar group. She also had been inspired by a number of small, similarly themed films, particularly the Polish My Summer of Love directed by Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida, Cold War). “That film has a very intimate, immediate feeling,” she says. “It’s set in summer and it’s very lush and green, and the greens really pop. It almost adds to the unease that the film is striving to create.”

Senior colorist Sean Coleman of Company 3 had been tracking the project for some time. It had originally been set to shoot just in time for the pandemic to shut it down. When he heard that it had been almost miraculously revived and ready to go about a year later, he was eager to come back aboard.

Laurel Parmet with DP Brian Lannin

Even before principal photography started, Coleman worked with the cinematographer and director in his color grading theater in Santa Monica, building a show LUT within Blackmagic Resolve to provide a starting point for the look, which would also be a tool to allow Parmet, Lannin and other department heads to see during the shoot how colors of the location, clothes, skin, etc. would eventually read in the final film.

The LUT would take the images from the ARRI Alexa used to shoot the film and introduce a film-print-style curve to bring out certain color characteristics, such as cooler shadows and warmer highlights that are characteristic to film. It would also subtly bring out certain colors, such as greens and cyans, to make them more pronounced.

Colorist Sean Coleman

“We discussed what we liked in the LUT and how we could later add and subtract elements in the DI,” says Coleman of the work they did before the shoot began in rural Kentucky.

“This is a story of one young woman’s journey, and it was going to be very naturalistic and personal — based in realism,” Lannin says. “It was very much about ‘casting’ the location, and it was very important for Laurel that we set this movie in a place that had a lot of natural beauty — it could be inviting but also play against some of the darker themes of the film. This is a somewhat oppressive community that the movie takes place in.”

Parmet elaborates that the intense greens throughout a lot of the film “create a sense of beauty and wonder, but they can also, later on, enhance a feeling of unease.” One might associate lush, saturated greens with a nostalgic memory of a pleasant walk through the woods, but, Parmet notes, “The characters are surrounded by trees and green, and the midday sun is beating down on them. There’s just something about making the greens even brighter for the film that makes the scene feel more stressful. That element, in combination with the sound design, helped create an almost grating feeling.”

DP Lannin, who has worked with Coleman on a number of projects (currently FX’s Dave) also discussed using the final grade to subtly add some very filmic elements to the imagery. “There’s part of the analog film process that was really important to us,” he notes.

Lannin wasn’t interested in imposing any kind of obvious film look, but “the small details — like the halation that you get from shooting on film,” he says, referring to that very subtle glow around highlights that is a natural artifact of shooting on celluloid — “was something we knew we wanted from the beginning. We were drawn toward a classic film print look, and then we steered that in a way where the greens popped a little bit more to make [flora] lusher and bring out the natural environments.”

“Another idea behind the film print look,” Parmet says, is that it would “make things a little bit dreamy and a little bit romantic in a way that reflects what’s going on in Jem’s head. She’s experiencing something new and exciting. It’s an opening up and it’s beautiful and it’s confusing.”

After the movie completed shooting in Kentucky and Sam Levy (Heredity, Beau Is Afraid) finished the editing, Parmet and Lannin returned to Coleman’s color theater at Company 3 to do the final grade. For Coleman, who has had a lot of experience working with indie filmmakers, the initial conceptual discussions about the color and the consistency of Parmet and Lannin’s approach were key to the success of the grading process, which for budgetary reasons had been allocated a rather minimal 40 hours.

Coleman’s approach for a 40-hour DI was to have the director and the DP in the color suite with him the whole time, explaining that because they were under such time pressure, decisions about each correction had to be signed-off on or refined quickly. Coleman points to a shot of Jem riding a bicycle, with the sun shining through the trees, as something that came up early in the process. To make it an epic shot, Coleman quickly auditioned a version in which he enhanced the dappled sunlight and brought out the golden hue to enhance the already beautiful image. The results, he says, “were very pretty, but not what they wanted. They wanted it to be more natural, and that’s fine. I always want to bring out what directors and cinematographers want in their films instead of imposing my own personal style.” He again emphasized how important it was for Parmet and Lannin to be in the room with him so they could get the exact look they wanted.

Time management is also key, says Coleman. He tried to get through one pass, start to finish, in 25 hours and then do two additional refinement passes over the remaining 15. “I always explain to filmmakers working this way that this isn’t a race. We’re going to do it properly. But we’re going to get what you want and move on. This is a rough task to pull off, and the clearer they are about what they want, the more efficient we can be.”

The grading process for The Starling Girl also focused quite a bit on subtle refinements to the filmic approach that the show LUT suggested throughout the shooting and editing stages. “A lot of what we concentrated on had to do with recreating the way film responds to light and, of course, using color to subtly bring out the feelings of the characters,” Coleman says. “We did it in the allotted time, and I’m very pleased with the look of this film.”

“I love working with Sean,” says Lannin. “He has such experience, and we can talk about all kinds of things. We can talk about film stocks that aren’t made anymore. We can talk in very subtle ways, and he totally gets everything I’m trying to convey and more.”