Picture Shop senior colorist Doug Delaney started his career in post production shortly after moving from St. Louis to Los Angeles in 1995, when he began learning the art and science of film imaging for visual effects. Since then, he has built a career collaborating with top film timers, VFX supervisors and color scientists and working with some of the industry’s top filmmakers on a mixture of live-action and animated projects, including Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story; Love, Death & Robots; Captain Marvel; and The Equalizer.
Most recently, Delaney handled the color grading on the Netflix animated special Entergalactic. The film is a music television special – made for adults not kids — created by American musician and actor Kid Cudi and directed by Fletcher Moules.
Entergalactic tells the story of Jabari, a charming, streetwear-clad artist on the cusp of real success. After a chance run-in with his cool new photographer neighbor, Meadow, Jabari has to figure out whether he can make space for love in his life.
Honoring the Art of Animation
Having worked on a variety of both live-action and animated projects in his career, Delaney is well aware of the different requirements and expectations when it comes to grading animation.
“For a live-action movie, assuming we’re involved early on in camera tests, which more and more we are, we have a more direct role in helping the cinematographer and filmmakers create the look and feel,” he comments. “You could be involved from the get-go, with dailies, preproduction and camera tests. It’s great creatively to be involved in that, and, ideally, you get to read the scripts and really understand the show before you step foot in it.”
Animation is a much longer process than physical production, with some differences in terms of what is being asked of the colorist. “However, there are many similarities in terms of the objective,” Delaney explains. “For example, in physical production we can be fixing things, like weather issues or consistency, time of day or editorial changes. These types of fixes don’t happen in animation, but there are other factors that require us to nuance and refine the scenes. It might come from two different places, but it’s the same end goal.”
Delaney feels that animation in general can be a bit more technical in terms of approach. “There is more specificity in animation because they have lived with it and designed it and literally painted and rendered it in a very specific way,” he explains. “The challenge is to serve and honor this and to tackle the technical challenges of ensuring that it remains consistent and that all parties involved are seeing what they expect to see. Then it’s about maintaining this through all the various deliverables and processes. Of course, this is also important in live action, but I think in animation it’s even more so.”
Entergalactic
Following his work on Love, Death & Robots, Delaney was approached by the Entergalactic team to help with the grade. For this animation project, he was brought in early in the process and was able to support the team with both creative and technical advice.
“It was the height of COVID, so I was invited to a few Zoom interviews with art director Robh Ruppel and the director, Fletcher,” says Delaney. “We kicked the tires about what they were looking for and what I could bring to the table, and we did some early color tests to sort out the color pipeline as well as some technical preproduction calls.”
Delaney wanted to be granular with his ability to assist in final grade and suggested they create masters for each of the characters, developing a matte for each one. “The technical challenge was the delivery of those mattes, as I needed them to be consistent,” he explains. “They were delivering EXRs, which can have a pretty big payload, and I wanted those consistently assigned to a channel for all the deliverables. This requires a bit of work for the animation houses in preproduction, but I felt it was important.”
Delaney used the sophisticated tools within FilmLight Baselight to help manage the character and object mattes, and he supported with tweaking and refining the renders. “With animation, Baselight’s ability to accept the EXRs with multiple matte channels and manage them quickly, easily and consistently is critical,” he explains. “The ability to manage incoming mattes and then supplement those with my own techniques — like shapes, keys, frames and rotoscoping — was really valuable.”
Technical Challenges
Art director Ruppel is a renowned artist and illustrator, and he and Fletcher had a very clear idea of where they wanted to take the movie visually. “In terms of the grade itself, animation is a very particular thing,” says Delaney. “The art director and the animation vendors are living with these images, and they render them to a very specific color palette and contrast – which can come with some technical challenges.”
The first challenge was the organization of the show and its hand-off from animation to editorial to color. “As it was a native Baselight conform, and we were working in ACES, it was really important to ensure the color pipeline was sorted and the character mattes and organization were consistent,” explains Delaney.
And visually, as it was a Netflix show with Dolby Vision requirements, the SDR had to be derived from an HDR source. “Because it’s animation, they’re rendering to a specific SDR color palette for a couple of years, and they know exactly what that looks like,” says Delaney. “To go from that to HDR and back to a derived SDR – and making sure that it matches the original SDR – can be challenging because you’re taking quite a detour in the color space.”
Delaney leveraged the color management tools within his system to support this. “I also find it very useful to be able to maintain multiple timelines. For example, I can check an SDR reference directly against a derived SDR from Dolby Vision HDR. The ability to check your work, track your color space journey and clearly see your layout of the color pipeline, and present this to a client, is extremely valuable.”
Texture and Film Grain
Early on, Delaney presented some ideas around applying film grain to the movie to help give the CGI-rendered images more texture.
“We added a little film grain, and I also pitched a couple of ideas for some lensing effects and chromatic aberration around the edges of the frame to give the film a bit more of an optical quality,” explains Delaney.
Delaney recalls working on a particular scene where the brush strokes and the lighting on Jabari weren’t quite consistent with what Ruppel and Moules were looking for. He also points out how, particularly in animation, an important part of the colorist’s role is to interpret and understand the team’s creative language.
“As a side note,” explains Delaney, “with Rob being an illustrator, the way he talks about highlights and shadows is very different to the language a cinematographer would use. Hearing his requests, getting inside each other’s heads and interpreting the language was a fun creative challenge.
“For this scene, in particular, he wasn’t happy with some of the brush strokes and the way the highlights were brushed on Jabari. To fix this, I used rotoscoping, keys and some sophisticated matting techniques to even it out and enhance some particular shots. There was a bit of work to get them to match and to execute the lighting techniques that he wanted in a 2D world.”
Adding Sound
When grading, Delaney usually likes to work in silence or with subtle background music to help with concentration and ensure he’s not distracted from the images. And, for the final master color correction, he always works in silence. But for Entergalactic, which was created by American musician Kid Cudi, sound was an important element for the director.
“When Fletcher came in, we would typically have versions of the stems or the current sound mix from the sound house so we could do playbacks with sound,” explains Delaney. “For Fletcher, that was important. There were sound queues, and the music certainly helped with the cadence of some of the HDR hits that we were doing.”
“One of my favorite things is seeing the final picture and the final sound all come together for the first time with everybody in the room,” says Delaney. “I still remember doing this with Fletcher and Rob. It’s exciting and will always be one of my favorite parts of the process.”
