Filmmaker Brett Morgen threw out the rulebook when creating the David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream. The film, which opened globally in IMAX and theatrically earlier this year, is an abstract take on the iconic artist, mixing all manner of imagery — from the expected concert footage and interviews to tiny snippets from classic films, animations and moments from seemingly unrelated documentary and industrial films. Morgen (Cobain: Montage of Heck, Jane) cut it all together into a collage designed to affect the viewer much more on an emotional level than more traditional documentaries do — far more montage than reportage.
Once Morgen completed the cut, he took the project to Company 3’s Santa Monica location, where he and senior colorist Tyler Roth (Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap) collaborated to create a grade that complements the director’s approach to the editing. “The color,” says Morgen, “was more lyrical and poetic than any film I have worked on. We ‘painted’ every inch of each frame, and rarely were we trying to match the natural cadence.”
“It was a lot of pushing things to extremes or ‘relighting’ and adding colors that weren’t in the original shots,” Roth notes. As Morgen espoused his vision for the film, Roth realized that the project would require taking imagery much further away from its original form than he had before. Where any colorist might be concerned about pushing colors and contrast too far — and possibly “breaking” the image — those simply wouldn’t be seen as problems by this director. The primary concern would always be to make sure that each shot contributes to the overall experience of watching this film.
Tyler Roth
“The approach to the grade for Moonage was unlike anything I had experienced or even heard of on other heavily stylized or technically unique projects,” Roth adds. “Typically, on a film, narrative or documentary, I would set looks with the DP and/or director on representative shots and then go through and match up the rest before reviewing and revising in context. It’s sort of a layered process, sculpting and refining the looks down to the details. Rather, Brett and I would work shot by shot in a very macro, granular way, with a vision in mind for the sequence as a whole. Then we would zoom out to review the flow and feel and then refine from there.”
The film, he adds, “shows David being interviewed and David performing, but it’s sometimes intercut with 30 or 40 total non sequitur shots that have some kind of a visual cue that relates them to one another and to the shots of David.” The opening imagery of the film combines shots from the 1927 silent film Metropolis, the 1902 French short A Trip to the Moon, footage from NASA and various animations to establish an otherworldly feel of an alien arriving to Earth, setting up Bowie’s arrival.
When the movie introduces archival shots of Bowie onstage, those shots barely reflect how they looked originally. They are full of colors that weren’t represented in the source material. They give a kind of emotional consistency within the scene while being totally untethered to each shot’s original look. Instead, the colors are designed to work emotionally. “Brett, who used hundreds of sources shot over a period of five decades, wanted everything to feel as if it’s brand-new,” Roth says.
We get an iconic glimpse of Bowie onstage, seemingly lit by a rainbow of light. This shot alone involved a significant number of hand-drawn masks tracked through the images in order to roto the artist out of the scene, “relight” the environment with spotlights and a rainbow made up of different colored beams of light created in Resolve, and then desaturate the performer. The result is a far cry from the original, old, somewhat faded image of the singer against a gray, blocky set.
In another shot of Bowie in a DJ booth, he and the booth itself were the result of extensive restoration followed by creative stylization laid on top of a faded, milky image. There are little squares and triangles and different-colored knobs on the console, some of which Roth painted a different color while also adding lighting effects. “It didn’t look like that at all when we started working on it,” says Roth. “We made it look the way it does to help make the image part of the flow of the film.”
The entire film was subject to this kind of reworking in the grade to create a film as enigmatic and provocative as its subject.
In addition to the “painting” and “relighting,” the color grading process also required an enormous amount of work that falls under the category of restoration. Images from a wide variety of old tape formats and film gauges, often in a degraded state, had to work for this documentary, which was designed to be experienced on giant IMAX screens.
Roth used a combination of tools within Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve to accomplish this facet of the work on the imagery, which came from myriad formats of old videotape and a wide range of film scans. “I used temporal noise reduction, spatial noise reduction – specifically chroma noise reduction – in many cases, affecting specific portions of the frame or certain color channels, defocusing some parts of the image and sharpening others.”
The complex process of grading Moonage Daydream took longer than on any other film he’s done. In all, he reports, it involved hundreds of hours in the theater over the course of a year because so much creative energy was involved in grading each individual shot.
As Roth acclimated to Morgen’s highly unorthodox thinking about color grading images, he soon found the process to be among his most artistically rewarding. “It changed the way I think about what you can and can’t do in color grading,” he notes.
“Brett has said in multiple interviews, and we’ve talked about it too that the movie is about David Bowie, but it’s not necessarily just about David. It embodies David.”
Of the sessions with Roth, Morgen observes, it was like creating “abstract painting. We were writing the film in the color theater. The film was birthed there.”
