By Randi Altman

If you’ve watched Marvel’s WandaVision, you can imagine that the production and post workflows were challenging, to say the least. The series, streaming on Disney+, features multiple time periods, black-and-white footage, color footage, lots of complex visual effects and the list goes on.

Colorist Matt Watson

Colorist Matt Watson and the in-house Marvel post team had their hands full and creative hats on. To help with any challenges that might come up, Watson got involved from the very beginning — during camera tests — and that, along with being on set, proved to be invaluable.

“I’ve set up several Marvel shows with a DI toolset and mindset,” reports Watson. “Having that resource on set at the start of a production really helps to find answers to color pipelines and workflow direction, and WandaVision had many challenges.”

WandaVision was a complex show to set up from both a color and pipeline perspective, so we reached out to Watson to find out how he and the Marvel team prepared and tackled the show.

Can you talk about the many post challenges on WandaVision?
Not only was this a show with looks from different eras and with multiple aspect ratios, but it was also Marvel’s first “HDR first” show — meaning HDR monitoring on set, in dailies and finishing — so it was really important to nail down a pipeline and workflow for all departments.

The Brady Bunch look

Of course, the success of this kind of undertaking comes down to the communication. Camera, DIT, dailies, editorial, Marvel’s plates lab, VFX and finishing… everyone had particular wants and needs, so being there and having these conversations was incredibly important. Communication is one of those ingredients that aid the success of Marvel productions.

Post supervisor Jen Bergman was great at getting all the teams together and talking through all potential problems. Evan Jacobs, Marvel’s creative finishing supervisor, was there during the setup to offer his vast experience with Marvel productions, as was Mike Maloney, Marvel’s imaging guru. The knowledge pool available for the show setup was inspiring.

How did you work with WandaVision DP Jess Hall (ASC, BCC)?
I spent time with Jess working on dialing in the LUTs for use. We had seven different looks in total, which had to be converted to both HDR and SDR. For me, being there in person really helps streamline and evolve this initial creative starting point, as I can see exactly what Jess was lighting on set and what his intentions were.

The Brady Bunch look

There was one instance testing a Brady Bunch look — Jess was trying to light with a blue ambience to create a color contrast with a warm key, but the first iteration of this LUT did not fully realize the subtleties of the light. So thanks to being there on set and being able to look at the nuances of Jess’ lighting with my eyes, I was able to retreat to my DI room and dissect the LUT. I added more filmic crosstalk in the tone curves and color gamut with some deeper, saturated primary colors to further separate the cooler shadows and warmer highlights, something very synonymous with 35mm film color reproduction. Jess was happy with the revised LUT, and that’s something that would have been so difficult to dial in had I not been there in person.

From my experience, dialing in the look early is so beneficial, particularly with VFX-heavy shows. VFX will live with these decisions for a long time and fine-tune their work. Any big swings later can risk breaking the compositing work.

It helps a lot to be on the ground in the early stages of production. There are lots of other things I typically get involved with. I tend to help shape the dailies pipeline, in collaboration with Marvel plates lab, and I’ll also try to establish the color grading environment so that the DP and anyone visiting the dailies room will get the best experience with our dailies colorists.

The Family Ties look

As you mentioned earlier, this show has a few different looks. Can you talk about the feel of the modern-day scenes versus the period ones?
Creatively, there’s a warmer palette inside Wanda’s world, where she tries to hold on to her happiness. This is in contrast to the cooler, more tragic reality outside in the “real world,” which is really based on the look and feel of the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Much of that is achieved by design in lighting, production design and costumes.

To further separate them visually, the modern-day scenes maintain a clean, natural feel, leaning into the photography. In contrast, the period looks lean into a stylization and texture, which included varying image degradation, such as grain, defocus, bloom, chroma misalignment, gate weave, etc. We reserved all this image degradation work to the DI so we could dial it in to taste. But again, this was all to complement the already amazing work done in camera. The lighting, lens choice and production design were all so well-researched and recreated on set that we had to make sure we were enhancing what was there in the “negative.”

The classic MCU look

HDR also played a part in the design of these different worlds. HDR is this huge sandbox of brightness and color gamut, so we spent time trying to figure out how much of this HDR canvas we wanted to use for these period looks. To maintain the photographic quality of a 1950s print or an NTSC telecine video transfer from the 1980s, we had to limit the available dynamic range HDR can allow. But for the modern-day MCU material, we could lift the lid and expand on what HDR can offer.

In the end, our period looks were limited to between 150-300 nits’ peak brightness, and for the MCU look, we settled on 600 nits. Jess felt the 600 nit represented a highlight level that still felt filmic but really showcased the photography. Really, all this exploration was vital so that Jess could light successfully in HDR and had complete control and representation of what the final HDR image would look like.

Can you talk about working with the period looks, which resemble classic TV sitcoms?
They are all based on classic TV shows that had been a part of Wanda’s life, shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, Family Ties, Malcolm in the Middle and Modern Family. But visually for us, they were just guides; we wanted to lift elements of each to help tell Wanda’s story. For some episodes, we leaned more into the degraded quality of the original, but less for others.

The transition to color is complete

For instance, Episode 1 has quite a heavy degradation treatment to really set the audience up in this alternate TV fantasy world. But we also didn’t want the audience to become fatigued from heavy, soft, grainy images, so Episode 3 really pushes the color separation of shows like The Brady Bunch, but with minimal textural degradation. A lot of these decisions were made in DI, when we were able to see multiple episodes back to back and get a sense of how the flow of the series worked.

Most of these decisions were made collaboratively by Jess Hall, Tara DeMarco and Evan Jacobs and presented to our director, Matt Shakman, before finally being presented to the studio. This way, everyone had a chance to offer their opinion and have a balanced, thoroughly considered image.

You were essentially dealing with two different shows in one.
It was more like 10 shows in one! We not only juggled the HDR and SDR element of each look, but some episodes had multiple looks, with transition from one to another. In order to make this work, we used the ACES framework to manage our technical transforms (to HDR and SDR, for instance) and converted all our creative looks to LMTs. This avoids us being stuck under a single LUT for an episode and gave us the most flexibility.

The Dick Van Dyke Show look

But even with this framework, we still had so many complex shots. Two that spring to mind are the closing shots of Episodes 1 and 3. In Episode 1, we have Wanda and Vision sitting down in their 1950s look that pulls back to reveal our modern day. In Episode 3, we have that classic black-and-white-reveal-into-color shot. Both were fantastic shots, but for them to work, we had pretty complex node structures in our coloring software, Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve. We used mattes holding out one LMT from one part of the shot, while another LMT was activated using another matte, while also carrying degradation in part of the shot. The resulting node graph in our software looked horrifying. But the implementation worked so well and gave us full flexibility.

What was WandaVision shot on? Can you talk more about how much of the look was established on set/in dailies?
WandaVision was shot almost entirely on an ARRI Alexa LF. Being on set during the beginning of the shoot gave me the opportunity to work with the DIT, Kyle Spicer, and our dailies colorist, Cory Pennington. We all worked together to calibrate what tools and controls to use at the front end so that I could take that work and continue in DI.

The Dick Van Dyke Show look

We tried to limit the CDL controls to offset only and slope when needed, as it’s pretty much the same as printer points in my finishing world. I find that if a CDL is aggressively handled, it’s hard to integrate it into a structured color pipeline in the finishing suite, so I spend time remaking it. Those guys did a great job. We communicated regularly, and in the end, they laid fantastic groundwork in the DI, which meant we could focus on more of the details in DI.

What was your reference for the B&W segments? Assuming it was all shot color and made B&W in your suite.
Yes, it was shot all in color — it had to be because there were a lot of visual effects that had to take advantage of a color negative for color keys, etc. This is something a black-and-white negative would have turned into a massive rotoscoping exercise.

In Episode 1, the reference for the black-and-white look was The Dick Van Dyke Show. For Episode 2, it was Bewitched. Having the color negative was vital to the look. The production design used the same period colors that were used on The Dick Van Dyke Show. From there, we were able to build two desaturation matrices that mixed the color channels of the negative to the finished monochrome image.

The Bewitched look

From there, we emulated a print process that included a film tone curve, a warmer D55 white point, film print defocus and film grain. We then further added some telecine/analog video transfer degradation. We went pretty heavy with Episode 1. We treaded much lighter to separate the two black-and-white eras on Episode 2. This had a cooler D60 white point and a grain and defocus more akin to an interpositive film print.

How does being in-house at Marvel help in the overall process?
It offers so many advantages to the finishing process. I think the greatest advantage is that we’re working on the show exclusively. We can dedicate so much time to really developing the look and color grading. Whether it’s at the start in photography stage, during the edit to explore how the grade can help the storytelling, in conjunction with VFX to find the best solutions to the numerous challenges, or, obviously, finishing the show at the end. We can really help the whole process alongside the production, rather than jamming everything in at the end.

Marvel has also developed an incredible internal tool, appropriately called JARVIS, that connects the VFX, editorial and finishing databases. It can perform some incredibly advanced data wrangling and heavy lifting that would ordinarily take a lot of time and manual work to complete.

Bridging two worlds

While that alone sounds cool (at least to me it does), the real benefit is the speed with which we can create and update cuts and sequences. We can have VFX send a list of shots they want to see and seconds later have a timeline built, complete with CDLs, previous VFX versions, underlying main plates, etc. We can go from shot requests to DI in minutes; it’s amazing.

You’ve touched on the VFX a bit, but can you discuss how you worked with that team?
The collaboration between departments on this show was so amazing. Our lead VFX supervisor, Tara DeMarco, had an insane amount of work, and we really wanted to help out where we could. We ended up holding regular grading sessions with the VFX team. They could come to us at a moment’s notice to look at shots in DI and to establish what they needed to work on and what could be left to DI.

Vision VFX

A great example was the balancing of Vision’s skin color throughout the series. Traditionally, this would have fallen to VFX to meticulously go through and balance the color of Vision’s skin while creating the CGI head — a real challenge when multiple VFX vendors were working on Vision. So instead, we had VFX generate mattes for Vision’s head, crown and infinity stone, and we took on that responsibility in DI. Being able to relieve VFX of that task so they could focus on other, cooler stuff only helped to benefit the show.

It’s sometimes difficult for VFX supervisors and their vendors to interpret and turn around specific color notes. So we would often create “sketches” for the VFX supervisors, a DI grade where they can play with color live to sketch in the direction they want their vendor to go. This was particularly true for the hex wall. We would often review VFX in the DI so we could more fully explore what that story point might look like. We’ve found it has been very useful for VFX to have their own color previz ability, and it saved valuable time when communicating their intent to the multiple VFX vendors they work with.

Vision VFX

In addition to the traditional challenges on a show of this scope, you worked during COVID as well, correct?
The finish took place during the pandemic, so the entire DI was completed remotely. Marvel sent out calibrated LG C9s to Matt Shakman, Jess Hall and Tara DeMarco, and I have one here accompanying my Sony BVM-HX310. This gave me and the creative teams the flexibility to start or join a DI at any point and the confidence that we were seeing comparable images.

For the bulk of the grade, I would work here in Disney Studios in Burbank, and Jess would join me remotely when he was available. We could have a 5-minute DI or a 5-hour DI, whatever was required at the time. The flexibility was fantastic.

We also ran sessions like this for editorial and VFX. Out of the COVID restrictions have come this great ability to be flexible, which has turned into a fantastic, valuable tool.

What If …?

What have you and the Marvel team been working on recently?
I’ve since finished Marvel’s Loki series. Travis Flynn, our other colorist, finished the The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and we’ve also collectively finished the What If …? animation series.

There’s a lot more coming down the pipe. We’re still a small department, but because of all the efficiencies that have been made internally, we’re able to achieve so much here. Since WandaVision, we can now run live HDR sessions between the dailies hub in Atlanta and our suite here on the Disney lot in Burbank. With a few button clicks, I can be looking and advising our dailies colorists in Atlanta, or I can be running sessions from here for filmmakers in Atlanta. The technical tools that are being built and deployed here create more time and paths to be creative. It’s a really exciting future.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.