Many reviews of director Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tick, Tick…Boom!, now streaming on Netflix, have commented on the look of the lead character Jon’s dingy old apartment and how it really exudes the feel of late ’80s/early ’90s New York and the Bohemian (read poor) existence of the playwright in his struggling artist period.

Based on Jonathan Larson’s adaptation of the autobiographical musical of the same name, the film explores the life of the playwright (Andrew Garfield) before and after his initial success, which would ultimately pave the way for his enormous hit Rent. Jon’s life pre- and post-success is cleverly offset in a specific dance number that flashes back and forth from the gloomy walk-up apartment of his struggling days to his first day in the warm, beautiful luxury condo he moves into following his first big success.

Senior colorist Stephen Nakamura of Company 3 recalls grading the scene with cinematographer Alice Brooks, ASC. The initial plan had been to render the old apartment in black and white to contrast with the beautiful color of the high-end space. But looking at the scene projected onto the screen in Nakamura’s grading theater, the two both felt it warranted a different treatment.

Black and white has been used quite a lot to represent the past, sometimes more successfully than others, and the two felt that this highly ambitious film from Miranda deserved something a bit different: They would let some of the color of the set come through so it didn’t feel like a completely different type of imagery, but they’d still make use of the monochrome concept.

Nakamura used Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve 17 to push a lot of the color in the blue/cyan direction to help evoke the cold, sunless space, but with enough warmth breaking through the coldness where it made sense — skin tones, a heater’s flame and some other dabs of red or orange — to retain the sense that we’re still looking at color photography.

Nakamura isn’t one to experiment with each new tool every time it comes out. His focus is always on the artistic interpretation of color; if the controls he’s used successfully for decades can get him where he wants to go, he’s happy.

But, he says, “whenever I’m trying to achieve something I haven’t done before, that’s when I experiment with new tools.” In this case it was the Color Warper that was introduced in Resolve 17, which allows control of hue, saturation and luminance of one or more selected colors within a single correction. “I understood how the Color Warper works in principle,” he recalls, “but I hadn’t used it. So I started to try some things out with the old apartment portions of the sequence, and [Alice and I] both responded.”

He was able, in a single node, to push the sets and clothes into something of a monochromatic cyan, particularly in the blacks, while also allowing skin tones and the flame of the heater to push through and remain warm, which preserved the presence of some color contrast.

While Nakamura notes the same result would be attainable through other means — “We could do a chroma key on the red and the blue and narrow them,” he says, or Custom Curves could have allowed him to push the colors into the same place — with the Color Warper, it could all be done in one go. “It takes all your colors on the vectorscope and allows you to just grab points and move them all around so you have all these adjustments on one node.”

The primary advantage, Nakamura explains, isn’t necessarily that it’s faster or requires a simpler node structure (although he reports that both are true), but that it allows for a higher degree of client interactivity. “You can decrease saturation by grabbing onto it and pulling it up or down and the color just moves with it,” the colorist elaborates. “You can grab another point to bring in more yellow or more green and you see all the adjustments interacting together.”

In the case of this sequence, the entire effect could be dialed in and finetuned as he and Brooks discussed the results in real time.

With the techniques previously would have used, Nakamura notes, “You could say, ‘Okay, I’m going to take this color and swing it around in this node and pull a different chroma key for this color in the next node and then get to the effect we want in four, five or six nodes.’ But it’s a lot less interactive. I wouldn’t have been able to work with Alice in getting the scene in the exact right place with nearly the same level of spontaneity.”

For the luxury apartment, he used more traditional tools within Resolve to push the sense of this inviting space and heighten the warmth and the feeling of light filling the rooms. “We showed it to the director, and he loved it,” Nakamura recalls. “When you look at the apartments together, the comparison of the two looks really helps to evoke the emotion of the scene without the audience necessarily knowing you did anything. And for me, that’s really what color grading is about.”

Images courtesy of Netflix