Company 3 senior colorist Yvan Lucas began working with DP Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, on the look of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon long before the film was in production. Lucas, who has collaborated with Prieto on most of the cinematographer’s work for nearly two decades, shares Prieto’s fondness of a film-style workflow in which filmmakers do as much as possible upfront to set appropriate looks, rather than attacking the footage with digital color grading tools after the photography is complete.
Yvan Lucas
The two like to create unique show LUTs — conceptually, an idea similar to designing custom “film stocks” — that incorporate the director’s ideas and sensibilities so the cinematographer can light with an eye toward the final look and so other department heads can get an early idea how their paints and pigments will read in the final film.
While Lucas and Prieto are not alone in this way of working, they are quite vigorous about maintaining film-style protocols throughout, grading the dailies using only the LUTs and digital printer lights and even doing early passes of the final grade solely with the same tools photochemical color timers use. This makes sense when you realize that Lucas spent many years timing film in Paris on such visually striking films as Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (for cinematographer Darius Khondji, AFC, ASC, and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet).
The ability to create LUTs that can seamlessly take colors from a specific type of camera original —film neg, LOG-C, SLOG and so forth — and push them in another direction to set a look, is a complex procedure that requires a strong eye and significant technical knowledge.
Imprecise LUTs can do more harm than good. And one limitation back when Lucas was working with Prieto on LUTs for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was an inability of color correctors at the time to isolate very specific hues to push in the desired direction. On that film, for example, the two were developing a custom Ektachrome-style LUT. “If you tried to just isolate reds,” Lucas offers, “you would usually end up also including skin tones.” Also, the resulting colors would often end up looking noisy.
The two had spoken about color and the limitations of digital grading technologies to really get the type of precision in a LUT that they hoped for. This got them thinking about going beyond the limitations and coming up with something that would allow them to get to the essential color information and isolate vectors more specifically. When designing one of the looks for Killers — the style of the early part of the film, which is based on the early 20th century Autochrome process — the production hired color rendering scientist Philippe Panzini. Panzini, who brought his color science expertise to the company that created Flame (Discreet Logic at the time and now Autodesk) and to many other companies since, was asked to design a box with sliders that could allow subtle shifts of colors as captured into the palette of Autochrome. Subsequently, color-rendering scientist Christophe Souchard took that design and turned it into an OFX plugin for Lucas’ FilmLight Baselight system.
Throughout the entire movie, Lucas also included a film emulation LUT based on Eastman Kodak’s 5219 500-T. This LUT helped confine everything — from the material actually shot on film to portions digitally captured with either Sony Venice or Phantom high-speed cameras — into the realm of color and contrast possible with imagery shot using that stock.
Lucas and Prieto used this plugin to create the Autochrome look at the start of the film, the ENR-style process (emulating the Technicolor photochemical process that adds contrast and slightly desaturates images) and the Technicolor imbibition process. The film combined these LUTs in different places.
While filmmakers like Scorsese and Prieto are very fond of this disciplined way of working, during the finishing stage they are always open to step out of the confines they created if doing so helps tell the story.
When it was time for final color, Lucas would work with Prieto and often Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker in one of Company 3’s New York color-grading theaters to fine-tune everything shot by shot. It was only at this stage that Lucas would introduce digital color-grading tools such as vignettes, keys, saturation, etc.
One such adjustment: During a section in the Autochrome portion of the film, there are some wide shots of an enormous tract of land that Scorsese felt should exhibit a more saturated green than the Autochrome process could have rendered. “He felt that emotionally, it was very important to see more of that green at that moment,” says Lucas, who then used keys and vignettes to isolate the vegetation and pulled back on the Autochrome just for those elements of the images.
Different cinematographers and colorists work in their own way. Some like to do a lot of the look creation up front, while others like to find it in the grading theater. “There are colorists who just start right out changing lift, gamma and gain and adding many secondaries,” Lucas says, “and they get beautiful results. But this is how Rodrigo and I like to work, and we’ve had a lot of success with it.”
The two also collaborated the same way on the film Barbie, building what they called the Techno-Barbie LUT that helped define the unique look of that film.
