American Cinematographer - June 2012 - 70

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Blood Relatives
They may not be able to define it, but it puts a little veil between them and the performances.” He chuckles as he asserts that the DI-dailies process offers “the nirvana of the rushes looking the way the cinematographer wants them to! But there’s a philosophy that goes with that. What I tried to offer Bruno was the idea of not constantly bending the negative by hand, but instead building something like a custom print stock.” Making the dailies timing interactive with the shooting “is a holistic approach, and it restores control [of the look] to the cinematographer on set. “We were building a color process that was dependent on the negative and how it was lit, and the two became quite interactive,” continues Doyle. “Bruno knew how things would react to color temperature and exposure, and he could decide to go for a certain exposure and more or less color. By the end of the shoot, we had a pretty good idea of the picture in terms of the grade, and when we sat down for the final timing, we knew what to do. There were no surprises.” Doyle’s approach was to create automatic processes, rather than grade everything by hand. He called upon color scientist/ASC associate member Joshua Pines and pipeline engineer Niklas Aldergreen at Technicolor to create a toolbox of custom scripts, transform functions and matrices to implement look elements. “If Bruno asked for a specific adjustment more than three times, we could automate it, and it could be easily applied to the entire film’s look,” says Doyle. Delbonnel recalls that his search for Dark Shadows’ look included a variety of references, starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, shot in Technicolor by Robert Burks, ASC. “That vibrant Hollywood film, whose actors glow, was my starting point. It also had the fairytale aspect of Kim Novak’s character coming back as a ‘ghost.’” With a laugh, he acknowledges that he’s “not sure people will see the relationship” between the two films. “Sometimes

Top: Cranemounted softboxes provide general illumination for the seaside town of Collinsport, Maine, a set built on the backlot at Pinewood Studios in England. Bottom: Delbonnel takes a hands-on approach to his lighting.

more Mac 2000s and some rock ’n’ roll Par cans were built into the set. Twenty very diffused space lights were placed on the ceiling “to give us a base level” from above. A key to the movie’s painterly look is the fashioning of what could be called “DI dailies” in the production’s on-set theater, which was manned by colorist Peter Doyle. Burton stresses the importance of defining the look during production. “You know, you can do anything in the DI, but you can do so much that it feels kind of pushed,” he observes. “We were trying to achieve the look early on, in the original photography. Of course, there was a little room to [refine things in post], but Bruno and I both feel that you should get it while
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you’re shooting it. When we did find the right tone with the color timing, it just felt right. It felt like the Seventies movies that I recall from my youth.” Delbonnel calls Doyle, with whom he first collaborated on 2009’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , “an essential partner” in creating the look of Dark Shadows. “Peter is my right-hand man. I have absolute confidence in him. He has a great taste, and he knows what I like. We developed software for our work that goes very far.” Doyle notes that getting the look right in the dailies enables filmmakers to avoid the pitfalls of DI work that goes against the grain of the shoot. “If you bend the image around too much in post, I think the audience can feel it.
American Cinematographer

American Cinematographer - June 2012

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