American Cinematographer - November 2016 - 44

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Rising Up

Above: Samuel
Turner (Armie
Hammer) and Nat
Turner were
boyhood friends
until the former
became
plantation
master. Right:
Davis captures an
insert of Samuel
Turner receiving
money. Producer
Kevin Turen
assists.

the desaturation process," says Sherrick.
Significant time was spent pulling
magenta out of the skin tones, which
kept the image in the "bandwidth" of a
cool, desaturated look. Even a little
magenta shift was noticeable and
distracted from the look. "With the
darker skin tones, Elliot had a specific
tone he was going for," Sherrick adds.
"We were just trying to create that
desaturated look without removing the
life."
On-set color grading also played a
big role in the numerous night exteriors,
always the Achilles' heel of low-budget
features. "I didn't have time for the grip
work required," says Davis, "but I knew
when I was lighting the scene, what I
could manipulate in post - shading
them with grads, knocking them down,
windowing them to make them brighter
or darker, altering contrast, color, etc. -
so I would let things go in production.
That allowed me to be fast. Instead of
44

November 2016

putting a flag on a condor at night,
which is difficult and time-consuming,
or having to put a flag on somebody's
clothes to make them darker, I knew I
could do that in the DI."
He would also define layers
through color and contrast, as in the
campfire scenes. "I could isolate the fire
and make it brighter and warmer, but
still keep the background behind it cool
and desaturated - and all the while
controlling the faces precisely," Davis
says. "There were so many things I could
do."
However, "there's a big hole in the
workflow right now," Davis states, and
that's the fact that none of the metadata
related to the secondary color work gets
inscribed in the CDL and transported
down the line. "This is something that
really needs to be fixed," the cinematographer stresses. "If you go in there with a
DaVinci mobile or equivalent, the
corrections that Steve made should be
American Cinematographer

seen by the DI colorist, and he should be
able to build those in. If he could start right
from there, that would put the DI at about
80 to 90 percent complete. But it's not like
that now." Instead, the DI colorist must recreate that work, relying on dailies, export
stills or QuickTime references.
"The challenge," says Sherrick, "is
figuring out a way to streamline that in the
future, so this additional work with secondaries could translate down the line. The
hope is that there is continued evolution of
the ASC Color Decision List framework.
As it stands now, it supports the interchange of basic RGB color-correction
information, which is fine for a lot of jobs
where you are just trying to set a basic look,
but when you want to do a more complex
grade, it would be great if there were a
framework that at least supported
secondary corrections. The key would be
finding a way to standardize this across a
multitude of color tools. By implementing
this, cinematographers would be able to
get closer to the look they are trying to
achieve and have the look travel along to
other parts of the post process, such as
visual effects. The colorist could also use it
as a starting point or simply as a reference
for intent. There may be some hurdles to
get over in the short term, but perhaps in a
few years this will be second nature. In the
meantime, we'll be using workarounds."
The final grade took place at
Headquarters in Burbank, where Davis
spent 100 hours working with senior
colorist Richard Garibaldi after DI
conform editors Scott Bradbury and Toby
Rogers had conformed the ArriRaw and
5K Epic files. (Following Fox Searchlight's
acquisition, a further touch-up was done at
Technicolor, which Davis was unable to
attend.) Garibaldi watched four films that
Parker had singled out as visual touchstones: The Assassination of Jesse James by the
Coward Robert Ford [AC, Oct.'07], Valhalla
Rising, and Davis' Iron Lady and Man of
Tai Chi. He then watched the Avid edit in
Rec 709 together with the director and
cinematographer; after lengthy discussions, he created a custom LUT that translated the key parameters of the raw dailies
in P3. Garibaldi graded in a 2K DPX DCI
workflow on an Autodesk Lustre platform

American Cinematographer - November 2016

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