The “Look” of ‘Hail Cesar’

[Max A.]

Hello Mr. Deakins and all the people over this fantastic forum! First of all, I hope you and Mrs. James are well.
Before going into the topic and asking my question, I believe that the “look” of a movie is the result of a combination of many things, not only a certain color saturation or hue that comes along the entire film, I think also that every movie has it’s specific “look” and the audience perceive and realize it only when the movie is finished. In my opinion, It is impossible to “copy” a “look” of another movie even for the same cinematographer.
Of course, I think that thinking about the color tones of a movie in advance can help a way of lighting maybe to help the “manipulation” of hues and saturations for a LUT or in a DI process.
Regarding this decision, I would like to ask you if it is possible, what was your idea, or your discussion with the directors, for what I feel is the warm “predominant” tone of “Hail Cesar”.
Why did you and the directors want to obtain that color palette for the movie?

About the technical side, I noticed that in some cases, especially for some exteriors, there is a warm “dominant” and seems to me that colors like blues are de-saturated or muted.
This is something that you achieved during the DI process? If it is so, what was your manipulation?

For instance, I attach two images, one comes from the movie and embeds the rich warm tones, and the other one is a ‘behind the scenes’ of what seems to be the same scene at the same time of the day.
The BTS picture has all the “blues” tones that come from the sky and atmosphere that the final movie (to me) doesn’t seem to have.

I know that you don’t like to use temperature filtration in front of your lens (except for some cases like Vegas in BR2049), so my curiosity goes to “how” did you achieve that warm palette in that exterior that seems to have a lot of blues indirect light coming from the sky.

As always I want to thank you for your time and availability, I know you are so busy these days.

I apologize for my bad English.

I wish you a peaceful day,
Max.

Topic

[Stip]

Until he replies (hopefully)…I think simply a high color temperature in camera would swallow the blues in this particular scene as well.

[Roger Deakins]

That image from the film is way off. I did shoot the exteriors to be warm but that is ridiculous. It looks like there is a yellow veil over the entire shot.

[Max A.]

Thank you very much for your reply Mr. Deakins! I apologize if something is altered in the image of the film. I took the picture from Filgrab, a website with many movie stills, maybe there was a loss of color details (probably based on the Internet color space) when the website uploaded the stills. Maybe, they took the stills from a movie source with colors slightly off, who knows?

When you say that you did shoot the exteriors to be warm, and based on the fact that you shoot with film stock did you warm the image during DI or by adding a filter in front of the lens (or maybe shooting with a daylight stock with 85filter but I know you prefer the tungsten stock when you shot in film).
Maybe today a solution could be shooting with a white balance slightly off (as suggested by Stip), my curiosity is related to the process with the film stock workflow.

I also love the color density that film stock has, it is not easy to “replicate” with digital files until I don’t work with a high-end camera and expert colorist.

As always, thank you for your patience in answering our questions, it is priceless for me.
I apologize for my bad English.

I wish you a peaceful day.
Max.

[Stip]

I also love the color density that film stock has, it is not easy to “replicate” with digital files until I don’t work with a high-end camera and expert colorist.

Max, if you use Davinci Resolve Studio, there’s a free DCTL from Paul Dore (ACES color scientist) called “Film Density” that emulates the darker luminosity in saturated colors of film.

You can find it on his Github site.

[Max A.]

Hello Stip, thank you very much for your suggestion! Yes, I use Davinci Resolve, I tend to try to do the same process you mention with tools in Resolve but good to know that there is another tool to try! I love to tweak color densities in Resolve, but of course, a skilled color scientist can use specific tools over others (also in Resolve) to achieve more “scientific” results, but this is another topic to talk about 😄.
Everything is interesting and comparison is something I love, but I haven’t always been able to find “colleagues” willing to discuss.

I wish you a nice day.
Max.

[Stip]

Max,

I find the tools in Resolve very limiting or too imprecise for these kind of tweaks and almost only use DCTLs (“DaVinci Colorspace Transform Language”) now.

You might want to look into it, I find it much easier to get pleasing (and mathematically “correct”) colors than with Resolves’ own tools.

“Film Density” and “Tetra” from Paul Dore (in the “DCTL” folder on his Github page) are two all-time classics and free.

There are also great free DCTLs from IridescentColor .com, one that’s also called “Tetra”, “Saturator” and “Split/Tone”. He also has videos on them and affordable commercial DCTLs.

More expensive but fantastic DCTL programmers are Mononodes and Kaur Hendrikson.

I recommend trying the free ones, they are already great!

[Author]

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