Pearl, Cole Push DI Tools to Create Unique Look for Captivity

(This article describes the work on the first (and completed) DI color timing of Captivity.  A new production company subsequently re-cut and re-graded the movie.)

Laser Pacific’s technological expertise, combined with the skill, experience, intuition and collaborative instincts of Daniel Pearl, ASC andDave Cole, DI colorist create a series of bold, unique looks for director Roland Joffé’s latest feature, Captivity. 

When two-time Oscar nominee Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission) asked Pearl to shoot a film in Russia, the cinematographer was thrilled by the chance to work with a great director, and intrigued by the project. Pearl was a pioneer in the creative use of the telecine, and is best known for his stylistically adventurous and innovative music videos. He also counts among his credits Pathfinder, Frankenstein, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – both the influential 1974 original and the 2003 remake.

The Russian project was a psychodrama about a kidnapped couple who begin to realize that their captor is trying to drive them insane. Joffé was initially set on shooting in anamorphic format, but he and Pearl decided that Super 35 combined with a digital intermediate was the right path. The movie was filmed mostly on stages in Moscow, with three days of shooting in New York City. 

“I knew that if we shot the film in three-perf Super 35 format, we’d save a bunch of money that could go towards the digital intermediate,” says Pearl. “The DI would put us much closer to the DVD that would eventually be made, and it would help me control the light. We cinematographers are always trying to focus the attention of the audience, and sometimes life is just too short, especially on the set. The DI helps in that regard, too.”
But Pearl stresses that the DI was more than a time and money-saving process. His collaboration in the DI suite with Laser Pacific Colorist David Cole was a roughly two-week period of fertile creativity in which theydeveloped the film’s signature looks through interactive experimentation and discovery.

“In my opinion, Dave Cole is a genius,” says Pearl. “Dave is a master of the Lustre software. Of course, I had seen the films he’d worked on previously, and he came highly recommended. But I was astounded. It’s not just his ability to wield the tools, although that is superior. He also hasa terrific eye and the color knowledge to contribute excellent ideas and input.

“Frequently my light is in a contrasty, dramatic style, and it comes from the side,” says Pearl. “If you’re going for a chunky look and you’re shooting the film up a little bit and crushing it in post, the eyes tend to go a little dark. Dave was immediately able to go in, grab the eyes and track them. That’s one example of the ways we were able to shape and control light in the DI.”

Pearl offers another example: “Sometimes I like a soft quality of light that is difficult or impossible to cut as sharply as I’d like on the set,” he says. “We could take a lot of time on the set, and still the shadow is neither here nor there – it’s mushy. Dave is able to use the DI tools to place the cut exactly where I wanted it, and feather it in just the right way, and do it in a fraction of the time it would have taken on the set.”

The filmmakers also used DI to fine-tune colors, which played an important role in the storytelling. “We came in knowing the film needed a yellow-gold wash, but Dave helped me find the right color journey for the story,” says Pearl. “We’d find the look for a scene, and then he would bring all the shots in the scene into that look. At that point I’d start bringing in Windows and working on particular areas of the frame. It was an efficient working method, which is important, because without it you can end up just going around and around. Post supervisor Chris Millergave us great support all the way through.”

Pearl and Cole used the DI tools to design several more specific looks that stand out from the rest of the film. One such look, dubbed “psychovision,” affected scenes seen from the villain’s point of view. “Roland asked for something crazy, weird and unexpected,” says Cole. “The editors had experimented in the Avid with a color inversion. We picked up on that and inverted color saturation so skin tones went bluish instead of yellow or pinkish, but luminance stayed the same.”

The goal was for some parts of those frames to be held “in normality.”Those areas included images of the villain’s next victim. Sometimes those normal areas were posters on the sides of busses, and these normal-look areas had to track through the “psychovision” frame, passing behind elements of the urban landscape.

“I was looking at the ‘psychovision’ shots, and thinking to myself that it would take two weeks of visual effects work to accomplish that,” says Pearl. “Dave could do it in an incredibly short amount of time, and it looked terrific on the big screen.”

Joffé also envisioned an unusual desaturated look for another sequence. Cole and Pearl considered emulating a bleach bypass process, but found that it didn’t work with the fluorescent fixtures, white tile and stainless steel that dominated the frame in those scenes. They found the right combination of characteristics by happy accident. 

“Dave and I were starting to drain and shift colors in this scene, and suddenly we hit something on a certain closeup,” says Pearl. “We both thought it was fantastic. Although we were draining the color, it was contrasty and it had a certain sharpness that felt sharper than reality. We agreed on the spot that this was something truly unique and perfect for the scene, and Dave applied it to the rest of the sequence.”

“Finding that look was very much an organic process,” says Cole. “It wasn’t just one setting or control, or anything we had played with before. We knew it needed something, but we weren’t sure what it was until we saw it.”

“Dave is extremely good at latching on to what’s unique and essential about an image, and applying to every other shot,” says Pearl. “You have to have the discipline to have a vision in your mind and drive the whole machine to get it, but you also have to be wise enough to recognize a happy accident when you see one, and grab it.”

When Pearl and Cole showed the sequence to Joffé they weren’t sure how he’d react. He loved it, and congratulated Cole and Pearl on their work. “It was a big turning point for him,” says Pearl. “He realized that we could depart from photographic reality, and he began to see DI as another artistic element he could use to tell the story.”