The Colors of the Other Side

Things change. Since 1998 when the book “50 Anos Luz” ( 50 Light Years) was written to today, 2007, a lot of things have changed in cinematography. Of all these changes nothing has changed more than control over color. This is the reason for the new “ 50 Light Years – 2007” .

Just like the year's car model incorporates the latest technological innovations the chapter on color timing methods deserves to undergo more than a mere “touch up”. People probably wouldn't say that their new car had just been “touched up”. No DPs for sure would say that about what has happened to color timing. “Touch up” wouldn't be enough to describe the changes made to the chapter on color timing; it is a “total overhaul”.

This is how everything began:

“A Outra Margem” (aka “The Other Side” – on competition on Montreal Film Festival 2007) is a feature film about a suicidal cross dresser whose life is saved by an idiot. The cross dresser has lost his lover. (The lover was more successful at attempting suicide than the cross dresser, he actually manages to kill himself by slitting his wrists in the bathtub. The lover's suicide happens before the film begins. Was he infected with AIDS? It's possible, but the film doesn't go there either). The idiot is a boy suffering from Down's syndrome. I'll admit that to call a mentally handicapped person who suffers from Down's syndrome an “idiot” is really idiotic, but this is where the beauty of the film lies: we have a mentally handicapped “hero” who solves the “normal” people's problems. To make a long story short, the film is sort of like “Kaspar Hauser” meets “Teorema”. It resembles “Kaspar Hauser” in that an idiot knows more about life than we, the supposedly “normal” people do, and his knowledge is our salvation. As regards Pasolini's “Teorema” the point of contact between the two is that one of the character's helps the others sort out their existential problems. This is probably the only similarity between the two movies and I wouldn't dare compare them. Everyone who's worked on a feature film knows how difficult it is to make a clear judgment on what they've just finished shooting. I hope that “The Other Side” has a little bit of the beauty that can be seen in “Teorema”, if it does, I will have been lucky to be the cinematographer of a great film. But getting back to the resemblance to “Teorema” it ends with the family's redemption, but... the redemption here doesn't come through sex! In “The Other Side” there are no sexual relations between the savior and his relatives as happens in “Teorema”. That's a relief isn't it? After all, we've already got a cross dresser and a kid who is mentally handicapped and to top it all, if they have sex with each other… (This is in fact the kid's mother's greatest fear; she's terrified almost to the point of panic about the possibility). Despite her fears, sex between the transvestite and the Down kid never happens.

Well, I guess that what is still left to say, as an introduction to the color timing in “The Other Side” is that all of the characters in the film belong to the same family. So, the cross dresser is the kid with Down's syndrome's uncle and there is also the kid's mother and his grandfather, an old farm laborer who'd kicked his gay son out of house and home on discovering his sexual preferences. You might think that as I called the kid an “idiot” it would logically follow for me to call the cross dresser a “tranny”. No way. I wouldn't dream of doing that. Calling the kid an idiot was only a literary ploy to hold the reader's attention for the remainder of the article. It's the old “shock the bourgeoisie” tactic to get everyone's attention. One should, especially nowadays when trying to shock people with political incorrectness and queer uncles, leave it up to comedians who are better at this than we are. Anyway, this introduction to the film was important to explain our manipulation of color in the film: the characters were presented in three separate and distinct blocks. These blocks are in order of appearance on screen:

1 – The cross dressing uncle in midst of a deep depression resulting from his lover's death.

2 – the quiet simple life of the working mother and her son with Down's syndrome in a small country town.

3 – the sad solitary life of the grandfather, a farm laborer on the outskirts of town

In the movie, the uncle manages to escape his depression thanks to his nephew's friendship and at the same time helps the kid to overcome his handicap and become part of society through the theater. In this film, as in Aristotle's' “Poetics”, the characters are larger and better than life, all the “normal” people have noble feelings, and the film has a happy ending. The happy ending is also important to the color grading, since it creates a fourth block of images in the film. The partitioned script gave me the idea for the cinematography that should also be partitioned, and the way to achieve the partitioning would be through the use of color.

“Progressive RGB”

I read the initial text and from what I gathered the idea is to have a dominance of red (R), of green (G) and of blue (B), which will balance themselves out during the film. Is that it? José Joffily 1

Right...that's it. More or less.

What Joffily forgets in his insight into the color timing of the “The Other Side” was to remember the first trinity of colors. When we speak of colors we always refer to RGB. But RGB is in fact the second trinity of colors. The real Holy Trinity is HSB ( hue/saturation/brightness). A color can only be really defined when we have these three parameters. And we can work on each of them either together or separately to change colors. Color, like anything else humans can conceive, has three dimensions, this is why it can have an almost infinite variation.

In our universe the fourth dimension is time, and in the infinite universe of color the equivalent is contrast.

To act on the RGB is to change the hue. “ Hue ” is what most people usually understand as “color”: red, green, blue etc. Now, when we act on the saturation , even though it might, visually look like we are just making the colors more (or less) “colorfull”, what we are really doing is putting in or taking out white from that specific color. And it makes no difference if it is on a painted canvas or on the screen of a monitor. When we remove all the saturation from an image, there are only two things left on the monitor: the three RGB pixels all lit up (white) or turned off (black). This is why when we remove all the saturation from an image it will become B&W.

If we don't act so radically, and do not totally decrease the “s aturation”, the image will become almost colorless: an image with de-saturated colors.

The third parameter of color is brightness, this is one of the two color variables that we were able to control using the traditional color timing methods, the optical/photochemical one, that involved filters and light intensity. What we used to do was to place color correction filters in a printer and lower (or increase) the light source intensity. In those days all we could do was to grade hue and brightness (density of the film). To change the saturation selectively was completely beyond our means. Contrast , which is the relationship between “brightnesses”, was also impossible to change, without passing through another generation of film.

As I wrote in the beginning of this article, “things change”. Now, with the “Digital Intermediate” things have changed. DI consists in transferring what was captured in film to a digital support and then working the images. Or, as ARRIFLEX puts it:

"Digital Intermediate" (DI) has become the buzz word in the motion picture postproduction industry. The sophisticated task of the DI process is to combine the known advantages of film as the preferred medium for acquisition, archiving, distribution and projection, with the digital postproduction process.

It is during the postproduction phase that color timing takes place. Nowadays, in DI, we can act upon the two variables of color which were impossible to act on in the past, or be it: contrast and saturation. This is the brave new world of total color control.

Being able to digitally work on “The Other Side” and to act on all the parameters of color - hue/saturation/brightness and contrast - I decided to return to my original concept of “Progressive RGB” which had been abandoned.

This is how it happened.

The idea came before we began shooting and was quite radical: we would “decolorize” all but one color. And even that one color would be de-saturated in the different blocks of images. A character's scenes would be de-saturated and only the “reds” left in, or be it the “R” in RGB. The other characters would have their scenes de-saturated too but leaving green or blue tendencies, which are of course, the “G” and “B” in RGB. As the characters' redemption happens the colors would progressively change until they reached the normal RGB. With hue, saturation and density balanced out, the way we usually see them. Towards the end of the film with redemption becoming more and more assured the colors would become more and more saturated.

The journey would be from “depression/de-saturation” to “redemption/saturation”, as can be seen in the pictures below.

Firstly on the left, the concept as it was presented to the director; these images were de-saturated in Photoshop using a frame from a key-light test. Then, on the right, the same proposition now using frames from the movie, at the beginning of the color timing in DI.

R – de-saturated/red, the simple life of the worker mother and her son suffering from Down's syndrome in a small town in the interior of Portugal .

G - de-saturated/green, the sad and lonely life of the widowed grandfather in the outskirts of the town.

B – de-saturated/blue the cross dressing uncle in deep depression because of his lover's death.

The frames below are from the “blue” character: on the left we see depression/de-saturation; on the right after redemption/saturation.

Goethe has a famous saying, which reads: “When you have a good idea the whole universe conspires in your favor”. Millor Fernandes twists this same saying into: “As soon as you have a new idea it starts popping up all over the place at the same time”. Neither said exactly what is written here but… they thought it. And if they didn't think it… I did… Just check out if this isn't a “universal conspiracy”: The minute I had this idea, the Ricoh ad you can see below showed up in the press. Isn't it an authentic sequence in “Progressive RGB”?!

Of course I know that there's nothing new about things like separating life into different phases of colors in feature films. There is never nothing new in art; everything comes as the development of an already existing idea. Talking about “Progressive RGB” the idea for it came from two different films: “Independence Day” and “The Last Emperor”, not even to mention the youthful Pablo Picasso's Blue and Pink phases. Karl Lindenlaub the DP on “Independence Day” explained the choice of colors for the different sequences in the following way:

“Well. We'd already made up our minds that for the desert all the colors would be light and yellowy. The nighttime material would be typically bluish. The interior of the human's' houses would be a warm orangey. The control rooms red… so in the end the only color left for the Martians really was green.”

The other source of inspiration was the film “The Last Emperor” in which Vittorio Storaro, the cinematographer, took to the extreme his concept of “psychological colors”: the movie begins in red and ends in violet and passes through the whole visible spectrum in between. In both films there was a joint effort with production design to achieve this result: the set dressing and wardrobe helped keep the chosen colors in evidence. In “The Other Side” this did not happen: the idea was put aside even before shooting began since it was considered to be too dangerous: it might alienate the audience due to the excessive formalism. So nothing was done during the shoot in terms of set dressing or wardrobe. The idea only returned to the forefront when the film was already edited and mixed, when we began the color timing. And this is where the DI novelty came back and with it film director José Joffily.

Joffily has this theory about where we are at in terms of post production. He says that the actual capture of the images is not really that important. The capture can be realized on any support or in any format. Then later, if you have time and money, you can finish it in DI and change everything: format, framing, colors, saturation, brightness and contrast. His theory may be right or it may be wrong but it clearly shows the way people, producers, directors and ultimately even cinematographers feel about the advances of DI. This debate doesn't even come up any more in still photography, because with Photoshop it is exactly what is already happening. And it's happening more and more with the movies . Some of the newer features with beautiful cinematography like “Perfume – The Story of a Murderer” and “The Labyrinth of the Faun”, winner of the Oscar for best cinematography this year, were shot based on “gut feeling”, as their cinematographers said, without paying too much attention to light meters or contrast ratio. Then in postproduction all the images underwent “fine tuning” in DI.

What happened in “The Other Side” is that, because of DI, we could return to a concept that had been put aside for lack of control over color. The possibility of de-saturating colors in a totally controlled manner brought back to life the original concept for the cinematography. With DI not only we were able to gradually de-saturate colors but it was also possible to do that on dissolves within the same shot. Not to mention that correcting density and RGB, as we'd do during traditional timing, had become much faster and more precise.

And we haven't even spoken of the “dynamic layers” that can fix errors of exposure within the same shot or the ease to erase scratches and dust from the original negative.

In the end… what really matters is the film on the screen. This photographic concept, which had almost been set aside for being too radical, now appears on screen as something much more subtle than it might seem by reading this article. People might never even notice it if the concept had not been explained and underlined here. Photographic concepts are always a bit intangible and can rarely be fully understood by the public: they act much more as guidelines for the cinematographer during the shoot and then later… for the dialog with the colorist.

TECHNICALY

“The Other Side” is a Portuguese production, directed by Luis Felipe Rocha 2 and shot in the north of Portugal . The color timing was done in DI at ARRIFLEX, Munich . The equipment is listed below. I won't go into any greater technical detail because I do not think it's important. The article I've written above, deals very little with technical stuff. My article is in fact a commentary on what can be conceptually achieved with DI and not about the technical equipment used in the process. I mention this because it might seem that to finish in DI one must go abroad and work with state of the art equipment, but that is not true. What's true is that it is a pleasure to work with these machines that are able to do more, but it isn't true that we can only do these things with those hardwares. DI definitely opens up new technical possibilities but over and above it opens up new artistic horizons. Anyone who has an idea (and has the ability and knowledge how to execute it) keeps the artistic control no matter if it was imprinted on grains of silver or bites. It makes no difference whatsoever if it is on film or digital, B&W or color, sound or silent, scope, 35mm or Super-8. Things haven't changed.

Camera – AATON XTR Prod – Super 16mm – Ground Glass 1.66/1.85 – Prime lenses Zeiss High-speed series (T. 1.3) –9.5, 12, 16, 25, 50, 85 – Zeiss Zoom 11-110mm (T. 2.2) –Canon 200mm long lens (T. 1.8(Raw Stock – Kodak Vision 2; 7205 (250D), 7217 (200T), 7218 (500T) – developed at LIGHT FILM, Lisbon – Work Copy in DVD.

DI at ARRIFLEX, Munich – Scanned in 2K log – Light grading done on a Hard Master Station Lampshade – Colorist: Rainer Schmidt – Corrections projected in real time on a Barco D-Cine Premiere DP90 DLP 2K projector – 2K data transferred to Kodak Interegative 5242 (acetate bas) realized on the Arrilaser at a speed of 1,7fps

Print – Vision 2383 – 35mm – 1.85:1 – SWARZ Film laboratory. Switzerland . Timing: Nicole Allerman.

This article on the colors of the “The Other Side” is really a summary of a chapter of this new book entitled “on Color”. The book isn't finished yet; but there are already 100 pages written and… the cover is ready, which as Foguinho 3 says is what really matters.

Edgar Moura – www.edgarmoura.com.br

¹. José Joffily – director of “Achados e Perdidos”, “Quem Matou Pixote”...

². Luís Filipe Rocha – director of “A Passagem da Noite”, “Camarate”...

³. Rudi Lagemann – director of “Anjos do Sol”...