As one of the pioneers of the modern DI process, Peter Doyle sat down with Colorfront in 1998 to define what would later morph into Discreet Lustre. Since then, he's put his colorful stamp on Lord of the Rings, the last two Harry Potters, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and, most recently, King Kong, a true colossus of a DI.
Q: How many colorists were on King Kong – and at what stage did you get involved?
A: I was the color supervisor, which meant sitting with director Peter Jackson and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie to create the final looks, the overall color arc of the film and how each scene should be designed and work with the others. Then I worked with the Weta colorists to make that happen.
Each scene was so complex that there was a lot of handwork, a lot of tracking and rotoscoping – borderline visual effects, really. I think what's happening now with a lot of these grades is that they're becoming extremely complex, with each shot requiring quite a bit of work with roto and tracking, so you need more people on the team.
Q: Wouldn't that be better achieved in VFX?
A: It's that gray area between visual effects and grading. For example, King Kong had quite a lot of scenes in the jungle where the sky needed a certain treatment and the green of the leaves needed a certain treatment. It's better done in grading because the tools allow a better match between multiple shots. You're able to see everything in context, and then you can play the shots back in sequence and see how it's working. You can really build in a color dynamic in the overall scene.
Q: How did you interact with the hands-on DI colorists?
A: The supervising colorist for Weta Digital was David Cole, and the two other lead colorists were Melissa Kangleon and Billy Wychgel. I'd sit down with each of them, define a look and say this is how we should technically go about it – then each colorist would take that look and grade the sequence. We'd review it together and I'd make comments. When we thought it was ready, we'd sit down with Peter and Andrew.
Q: What were the trickiest parts of coloring King Kong?
A: What was interesting with Kong was that it had a lot of time-of-day transitions. What you're trying to do is imply that the scene starts at 3PM and then finishes at nighttime, and to pull that off is really quite complicated because no shot is the same. You're always trying to keep a continuity and a flow so you don't get thrown out of the film – but also create a feeling that the time has changed. Andrew built a lot of that into the lighting. It was important that we understood what he was trying to do so we didn't grade it out.
The jungle was also tricky because there was an extraordinary amount of detail and there was the danger it would turn into a green mass. We had to keep the shots so that there was a sense of design and you could see what was happening in each shot.
Q: How much of a role did the DI play in helping to sell the CG creatures?
A: I think in this case, Weta did a pretty good job with Kong. The DI wasn't about saving CG – it was about enhancing and providing continuity.
Q: Was there a philosophy behind the color palette in King Kong? How much was that an extension of production design, costume design and so on? Did the DI contribute anything unique?
A: The brief was that the film was to look as realistic as possible, by using theatrical techniques. It was reaching for very stage-like tools and visual motifs but to keep it looking realistic, and there's an interesting contradiction inherent in that.
In the jungle, the key lighting element from Andrew was the proscenium arch concept where the foreground was darkish and the background was quite bright. So it meant that if you were underneath the jungle canopy it would be darkish – but when you saw the horizon it would really burn out. The other design element was to avoid having the jungle green pulling the overall brightness down. We were always working towards keeping it extremely bright, in terms of the highlights, so that it felt as real as possible. That way you could quickly define the area where the actors would be standing so you could focus on the performance.
The DI contributed to the design by helping create continuity for the three hours and the three worlds – the opening scenes in New York, Skull Island and the return to New York, which is when Kong falls from the building. We also worked to create a sense of travel in the jungle, as they enter Skull Island. We did that in part through the amount of color in the film. It's not so self-evident, but when you first arrive at Skull Island, it's almost b&w. It's quite desaturated. As they travel into the jungle, there's more and more chroma so by the time they hit the sacrifice of Ann to King Kong which is the first reveal of Kong, it allows an opportunity to have an extreme color difference. The jungle was blue in the nighttime scenes, allowing us to make Kong a black shape so he'd catch highlights. For the final reveal at sacrifice, he could then take on the red wash of the village where Ann was standing.
Q: Did you learn anything from this film?
A: Yes. It sounds like a subtle thing but those time-of-day transitions were very interesting. Normally in grading, you're always trying to grade out those transitions as a sequence is shot throughout a day. The other is the sheer firepower required for the complexity of the film – having at least three colorists to pull that off and to coordinate it and maintain an overall vision was a learning experience.