KING KONG

The Look: A Peachy Afterlife
The thing about Peter Jackson's lovesick monkey movie is that it doesn't look like a lovesick monkey movie. He shoots it in epic, lavish style with panoramic landscapes, romantic movie-star closeups and a painstaking digital recreation of old New York. Where the Lord of the Rings movies worked largely from a dark, foreboding palette where color-grading often meant brightening up spots in the image or highlighting someone's face in the darkness, King Kong takes place largely in the daylight, or in well-lit nighttime sequences. That's scary for a VFX movie, since there's nowhere to hide the stuff you rushed through the pipeline to meet your deadlines, and it means the colorist team at Weta Digital, supervised by Peter Doyle [collaborating with supervising colorist David Cole and lead colorists Melissa Kangleon and Billy Wychgel], had to keep on their toes to reflect constantly changing lighting schemes. VFX are layered upon VFX, and if the screen does sometimes look like a big digital painting, smart grading decisions in the Lustre suite help keep the image coherent from sequence to sequence and across all three narrative segments. The shockingly realistic Kong is among the most believable monsters in monster-movie history, but the film's best color gambit comes when it visualizes sunrise over the East River of Manhattan as an unlikely but ethereally beautiful combination of yellow, peach and turquoise that bathes Kong in the light of a movie monster's afterlife. Just lovely. ‘ The D-Eye Guy