Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC (21 Grams, Alexander, Brokeback Mountain, The 25th Hour, Amores Perros, Original Sin), is no stranger to the DI process. This Mexican-born-and-educated cinematographer did his first DI in the early experimental days with director Julie Taymor on the very colorful Frida. Prieto talks to DI Studio about coloring Babel, the third in his trilogy with director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
How did the experience of doing a DI on Frida impact you?
I got hooked on the tools and the possibilities you have with a DI. So I proposed to use it on 8 Mile as well. For me, the main thing is the interactive part of it, not so much manipulating contrast or secondary colors and all that. What I like is being able to ask for a point of yellow or a point of cyan and see it happening before my eyes, as opposed to waiting and seeing the results the next day.
With Babel, a DI was necessary because you used 16mm and 35mm and so many film stocks. How else did you benefit from a DI on this film?
It all started with 16mm because we wanted to have a bleach-bypass look on the Moroccan section, but we didn't want it to be a full bleach bypass like we did on Amores Perros. We wanted to go halfway, and we found we couldn't achieve a consistent look photochemically. There were variations in the lab. We had to achieve that affect digitally.
Did you create any other special looks in the DI suite?
One important element of the visual was film grain. We wanted different textures in the scenes, which is why we used 16mm. For Japan, we used anamorphic lenses adapted by Panavision because of their very shallow depth of field, which represented the main character's deafness. We didn't touch any of this in the DI suite. All we really tried to do in the DI was to play with color, and play with contrast for the Moroccan section, because we did digitally create that bleach bypass look. The rest was in the negative.
What was your process working with the colorist?
Yvan Luca was the same colorist that did Alexander with me. I also grew very fond of the Discreet Lustre at à‰clair in France. So I had Yvan and the Lustre at LaserPacific. The thing I like about the Lustre is that you work in the color space, which is like working on a print. I can say, 'Give me 5 percent color desaturation or 15 percent contrast.' It's very, very precise and that I enjoy.
I understand you used Gamma & Density's 3CP on the set.
During the shoot, I took digital pictures of the set-up and used Gamma & Density to do a color grading of the photos, and then sent it to use as a reference for the dailies. All the information is there, represented graphically and numerically. We had video dailies that were very close to our intention. When we started the DI the first week, I used these images as a reference. It was a good tool to start with.