Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/983981
www.postmagazine.com 29 POST MAY 2018 DP/COLORIST RELATIONSHIP color. There was no need for me to push it; I took what was there and dialed it up a click so it would feel more cinematic. Alexis gets it in camera, his intent is there. My job is to bring it out, not create what's not there to begin with." Zabe believes that as a cinematographer, "half my job is on set and the other half is in the DI room. I don't distinguish the DI from the photog- raphy: It's as important as what I do on set." The DI theater is "where emotions get fine tuned," he explains. "It's about taking color to a place that's at the service of the story. It's layer- ing subtleties of the story, building more layers of significance on top of the performances, the sound, the words." Using 35mm film for The Florida Project took Zabe back to "the old-school way of dealing with the elements of surprise and the variables of the photo-chemical process. I told Sam about the decisions I made on the shooting end, and he just completely got it. Color had to walk the fine line of the naïve, colorful dreamy way in which the child Moonee sees the world and the more harsh reality of the world. Sam totally got it." Tyrel was shot in upstate New York in winter with a script that left room for improvisation and felt "very real and conversational," says Daley. "Alexis shot with all practical lighting; the mirrorless camera was incredible at captur- ing detail in low light. I had to take the digital edge off it and make it more film-like. And it's a noisy camera, so I used the Neat Video plug- in to do noise reduction on the entire film and added a new layer of Resolve grain on top for a consistent texture." "Sam was great at working with a super-com- pressed digital image; he pulled quite a few aces out of his sleeve to do some interesting digital tricks and pull information almost out of no- where," says Zabe. "He'd noise reduce and layer the same clip two or three times with different algorithms to bring out details in the low or mid-end. "The reason I chose the a7S camera was its low-light sensitivity. There were scenes lit entirely by a car dashboard light — the a7S was the only camera that could do that." Daley used Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve Studio 12.5 for both features. "For The Florida Project I had to rethink a few things and merge old and new workflows since I was deal- ing with film, two type of digital video and VFX shots on digital video," he explains. "Resolve gave me the flexibility to fly in all the last-minute film scans and VFX as they came in. I'd drop them in at lunchtime then move on." Daley emphasizes that it's the chemistry between the colorist and DP that "can't be planned for. I didn't get to meet Alexis until day one of the DI for The Florida Project so he put a lot of faith in the director's decision to hire me. During a lull in the grading session, he pulled out a tiny pocket microscope to look at the pigment in the Technicolor logo on the statio- nery. That's when I knew we'd get along just fine. Alexis sees the world the way I'd like to; he sees beautiful images everywhere, even on just a notepad." JUDY AND DALBY/SIMMONS — ROSEANNE Emmy Award-winning DP John Simmons, ASC, knows a few things about colorist-DP relation- ships. He's been working with colorist Jod Soraci of APT-4 in Marina del Rey, CA for more than 30 years and he spent four seasons of Nickelodeon's Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn alongside Technicolor colorist Roy Vasich. Now, Simmons is paired with senior colorists Dan Judy and Rick Dalby of LA's DigitalFilm Tree (www.digitalfilmtree.com) on the hit reboot of Roseanne. Simmons views color grading as "the second step" in his creative process. "When I approach a project, I develop a look, along with the art di- rection and script, that I feel interprets the show in the best way. By the time I get to color, I'm not establishing the look. It's the next [tool] in my paint box to enhance and refine the look. I can open things up or create subtleties I wasn't able to do on set." He credits shooting music videos in the early 1980s with giving him "a wonderful foundation" in color grading. "I got to learn what was possi- ble and how to communicate with the colorist," Simmons says. "I'd like to think I have a pretty good knowledge of where I can take a look when I'm shooting a project — what I might be able to do in the color grade to interpret the narrative better than I could do practically on set." Simmons always tries to participate as much as he can in the color process, "especially for the first few episodes of a series; I'm in there a lot. For the new Roseanne I've spent time in the color bay for every episode even though Dan and Rick landed the look we'd talked about and that I baked into the camera. They're really able to bring that look to life without my being there. They're as passionate about the look as I am." Developing a look for Roseanne 20 years after it finished its original run was no easy matter. The Connors were a beloved heartland family, but time hasn't stood still for them — the kids are grown and there are new generations to bicker with and new issues to cope with. "We wanted to honor the previous show while making the new show unique and contemporary at the same time," says Judy. "Everyone wanted to pay homage to the family feel of the show," which he likens to a "warm familiar blanket" that viewers can wrap themselves in. Simmons shoots Roseanne on the Panasonic VariCam 3700, capturing the show in HD. "The smaller chip gives us more depth of field and feels a bit closer to the look of the original show," he reports. Dalby recalls look development as "a long, multi-layered process." Before Dan Judy joined DigitalFilm Tree and before any camera test material was available, Dalby was already creat- ing dozens of different "style pieces that might suggest a somewhat retro look." They featured "a huge variety of manipulation of images from compressed color to DaVinci layer mixer effects that imitate some of the layering that you might do in Photoshop. DaVinci Resolve is node- based, so it was quite easy to play with lots of different looks by combining layers and select- ing which ones had the desirable effect." The Florida Project was shot on 35mm film.