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July / August 2022

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n Warner Bros. Pictures' Elvis, audiences gain insight into the famed singer's career and complicated relationship with manager Colonel Tom Parker. The feature, directed by Baz Luhrmann, is presented as a cinematic drama, while also loaded with musical performances. Austin Butler stars as The King, while Oscar winner Tom Hanks plays his manager — Colonel Tom Parker — who, while greedy and manipulative, was instrumental in Elvis' success. The film was shot in Queensland, Australia, with post production and VFX taking place in Sydney, Brisbane, and Miami in the City of Gold Coast. The Post Lounge (www.thepostlounge. com) provided dailies color and DI/ final color for the film, enhancing the work of production designers Catherine Martin ("CM") and Karen Murphy, who were tasked with recreating Graceland, Beale Street in Memphis, TN, and The International Hotel in Las Vegas, among other settings. Mandy Walker served as cinematog- rapher, shooting on the Arri Alexa 65, and entirely recreating many well-known scenes from performances on Steve Allen and Milton Berle shows, as well as the '68 Special in Las Vegas. According to colorist Kim Rene Bjørge, who worked on the dailies, as well as final color, the production shot up to five cameras each day, resulting in an abun- dance of footage. Working closely with Mandy Walker and using Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve software, he would create color decision looks (CDLs) and hand the footage off for transcoding, with files then moving on to editorial. As both the dailies colorist and DI col- orist, Bjørge had the advantage of having seen all the footage when it came time to apply final color. "It was interesting…being able to be a part of that because, normally, the dailies colorist is not also the finishing colorist, so it's a good process, where I know the history of every scene." The film's color palette is very specific to the time period. Colored light doesn't come in until later on in Elvis's life. The early years of his life in Memphis was dubbed by Luhrmann as "color black & white." The director referenced 20th century American photographer Gordon Parks and his early color photography. "It's sort of more like the Kodachrome kind of feeling or look [of] the early days," Bjørge explains. "The color doesn't pop as much…The later stuff, like [when] we hit the '50s and Las Vegas era, the colors pop more. Our references, a lot of times, would be the documentary stuff of Elvis that was shot at that time." In addition to Bjørge, the final color team included Kali Bateman, who once worked at The Post Lounge and now works as a freelance colorist. DaVinci Resolve, she notes, is everywhere in Australia, allowing her to easily integrate into different studios' color workflows. She points to Resolve's collaboration tools as one of the strong features that allowed her and other contributors, whom would later come onboard, to keep the project moving forward. "It was sort of set up with this central database, and that was where the server was for all the projects," says Bateman. "And then all of the footage was on a shared media SAN. We were able to work — sometimes in the same room, sometimes in different rooms — on the same material, or even in the same reel at times. Often, one of us would be doing a session, and then the other one would be implementing the notes from that session at the same time. There were quite a few times when we were in Miami, Kim would often be doing a session with Baz and CM, and I would be sitting next to him on a separate machine, imple- menting those notes at the same time, so that by the time they'd gotten through a spool, we'd already implemented the notes from the start of the spool and could see whether or not those were going in the correct direction…Kim could be presenting what we'd worked on, and doing broad brush strokes, and then I could be going through and doing sort of more custom-based things, where you really wanted to pop a color here or push a color back there." Bjørge points to some of the film's early scenes, where Elvis, as a young boy, is drawn to the music coming from a reli- gious service being held in a tent nearby, and another sequence where a teenage Elvis attends a party on Beale Street. "The young Elvis scenes…I think it was shot by second unit, so Baz wasn't really there," Bjørge explains. "This is one scene where we definitely treat it a little bit different to what the dailies were, bringing the colors and using Gordon Parks as a reference. That sort of treatment went through Beale Street and daytime — that muted color kind of look, which is something we developed together with Baz in the grading theater. (It's) something that wasn't developed while they were shooting." WARNER BROS. PICTURES' ELVIS BY MARC LOFTUS A TEAM OF COLORISTS TAKE ADVANTAGE OF RESOLVE'S COLLABORATION TOOLS I COLOR GRADING www.postmagazine.com 22 POST JULY/AUG 2022 Colorists (L-R) Kali Bateman and Kim Rene Bjorge.

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