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42 C I N E M O N T A G E T E C H without feeding someone the story. As a colorist, I find projects that lean into visual language are especially exciting because you can convey so much through mood. There might be a shot of wind in the trees. It's not driving the plot forward, yet it could be the most important shot in a scene be- cause it's the most evocative," he said. "Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!" embraces magical realism and heightened reality. The visuals are rich and colorful with an almost storybook feeling of reality. Jencks said, "The word 'magical' was a key piece of the direction. So much of the color in the world was done practically with wardrobe and color choices by the art department on set, which I was amplifying in color grading." Before getting down to work, Jencks, cinematographer Daniel Satinoff, and director Josef Kubota Wladyka spent time experimenting with texture and different techniques to soften the blacks. "We want- ed the fine details of someone's hair, for instance, to be softer, but we didn't want to lift the blacks overall, which would have made the image seem washed out. We tried reducing the sharpness of shadows versus applying different filtration to shadows — simulating optical filtration like Black Pro-Mist, Mitchell diffusion, or Smoque fil- ters and using them in non-traditional ways to soften dark areas of the image. Tradition- ally, these filters are put in front of the lens, but simulating them as a post-production process allows us to treat the shadows to diminish aspects of digital acquisition that we don't like or don't fit this particular film. All of these things can be part of the 'look development' process," said Jencks. SATURATION POINT They also experimented with satura- tion. Jencks noted that different types of saturation can feel very different, and for "Ha-Chan," it was important that the image be rich and colorful in a way that felt natu- ral, not as if a process had been applied to achieve that effect. "The type of saturation that's often appealing to me is letting colors darken as they get more saturated, shaping the saturation so that we don't allow colors that are very bright to also be super-sat- urated. If you have too much color and brightness in a normal object, it can start to feel as if that object is actually glowing in an unnatural way. As things get more saturated, they also take on a darkness and richness. It can feel more painterly, more organic," he said. In contrast to the rich, colorful imagery of "Ha-Chan," "Hot Water" leaned into understated naturalism and atmospheric beauty. The physical landscapes were important to the film's feel, and Jencks's job was to let those visual environments — whether sprawling deserts or the con- fines of someone's home — be unique and beautiful. Jencks explained, "For certain aspects of post-production, you're working so hard for your work to be invisible. And 'Hot Wa- ter' was certainly one of those situations. We put a tremendous amount of thought and effort into color grading 'Hot Water,' and ultimately, I hope it's all invisible. That's a weird thing to say as a colorist, but the viewer should just accept that this is what was in front of the camera at that time. Instead of noticing the color grading, I would love the audience to come out of the film thinking, 'That film was beautiful,' and not give a thought to the color grading." Embracing naturalism meant Jencks could simply use what was shot as his guide to color grading a scene. Easier said than done. "In reality, for example, production may have been losing light during the shot, so the later shots are darker than the earlier shots, and they're using them out of sequence. You don't want to embrace that type of naturalism. You want to embrace the naturalism of the environment. And so the trick becomes, how do you embrace the nat- uralism of light and an environment, while also enhancing and clarifying it? In those situations, it's less about creating a look per se and more about distilling the lighting and color that's already there," he said. Jencks has access to both DaVinci Re- solve and FilmLight's Baselight and chooses which color grading system to use on a proj- ect-by-project basis. "I have a team that can use both, which is hard to come by because learning both platforms takes time, and the hardware is an investment. So I feel lucky to have both available to me," he said. System notwithstanding, Jencks finds the two most useful advancements in color grading have been AI/machine-learning tools for creating depth maps and automat- ed rotoscoping. In Resolve, there's the AI rotoscoping tool Magic Mask 2 that, with just a few clicks to guide selection, can automatically identify and create masks around people or objects. "When I first saw the automated roto tools, I thought, 'I would never use that; it's not how I work at all.' I could see how it A Davinci Resolve color grading platform.