Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546033
color. The Handmaid's Tale series palette developed around the red costume of the Handmaid and the teal blue dress of the Wife. As near complementary colors, the two made a striking pairing. In The Testaments, the design team was handed a rainbow of color: a sea of adolescent girls dressed in plum combined with little ones in pink, graduating menstruating girls in green and Pearl Girls in white. Added to that, teal blue of their mothers the Wives, sage of their caretakers the Marthas, brown of their teachers the Aunts, and an occasional Handmaid in red. Our director was a little worried with how it might all come together. We carried out extensive camera tests to look at different shades of these colors in combination with each other under different types of light— warm, cool, day, night—and against backgrounds I thought might play well behind the dominant plum costume color. Fabric texture vastly changed how colors read to the camera. There is no such thing as color after all, only light. Matte natural fibers suited to Gilead's synthetic-free ethos absorbed light, making them difficult to project color, which only made the job harder. We learned that green is difficult. We struggled to retain a deep, saturated green. It tended toward brown in warm light and blue in cool light. We settled on the most neutral of greens, neither warm nor cool, and Greta had to adjust her light toward neutral to retain its greenness. Greta worked on developing a unique color LUT for The Testaments. Over the years, the LUT on The Handmaid's Tale had evolved. Initially, it worked on deepening the red of the Handmaids' costume by working on the shadows within the red channels. The LUT worked very well for the red and teal combination. Through later seasons, June's struggles played out against a beautiful, increasingly desaturated light. Greta began our camera tests by using the original LUT from The Handmaid's Tale, to retain some sense of the already established world, but as we looked at our new palette, she developed it to prioritize our new colors and bring up color saturation. As The Handmaid's Tale progressed through the seasons, the scripts described Gilead as a more realized society. In the beginning, we often recalled parts of everyday America that had been hurriedly converted for the new regime, repurposed from their former use. Production Designer Elisabeth Williams referenced fascist imagery, creating a graphic, monumental style for Gilead's official buildings. Toronto's brutalist architecture, where the series shot, highlighted the regime's domineering feeling. The C-E. LYDIA ACADEMY LOBBY CONCEPT RENDERS BY ETIENNE GRAVRAND AND MICHAEL DERRAH. C E D