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Peter Jackson’s Monkey Business, (c) Brad Reid 2006
Illustration Friday topic: E is for… Entertainer

If you’re like me, then you’ve been ogling the advances in motion picture colour for some years now. Some recent standouts like Yimou Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers and Michael Mann’s Collateral express a joy of colour that makes almost everything else – and certainly almost everything from before 1995 (or around then, I would guess) – seem grey and tired by comparison. I love the colour in these movies. For my liking, their use of colour seems to go beyond mere assistance to the story – their colour seems instead to be part of their whole reason for being.

One thing that I have been craving, however, is a look behind the scenes at the new colour technologies that have allowed these advances.

Luckily for me, at least one such look behind the scenes has recently become available. While Universal Studios has requested that Peter Jackson’s King Kong Production Diaries be removed from KongIsKing.net, the Post-Production Diaries are indeed still available, and at the 12-weeks-to-go mark we find a short video detailing the colour grading process as it was applied to the film. Here it is.

Colour grading, as the video presents it, is the post-production process by which the image captured on the raw negative is then transfered to digital files and adjusted for changes in lighting and corrections in continuity. The word “grading” is used to emphasize the filmmaker’s ability to make these adjustments by any measure of fine degrees. The true star of the video is Jackson’s own Discreet Lustre software, which we are told was developed for the Lord of the Rings, and I was mightily impressed by its ability. In the video we see it used variously to change the apparent time of day (a process called colour timing), to fill out scenes that originally appeared a trifle flat, and to draw out details in objects of particular importance, such as an actor’s face as the camera draws in for an expressive close-up.

I heartily recommend this video to all admirers of cinematography.