Two of the top prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival have gone to movies which relied on FilmLight colour science for the finishing look. Parasite, from Korean director Bong Joon Ho, took the Palme d’Or, while director Mati Diop won the Grand Prix for Atlantique (Atlantics), the first black female director to take the honor.
Parasite is a dark comedy of social manners and tensions. The whole DI took more than two months: colourist Kevin Kang spent approximately the first month grading, and the last weeks finessing VFX shots alongside director Bong.
“I often used the new Colour Temperature operator in Baselight for my primary grading,” Kang explained. “It allowed me to quickly balance shots prior to adding a look to the sequence. The advantage is that it works by adjusting metadata from the raw file, and so it still retains all the pixel fidelity.”
Atlantics opens in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal, where a team of workers on a futuristic construction site decide to escape by sea after going without pay for months. Director and writer Mati Diop was supported by Claire Mathon as DoP and Giles Granier as colourist at Le Labo, Paris.
“After the first on-site tests, the need to shoot with two cameras was clear,” said Granier. “So we had the great sensitivity of the Panasonic VariCam at night, and the clean output of the RED Dragon in daylight. The quality of the Baselight pipeline allowed me to easily match these two cameras.”
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