Dreujou notes that although digital dailies can alert filmmakers to potential problems, they can be downright frustrating. “You don’t have time to really get into a sequence,” he says. “It’s a way to check that everything is okay, but it goes too fast. Also, you’re often selecting the problem scenes because you want to check them, so most of what you see needs work. After a while, it can get pretty depressing.” After days of effort on Two Brothers, Dreujou remembers the moment when he finally saw an entire 20-minute reel output to film. “Seeing Reel 2 in its entirety was happiness! All of a sudden, I could breathe more freely. You don’t really see things until you get an entire reel, and then you can really enter into the film. However, you have to be sure of what you’ve done before you send a reel off to be recorded on film. You don’t want to have to re-record the entire reel!”

Adds Lucas, “In digital grading, you tend to work reel by reel, so you stay on one reel for a long time. When I finally see the entire film, I may want to tweak the reels so they match — one might be greener than another because we did it two weeks later, for example, so I may adjust the end of one reel and the beginning of another.” Lucas often does these final adjustments directly on 35mm with 35mm color timing.

In photochemical color timing, there are three controls, one each for the amount of red, green and blue light that will shine through the negative and onto the positive print. Changing all three printer lights together adjusts the density or brightness of the image. One look at the dozen buttons and complex menus of the Lustre makes it clear that there is more at work here than just three printer lights. “The tool has completely changed,” agrees Lucas, “but the way of working is the same because I can work on a machine that has the same color points and density points as with film. Now, however, there is a new parameter: contrast. I work at removing undesired variations in contrast between shots. Another big difference is that we can now work with zones inside the image, but inside each zone, we work the same way we do with film.”

Lucas defines the zones with roughly sketched polygon or oval “windows” and then varies the color, brightness or contrast values inside the window. These windows (also known as mattes) can be programmed to move within a shot, follow an actor, or, in this case, follow a tiger across the frame. Lucas notes that the control of saturation is another feature that distinguishes digital grading from film grading; although there are ways to desaturate the image photochemically, such as ENR, these are complicated processes.

The two tiger images shown on page 78 exemplify the hybrid nature of Two Brothers. The wider shot was filmed in HD, while the close-up was filmed in 35mm. Both shots contain virtual CGI elements: in the wide shot, some of the flames and smoke are virtual, and so is the circle of flames seen in the eyes in the close-up. Lucas explains, “Here, as elsewhere, we accentuated the color of the tiger’s fur. We added saturation overall and yellowed the image significantly, but kept the greens of the vegetation. This could have been done in classical timing because we didn’t use windows.

“In the day interior shown here,” he continues, “we redid the backlight. I brightened the shot and used a window to darken the people and the walls. For the image of the Buddhist woman praying, we added density and saturation to an image that was shot during the day to create more of a dusk feeling. In the interior, we used windows to brighten some shadows and warm up her face and the area behind the bamboo. We used windows in about one-third of the shots, including many effects shots. We typically used them to boost the green of the jungle and the color of the tiger’s fur — we had to match the color of 30 different tigers! We also used windows to bring down the HD skies.”

The greater capabilities of digital grading have made postproduction a more protracted process, and many cinematographers are concerned that productions are not allowing for a lengthy digital timing when they make deals with directors of photography. Dreujou observes that photochemical grading takes roughly one week, during which the cinematographer attends projections, gives notes to the color timer, and only comes back to see the next print. Digitally grading Two Brothers took almost two months of Dreujou’s time; the ability to stay on one shot and grade any area of the frame means that the dialogue between cinematographer and timer is much more detailed than it has to be in traditional timing. “If you truly want to leave your signature on the film, you have to organize your schedule so you can be available — even if it means turning down other films,” he says.

Digital grading is changing the nature of cinematography by creating a kind of “virtual cinematography,” whereby the cinematographer can use software in post to create virtual filters, flags or T-stop changes. “Because of these tools, I will sometimes live with certain problems during shooting because I know I will be able to fix them in post,” says Dreujou. “Say, for example, that the walls are too bright. It may be complicated to set up a bunch of flags, and it will take time to adjust them. I now know that I will be able to darken the walls very easily in post, so I may not take a half-hour to solve the problem on the set. However, if the cinematographer isn’t there to make that change in post, it won’t get done, and then the image won’t be what he or she wanted. In general, it’s dangerous to not be present during post.”

Dreujou adds that a cinematographer needs to have clear objectives in order to avoid getting lost in the endless possibilities of digital grading. “If you don’t go in with firm intentions, your image can end up all over the place. Now that I have more experience, I think a lot about the timing during the shoot. Usually, I want to reproduce what I have created on the set.”

Dreujou confesses that he now relies on virtual grad filters instead of putting the real thing in front of his lens. “I used to use a lot of grads, but now I use hardly any. It’s complicated to move a grad during a shot, but it’s very simple in post. I still use 85s and colored filters because I don’t want to deliver a neutral image. In some cases, it might be easier to not use filters during the shoot, but I’m deeply attached to the notion of giving an intention to the image on set. Time is precious in production, but as cinematographers, we’ve been asked to put a story in images, and we must do that from the very beginning until the very end.”

TECHNICAL SPECS Format: 2.40:1 extraction from Super 35 and HD HD capture: Sony HDW-F900 and HDW-F950, Digital Primos Film capture: Arri 435, Primo lenses Original elements: HDCam videotape and 35mm Kodak and Fuji negatives Effects image format: 1920 x 1080 pixels, RGB, 8bit linear Grading image format: 1920 x 1080 pixels, RGB, 10bit log Tools used: Phillips Spirit DataCine Discreet Smoke, Flame & Inferno, Discreet Lustre, Éclair 3D Display LUT, Barco DLP 50 projector, Arrilaser Film Recorder Intermediate Film: Eastman Kodak 2242 Printed on: Kodak Vision 2383