Colourist Eric Whipp discusses how using Baselight helped him create the look of the fantasy drama
By Contributor
Published: October 6, 2022 Updated: October 7, 2022
Colourist Eric Whipp discusses how using Baselight helped him create the look of the fantasy drama
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Eric Whipp started his career as a colourist in the mid 1990s, specialising in movies. In 2007 he worked with George Miller on the Academy Award-winning movie, Happy Feet, and was reunited with him in 2014 for Mad Max: Fury Road.
Today he is co-founder and senior colourist at Alter Ego in Toronto, Canada's leading colour and VFX facility. His latest project was yet another collaboration with George Miller the newly released Three Thousand Years of Longing.
This fim is a contemporary retelling of the story of a djinn (genie). It follows the story of a lonely scholar (Tilda Swinton) who, on a trip to Istanbul, discovers a djinn (Idris Elba) and he offers her three wishes in exchange for his freedom.
Having done a few films with George Miller, we already had a good relationship and when George calls, you say yes! , comments Whipp.
As well as being reunited with Miller, Three Thousand Years of Longing brought Whipp back together with cinematographer, John Seale - who had previously worked with Miller and Whipp on Mad Max: Fury Road - who came out of retirement to shoot the movie with Miller.
Developing the look Whipp and the team started working on the colour around 15 months before they delivered. The edit was only just getting to rough assembly mode at that point, but it was enough to start exploring looks and see takes that we were confident would be in the film, recalls Whipp.
George is extremely visual and has an amazing eye for detail, says Whipp. He loves being in the Baselight suite, as it's a chance to explore looks and finesse the image. He tends to like richer colours, but if you just dial up the saturation on an image, it generally looks terrible. It's my job to find ways to achieve a rich colourful image in a nice way that fits with George's story.
Whipp recalled how they referred to a lot of paintings for inspiration for the grade. The idea was to make the hotel room feel very neutral, clean and bright, and then contrast the djinn's stories with a very storybook/painterly look. Sometimes it might be more like a Rembrandt painting and for other scenes like those war paintings from the early 1800s, he explains.
Creating colour and VFX in Baselight Every shot of the film presented a unique challenge either in relation to colour specifically or due to heavy VFX requirements and the team turned to Baselight to help achieve their vision.
We used so many effects and tools that I never thought I'd use, explains Whipp. For example, I used a puddle warp tool for one shot, where the bottle hits the bottom of the ocean.
For Queen Sheeba we used texture equalizer to create the flawless skin. And there was a huge amount of VFX work in the suite. We created vapour coming off the djinn, sky replacements, Djinn vision' FX, and very complicated transitions.
During the grade, Whipp created complicated transitions with smoke, chroma warp, lens blurs and other tools within Baselight, to take the story smoothly from one frame to another.
Due to the way Baselight is architectured, it was possible to do this all in the suite without the need to have VFX involved. This was a bit of a lifesaver, because we were able to keep the grades of the incoming and outgoing shots live rather than bake them down and supply to VFX, adds Whipp.
The Baselight grading system was an incredible asset to finessing the images , agrees cinematographer, John Seale. The visually complex film in flashbacks was aided in the shooting by knowing that grad filtering, vignettes and sun shafts could all be done in post. This was a great saving in time, comfort, and speed of shooting.
The ability to reframe shots was a great advantage as was the control of exposure and colour in selected areas within the frame, and in the maintaining of those in continuity of edit, adds Seale. Many of the effects in the imaging, i.e., exposure of eyes, shimmering of image, highlights with liquids, were made with full control and ease in Baselight. The ability to reduce any excess movement in handheld or Steadicam shots was a great advantage.
Challenges Within the film, the audience is told several stories by the djinn, spanning across three thousand years and four different time periods. Each story needed a specific look to suit that period in time. One of the most challenging parts of the project for Whipp, was to find looks for all the different time periods while still finding a way to keep the film unified.
The film takes place over 3000 years and there's no easy way to reference a specific look like that. We did however play into the palettes of the time. The Queen Sheeba scenes have a very rich golden look which we felt might be a way of telling the story of how rich it must have felt to be there at that time, explains Whipp.
There was also an abstract, dream-like shot of approximately 1.5 minutes long in the movie which Whipp recalled as being particularly challenging.
For this shot I added vapour coming off the djinn and the surrounding elements. Each piece required several layers of comp. There were about 4-5 layers of wafting smoke tracked to just the Djinn's shoulder alone using a range of different blending modes. Then we repeated that for the other shoulder, then the forearm etc. I think we ended up with around 160 layers, adds Whipp.
Margaret Sixel, the editor on the film, had the idea to fade to white at the end of the shot, instead of black.
I was afraid that a fade to white might look a bit average, recalls
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Colourist Eric Whipp discusses how using Baselight helped him create the look of the fantasy drama
