The Ring (2002), dir. Gore Verbinski. The film derives from a Japanese horror novel by Koji Suzuki.
In death, an onryō (unquiet female spirit) kills all those who view the videotape she created to document her anguish-wrought childhood. Using post-production color correction software, digital colorist Adam Gerardin, then at Tippett Studio in Berkeley California, created the blue-as-a-bruise look of this supernatural thriller.
Pleasantville (1998), dir. Gary Ross. Color effects designer Michael Southard and 96 other CGI technicians modified saturation or contrast or both in almost all of the 1700 digital effect shots in the movie. Brother and sister from the 1990s enter a black and white 1950's television world, gradually transforming it.
When Color Systems Technology introduced the process in 1985, colorizing monchrome movies became, however briefly, "the next great idea." In 1990, even Jean-Luc Godard ordered up a colorized print of Breathless (1960). Color in Pleasantville signifies feeling. "Color in this movie is really a character as much as Joan Allen [above] or Bill Macy are characters in the movie," producer Bob Degus remarks.
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), dir. Guy Ritchie. The burglars bumble in close-up, not a single green leaf is visible, and digital manipulation turns streets and skies and skin tones yellow. The film plays in colorist-created high contrast.
The Bistro. Juarez Machado
Amélie (2001), dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Paris here is red-green-yellow, incubated bright and saturated as a painting by Paris-based Brazilian artist Juarez Machado (whose images, in part, inspired the look of the movie). “We did the film entirely in digital process," Jeunet says. "I mean the timing, not the shooting, but the timing. We could change all colors. And when it was part of the story, I decided to have an explosion of color—all colors…Before, it was very difficult to get it in tradition ways. I mean the chemical process. But now, with digital process, everything is possible.”
Saving Private Ryan (1998), dir. Steven Spielberg. A three hour drive by highway from Paris where Jean-Pierre Jeunet shot Amélie,Spielberg's Omaha Beach differs in tone and mood profoundly. Colorists desaturated the battle footage, chilling the action with blues and greens. Special effects red smudges in the image immediately above enhance the frenzy.
American, British, and Canadian soldiers invaded Normandy from Britain on an early summer day, June 6, 1944. Weather was poor. Saving Private Ryan colorists imbue the scene with with the pallor of winter.
Spielberg staged the Omaha Beach scene on Curracloe Beach in County Wexford, Ireland. Spielberg's beach is, in part, the creation of colorists. A summer vacationer depicts his version of the same beach below in this summer 2010 snapshot.
