Vittorio Storaro: ENR and Color

From American Cinematographer, Storaro and Bulworth by Garrett Brown (June 1998)

"On Bulworth he used the ENR process. It makes the blacks blacker but it also desaturates color, which I didn't know until working on this film. So he overlights with color—he oversaturates. Rosco has made double CTOs and double CTBs, and they are working on a triple lavender that he particularly likes."

- Gary Tandrow, Gaffer for Storaro on Bulworth

Storaro saturated the back wall of one office set with a remarkable deep green, to the extent that the mountainous black bodyguard and the flowered sofa on which he is seated become so camouflaged against the wallpaper that he rivets your eye when he moves—an amazing shot. I am convinced that Vittorio perceives the color spectrum with much greater intimacy than I do.

"He's the only cameraman I've ever worked with who can tell perfect greens and magentas. He can walk into a place and say exactly what it needs. We had to shoot under fluorescent conditions and match it, and he knew we needed more green. I couldn't see it with my eye."

- Gary Tandrow, Gaffer for Storaro on Bulworth

Incidentally, Storaro says that Bulworth will be his last film shot for ENR. Kodak and Technicolor (which he humorously charactizes as his "mother and father in the creative world"), both have technology in the pipeline that could make ENR unnecessary. Kodak is developing a new print stock with blacks that are said to be as rich as those in an ENR print. Technicolor, however, is reviving a version of the inbibition three-strip process, which provides ultimate color and contrast control and ensures longevity for the original prints.

Emmanuel Lubezki: The CCE Process

From American Cinematographer, Galloping Ghost, by Stephen Pizzello (December 1999)

The cinematographer opted to record the entire movie on one film stock: Kodak's Vision 200T 5274. He explains that this decision was based on the filmmakers' desire to enhance the look of the picture with Deluxe Laboratory's Color Contrast Enhancement (CCE) process.

"With the CCE process, you add a lot of grain, and I though the Vision 500T [5279] was just too grainy. I love the texture of grain, though, and I think the grain [that CCE added] works well, because the images have the quality of an old illustration. I don't like it when the grain starts to become obtrusive, and the audience begins to feel it. If someone who doesn't know much about photography mentions grain, it means they're perceiving it too much."

- Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC

Developed by Deluxe's vice president of technical services, Beverly Wood, and executive vice president of engineering Colin Mossman, CCE is one of three silver retention processes offered by the lab. According to Wood,

"CCE is a proprietary process that produces a much higher contrast and adds more grain. When you have more silver [in the print,] you get a grainier look and blacker blacks. However, your black [values] can also plug up more. The matter of getting the color, the balance and the contrast right comes from the standpoint of density. CCE is different that the ACE process, which is adjustable; with CCE, the distinguishing factor in the answer-print process is that you can't really adjust the blacks or the amount of desaturation. Our job at Deluxe is to get the look that Tim and Chivo want at the answer-print stage, and then maintain that same look when we make the dupe."

- Beverly Wood

"From the beginning, Tim said, 'If the studio would let me, I'd shoot this movie in black-and-white.' But then we talked about it and he said, 'You know, maybe not-- maybe it's better just to do it in color and keep everything very monochromatic, but still keep all of these shades of grey, dark blue, very dark brown and green. He asked me if there was anything I could do in the photography to get that look, so we began talking with Beverly about different processes that would enhance the film's contrast and desaturate the colors. We did a bunch of tests, like flashing and not flashing the film, and we decided to go with CCE, which was the process that would add the most contrast and desaturate the colors the most. Tim was always there when we did the process tests. It was a lot of fun to have him there, and we like the same things, so we went with the CCE process.

Once we decided on the look, we had a meeting with all of teh departments, because CCE really affects the contrast and blacks in the images. Ian Robinson was our contact at Deluxe London, and we consulted very closely with him. The costume designer, Colleen Atwood, was doing a lot of stuff in black, but after the tests she began adding bits of silver and other enhancements to the texture of the clothes so we wouldn't lose the details completely. With Rick Heinrichs, we would paint 8' by 4's with the colors he was planning to use for each set, and then shoot them, project the footage, discuss it and revise the colors. The color red was particularly affected by the process-- it became really dark, sometimes so dark that it was almost black. We had to be really careful in the way we lit things. If you went into one of our sets while we were shooting, you'd have though we were doing a soap opera, because everything looked really overlit. When we saw the dailies, though, everyone would say, 'Wow, this is really dark and moody.' You always have the factor in the effect that the process will have on the images. The first week of the show was miserable for me, and many many times I wanted to kill myself for deciding to work with the CCE process, but when you see the movie from start to finish, it looks really good.

... The thing that's really difficult about the process, which almost made me chicken out, is what it does to the actors' skin tones. Because there's so much contrast and the gamma curve is so steep, the skin tones can look blemished if you're not careful. I don't like to use much diffusion, and I usually don't mind when you can see some imperfections in the actors' faces-- as long as those imperfections don't take you out of the movie. On this picture, though, I wish I had used just a little more diffusion."

- Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC

Peter Menzies Jr: Color Temperature

From American Cinematographer, A Few Bad Men by Jay Holben (July 1999)

"We went pretty saturated with our colors. Sometimes I'd put three of four layers of full CTS on a lamp so it would go into a really weird orange-red spectrum that was close to sodium-vapor in color. As the film went on, we added more color as we got braver about the look, always keeping the actor's skin tones around 2400*k so that they maintained that nice warm look.

I love mixing color temperatures. For the last couple of years, the boys have made fun of me for not using any two lights of the same color. When you do walk down the street in real life, though, nothing is perfect-- there are weird fabulous colors all around you. In my opinion, using something other than white light all the time just makes a scene more realistic. We used a lot of theatrical colors, too. I haven't used traditional CTO for quite a while, since I prefer to use CTS. It drops the color temperature down another 400*K and has a bit more yellow in it than orange."

- Peter Menzies Jr, ASC

Douglas Koch: Last Night, Lab Techniques

From American Cinematographer, An Elegy for the Earth by Mark Dillon, March 1999

Regarding the film, Last Night

The filmmakers initially considered using reversal film, with either standard or cross-processing but Koch notes, "That seemed fairly risky, and getting local labs to work that way, especially in terms of the cross-processing, was a bit of a problem. Cross-processing gives a nice contrasty image, but the color saturation also seems to increase quite a bit; Don was interested in a more desaturated look." The duo also contemplated shooting color stock, making black-and-white and color inter positives and then re-registering them for desaturation. "By doing that, you can control every shot and every scene precisely," the cinematographer expounds." You can have a higher-contrast black-and-white version and just mix the color in. It was a very exciting idea, but on a film of this scale, we estimated that it would cost an extra $100,000-- the whole film would have become a giant optical."

The technique that seemed most promising during their tests, which were performed at Deluxe in Toronto, was the bleach-bypass process, which Koch tried first on an original negative. "They can do what they call a 'partial' or 'complete' bypass," he elaborates. "The partial seemed virtually invisible-- you couldn't really see any effect from it-0- whereas the full one was quite striking." However, the cameraman decided that applying the process to the original negative would be too much of a gamble. When bleach-bypass was administered at the printing stage, he found the results to be "quite nice, although it created more of a lush look which resembled that of the ENR-type processes." Furthermore, no one in production wanted the film's look to depend so heavily in the printing stage, which could not be controlled outside of North America. Inthe end, bleach-bypass was added at the interpositive stage. Since the process substantially increases contrast, Koch had to light his images flatter than usual and over expose them. According to McKellar, if bleach-bypassing became unworkable, the resulting footage would be "quite garish and flat, because everything-- the characters' clothes and all the walls would be very brightly colored."

Koch shot Last Night on Kodak's Vision 250D 5246 stock. His deliberately over-lit negative was pull-processed two-thirds of a stop in the lab and then underdeveloped slightly to help lower contrast and color saturation. To produce a dense negative with a suppressed grain structure that would allow for greater flexability, he pushed his photography by one stop and then went over by an additional two-thirds-- exposing mostly at a T2 or T2.8.