This short video about the Coen brother's film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou', the first feature film to employ a full digital colour grade. No Copyright Infringement Intended This is solely for educational purposes
Interesting. I was watching “O Brother” last night on AMC’s Story Plus and one of the production notes mentioned that this was the first film to digitally alter the entire look of the film. Thanks for the upload.
It's interesting that this film is only a few years old, but the idea of altering the entire look and color replacement would have been unheard of before this.
Yup, Pleasantville was the first full DI (even the full-color scenes were digitized to match the grain structure of the B&W scenes), but I think it was O Brother that truly demonstrated its full potential as a substitute for any kind of color timing work. Even so, outside of the US this was already happening, albeit not that often - technically "Breaking the Waves" was an earlier DI, and the Copenhagen Digital Film Lab was outputting DI's since 1998.
Interesting approach to getting "the look" the Cohen Brothers & DP had envisioned. I'm a real-film cinematography worker. I wonder if much of this look could have been gotten during the actual shooting, with sepia filters, specific film emulsion selection, and finally some alteration of the lab chemicals. I know that I am in a minority, but I will always prefer film filmmaking and the common HD video productions I do not consider "cinematography", it really just digital image capturing.
Hunter, curious if you had a chance to listen to any of Team Deakins, Roger's podcast recorded in the last few years, since your comment. The Bev Wood and Dave Diliberto episodes have a lot more detail about how difficult this process was, as they were pushing past what the traditional techniques due to the sheer verdancy of their locations. Another strong impression from the podcast is that Deakins is very much like you in preferring simple and traditional techniques. He seems to have found the right way to incorporate digital without compromising his artistic or professional principles.
Its ironic how such a process is now unavoidable in todays mainstream films.. But for some reason those with the money and the experience (Ie big name directors who grew up on film) chose to still shoot on film, adding that dancing grain, rather than take the film scanner with them in the form of a digital camera and completely avoid going through the unneeded analog process.. You would expect a good film grain effect would bring in more common sense. I suppose it is hard to break old habits..
Why not just shoot it all in B&W and then someone can just decide which overall colour cast to apply to the whole movie. This may be an exaggeration, but it seems to be going that way. I read that horses only see in B&W. Perhaps they would enjoy our movies. As for humans...
