How Greta Gerwig Recaptured Old Hollywood Technicolor Magic for ‘Barbie’

Prieto and his closest collaborators had no selection however to plot their very own course of for ground-up creation of the movie’s palette, dubbed TechnoBarbie by Gerwig in a nod to their analog forebears. He had come to the desk with a handful of concepts concerning the temperature and texture of the general look: one, that Barbie Land ought to have a “boxed-in” feeling directly overtly faux to us and actual to the characters, and two, that it must also have an “innocence.” (Prieto describes this as “when, as a child, you open up a gift to discover a toy you’ve been wanting.”) He noticed uniformity as the important thing to each and got down to discover an all-purpose tone for every colour, as if the “saturated, much less nuanced” greens of the grass and timber have been each manufactured on the identical toy manufacturing facility. (Warren Beatty and his director of images Vittorio Storaro did one thing comparable on 1990’s Dick Tracy, limiting themselves to a single blue, purple, and so on. to emulate old-school comedian guide printing.)

“We did speak about capturing the entire thing on movie,” Prieto says. “Then I had this concept that as a result of toys are pristine, they’re clear, they don’t have any mind, that every one of this is able to make digital applicable for Barbie Land.”

He had carried out some experiments with artificial substitutes for three-strip on the ultimate scene of his earlier challenge, Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, however Barbie demanded a full overhaul. To determine a novel “lookup desk”—a form of digital filter that permits for exact manipulation of every shade—Prieto first requested manufacturing designer Sarah Greenwood to cowl a wall with squares of various colours for a display check with stand-ins carrying costumes meant to conflict. That session shaped the idea for what would develop into TechnoBarbie, however clinching the peppy brightness required a finer stage of finesse.

Prieto and his trusted colorist Yvan Lucas commonly be a part of forces with Philippe Panzini, a programmer and “colour geek like no different” answerable for the imitation of classic movie shares like Kodachrome and Ektachrome on The Irishman. For Barbie, he developed a proprietary software program referred to as PPL (as in Prieto-Panzini-Lucas), a colour correcting program that separates a digital camera picture into the three fundamental parts of blue, inexperienced, and crimson, which can then be tinkered with individually. “This doesn’t essentially imply saturating,” Prieto explains. “It’s extra like enhancing.”