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This film came to the color station with some clear ideas. All the film monitoring was performed in color; however, the idea was that the final image would be in black and white. Diego Rísquez, the film director, had asked me that at times the singer’s jacket and his car – a display of luxury and wealth- appeared completely in color. This created a caricature image of very specific moments, tarnishing the narrative. We tried many paths until we found a balance in the idea of enlightened photography: filtering some colors that would highlight details of the image as if we had placed a brushstroke of ink on a printed copy of a photograph in black and white.
Imagen original
I briefly describe the strategy used, which always depended on the colors of each scene, but that should have a continuity in the film. I chose a LUTs Noir Trix, which generated a nice contrast and grain to apply to the original image. As we did not want it completely black and white, opacity was regulated with the Keyer at 50 %, which left a very nice low saturation image, but with greenish skins. It was very easy to make qualifier in a previous LUT node, only allowing to upload the saturation of that tone, returning the brightness to the characters and reproducing the illumination effect.
Original + LUT Noir Trix 100 %
Final result.
Simplified node tree
Here is a very simple node tree, which can increase in complexity adding as many parallel nodes as desired before LUTs, according to the variety of original colors of the scene that we want to highlight. In some cases, I drilled the LUTs with a mask to allow the base tone of the image to be completely uncovered, playing with the idea of the painter in his old studio.
