Colourists on the latest Light Iron projects that debuted at Tribeca, including Dating and New York

Light Iron senior colourist Sean Dunckley shares the creative inspiration behind the final grade of the romantic feature Dating and New York.

Reflecting on the feature Dating and New York, which premiered last week at the 2021 Tribeca Festival, Light Iron senior colourist Sean Dunckley noted: “”In our early discussions about the look, cinematographer Maria Rusche told me, ‘The director, Jonah Feingold, loves classic rom-coms. We talked a lot about the movie feeling like falling in love with New York, and feeling warm and fuzzy.’ On that front, we were looking for a very full feeling, so we used a Kodak-like film-emulation LUT as our base to bring out the warm highlights and get rich blue tones similar to Midnight in Paris, a film we drew inspiration from.

!It was a tricky balance of getting a lot of saturation and richness into the image while keeping it soft and magical. One interesting thing we did to achieve this was add a bit of halation, which let our highlights bleed into the mids and really helped create a soft, ‘glowy’ image. We finished in October. I did my first pass unsupervised due to Covid restrictions, but I would send stills to Jonah and Maria nightly so they could see where I was going. Once I had a full pass on the film, they came into the theatre already prepared with notes from the stills. We tried to make the whole process as efficient as possible.”

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As Light Iron senior colourist Nick Hasson explained, the Tribeca premiere 7 Days “is a very intimate story about two people forced together during the pandemic. We spend most of the movie in a single location with the two lead actors.”

“The sun was used as the main lighting source, and the crew used available light as a storytelling tool. The characters move through the house as the time of day changes, which keeps the story flowing. The color grade needed to be natural. Cinematographer Jeremy Mackie wanted to really focus on skin tones and colorful but realistic saturation. We graded the movie in four days on DaVinci Resolve.”

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For director Sean King O’Grady’s claustrophobic horror feature We Need to Do Something, which premiered this week at the 2021 Tribeca Festival, “Cinematographer Jean-Philippe Bernier supervised the grade remotely,” Light Iron supervising colourist Ian Vertovec explained.

“Before they did We Need to Do Something, Sean King O’Grady had produced and Jean-Philippe Bernier had shot a feature called Dinner in America. I worked with JP on the final grade for that film, and after we finished, I was inspired to revisit my strategy for building a modern, clean ‘film look.’ A lot of film-emulation LUTs lean into the vintage look of older film stocks, with warm highlights and cool shadows. That can be wonderful for many shows, but Dinner in America had a much more modern look with a more neutral tonal range.

“After we finished the grade, I went back and tweaked the show LUT JP had used during production so it would reflect this alternative to the traditional film look. I tried to give the more saturated reds and blues a rich density rather than a digital-looking chromatic brightness.

“When JP contacted me last summer about We Need to Do Something, with Sean directing, I sent him this new LUT to try out, but I didn’t tell him it was inspired by our work on Dinner in America. He ended up using it as a show LUT during production and for dailies, and when we started the DI, he told me how much he loved it. I said, ‘That’s because you made it!’ and we had a good laugh.

We tried to stick to the natural-light look, but we would push the colour when the story would get a little supernatural. Over the course of the movie, we merged the looks together so the audience might not know if they’re watching something play out in real time or a flashback or a dream.”