The Colour of Magic: Grading Sci-Fi and Fantasy Worlds

 

 

Fantasy offers a safe and free space to visually explore the complexities of our psyche and internal journey. The 'DEATH' and 'VOID' music videos for Melanie Martinez are perfect examples of this. Her 'Portals' album represents a new level of self-discovery, and I loved seeing her bring this vision to life. In the grade, we created distinct colour palettes for each video while still having them live in the same ethereal universe. 

 

'Portals' is a concept album full of fairytale realms and otherworldly characters. Though I have worked on quite a few VFX-heavy projects, this collaboration had the most extensive world building I have been a part of. The initial look development between Melanie and our design and VFX teams was key. We used a lot of this exploration in the first stages of colour, taking early matte paintings and renders to set the looks that would be carried on throughout. 

 

 

In 'VOID', we juxtaposed delicate pink, warm tones, soft shadows, and beautiful haze with the ominous imagery. Melanie's alter ego Cry Baby stands out fearlessly in a world of mystery, shadow, and danger. In 'DEATH,' we used unusual cool tones to put the audience in a distinctively 'not of this world' realm, while also feeling lush with flora, life, and movement.

 

Melanie's creative direction has always been beautiful and unique. I love the emotional complexity she shares with us in these music videos.

As a colourist, it can be especially rewarding to work on projects set in a science fiction or fantasy world. Of course, the work we do in the grade is just one facet of the work. Sets, lighting, SFX and VFX all have to come together like different layers that add up to the final result.

 

I think it's particularly interesting that colourists are sometimes being asked to do more of this work than ever before since there are so many new tools that allow us to manipulate images in ways we couldn't earlier. So, we can be more involved and contribute more to the look of elaborate scenes if the VFX supervisor wants to take advantage of that option.

 

VFX supervisors Jabbar Raisani and Marion Spates were very interested in pushing the envelope on Netflix's fantasy series ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’. They brought me into discussions about multiple scenes that could benefit by being completed or semi completed in colour, rather than entirely in effects. We wound up creating whole environments, such as changing all the flora in a scene into an otherworldly colour, contributing to a massive climactic sequence where the fire breathing Koi-zilla monster pulls all the colour out of the world and creating artificial firelight. 

 

I'm immensely proud of the more traditional type of colour correction I've contributed to many fantasy/sci-fi projects. I worked with the creatives on Amazon's ‘The Boys’ to bring out its moody, contrasty, desaturated look. 

I just completed a spot for the agency 72andSunny to tease the world of the game ‘Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred’. There I collaborated with the filmmakers to build a mysterious, shadowy grade with rich, intense colours and quick bursts of very bright highlights.

 

 

The more fantastical the setting, the more goes into building the look and, where appropriate, the more different ways the colourist can contribute to that process. 

 

 

For ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’, we created a dark, yet colourful world by separating all the colours to produce an ominous, yet contrastive and colourful image. The goal was to highlight the spaceship by ensuring that the red lights were prominent and flooded the floor upon arrival. Instead of the typical bright, bleached-white lighting seen in many sci-fi films, we opted for a more ethereal and softer bright light, creating a glow that felt more otherworldly.

Another example of a different sci-fi style would be ‘The Myth’, a four-part eerie series. The brief for these was simply "a nod to sci-fi film". Each of the films are their own story, the ideas were based on popular, iconic films. Grade-wise, this was a blast to work on, pushing each film into a filmic, muted, world. Grain and texture played a large role in these grades.

'Lover Chanting' – a fantastical music video – opens in a muted, neutral real world before transporting us into a vibrant, gaming and cosplay universe. In this fantasy realm, we fully embraced bold saturation and brightness, daring to defy conventional commercial grading norms. The heavy use of softening, glow, and diffusing effects in the grade added an ethereal quality, enhancing the immersive experience and inviting viewers to lose themselves in the enchanting narrative. The surreal grading for ‘Lover Chanting’ is in stark contrast with ‘Plora Aquí’, which pays homage to mainstream cinema of the ‘80s and ‘90s. This was graded to be tender and sweet at the beginning, warm and glowing but becomes darker and colder as it progresses. 

 

When it comes to colour and fantasy worlds, it can go one of two ways. Sometimes, you're guided by the style of the genre, others, you're given free reign to break convention and create something new. With Kings Slam 'Call of the Kings', it was the latter.

Collaborating with Los Pérez and working alongside our comp team, I had the opportunity to set a bespoke look across eight, fully VFX environments. The film isn't grounded in reality, so the usual rules didn't apply – a refreshing challenge. There was a lot of collaboration between myself and the VFX team to add colour in unnatural ways to aid the otherworldly aesthetic.

 

 

“When it comes to sci-fi/fantasy production, great coordination of all aspects of post production and VFX is necessary to seamlessly integrate the real and the imaginary and achieve the desirable effect of the envisioned world. TELEVISOR carefully created set extensions of shoot material, including the volcano extension, and put CG rocks around it. The simulation of smoke and fog helped place the main character and volcano in the overall environment. By skillfully combining practical effects and CGI elements, the team was able to create a stunning visual experience that transports the audience into a mesmerising otherworldly universe. We had to expertly enhance the colour of the lava as it emerged from the dark rocks. This required a delicate balance, carefully blending shades of red, magenta, and black to complement the character's costume and the dark rocks themselves. TELEVISOR was challenged to create all VFX on dark material from Kodak negative, already after colour grading, and managed it gracefully. Then the material came back to colour correction once again for final touches.”

The fantastical and sci-fi inspired storylines are great opportunities for a colourist to explore colour/texture and create pushed looks, as these fictional worlds have an un-established look until first defined. The more distant from reality the fictional storyline goes, the more freedom a colourist can have to define it. Once the colourist establishes a look from the first scene, if done well, the viewer accepts this as the reality of how things look in this fictional world. That said there are still some colour grading rules to consider with intention such as how to approach the contrast curve to serve the story and how to have enough colour separation for the subject to serve the story.

Sci-fi films and shorts have the potential to go anywhere. Budget depending you could be grading a vast Martian landscape or the enclosed claustrophobic confines of a spaceship. However I've found that most often sci-fi films (locations notwithstanding) like to tell stories about people's minds. 

Dabbling in the fissures that can occur from an apocalyptic future is something I explored with director Sam Seccombe in his film ‘Survivor’. As our protagonist pieces together her own story, we graded with an intensely realistic version of the outside world while warping the grade as we go inside our heroine's mind as the stresses of her recent experiences come to the fore. 

To overplay this in a grade can be very tempting but we retained a subtlety so as not to take the viewer out of their immersion. I feel this is something that's critical in all grading but especially so with sci-fi, while the excitement of such a story can often lead us to want to be as fantastical as our material it's important to retain a measure of realism. That being said, bring me a huge space epic and see how long I can restrain myself.