Company 3 used DaVinci Resolve on 'Tomorrowland' HDR settings

Colorist Stephen Nakamura used DaVinci Resolve to grade 'Tomorrowland' and create a pass for the new Dolby Vision projection system.

Stephen Nakamura, colorist at Company 3, used DaVinci Resolve to grade Tomorrowland, the new epic science fiction adventure produced by Disney. Since this feature film is the first to be released in Dolby Vision, Nakamura also used the editing program of Blackmagic in order to create a pass for this new projection system.

Tomorrowland It was directed by Brad Bird, who has been awarded two Oscars (Ratatouille y The Incredibles), while the filming was in charge of director of photography Claudio Miranda, also deserving of an Academy statuette (life of pi). The film follows the adventures of Frank Walker (George Clooney), a childhood inventor prodigy, and Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a brilliant teenager with overflowing scientific curiosity, as they undertake together an extremely dangerous mission with the goal of unlocking the secrets of an enigmatic place located at some point in time and space known in their collective memory as Tomorrowland.

Nakamura highlights that “the appearance of Tomorrowland It's slightly brighter and more saturated than real life, but not to an extreme point, as the shadows don't darken too much or detail is lost in the highlights. I generated several Power Windows in Resolve to tone down the effects in a very subtle way. The film is loaded with complex special effects and it is always possible to make some improvements at the grading stage by seeing them projected on the screen in their context with the other shots.”

According to Nakamura, there is a fascinating special effects sequence in which one of the protagonists is transported to the world of Tomorrowland por primera vez. “Se trata de una toma en movimiento que dura alrededor de dos minutos e incluye una vasta cantidad de elementos creados por Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). Justamente estaba realizando el etalonaje de esta escena en ILM mientras se diseñaban los efectos. En esa ocasión, utilicé las herramientas de atenuación de bordes y ajuste de luces en el panel Color Match, along with some functions for composing images by chrominance, with the aim of increasing or decreasing saturation in specific parts of the image,” he says.

Dolby Vision

Nakamura also used these tools to carry out the Dolby Vision pass.

"By converting files from the conventional P3 D-Cinema format to PQ, it is possible to make the brightest areas of the images more than twice as bright, and the black color of the shadows to be more intense. Brad and Claudio were interested in taking advantage of this great dynamic range in a very subtle way," said Nakamura. "A lot of the adjustments for Dolby Vision were really about creating a new interpretation of the material, so that the width of the dynamic range was not an overwhelming aspect over other elements. For example, a bright area in an image, such as a lamp, would not completely obscure the actors' faces as it might otherwise," he adds.

Nakamura concludes by stating that “although the Dolby Vision pass gave me the ability to accentuate the brightness in the bright areas of the images in a way never before seen in the traditional D-cinema format, I used the edge softening and highlight adjustment functions in DaVinci Resolve to preserve the original look of the standard 14-foot Lambert version in the Dolby Vision 31.5-foot Lambert variant.”