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- How Color Creates the World of "Slow Horses"
How Color Creates the World of "Slow Horses"
PLUS: Take Our Reader Survey! (Pretty Please)
Steve
October 01, 2024
Happy October Hollywood tech nerds!
In this week’s post:
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How Color Creates the World of Slow Horses
At Hollywood Tech Nerd Headquarters I maintain a depressingly-long TV show watchlist, which has both classics I missed the first time around as well as the hidden gems currently out there in cable and streaming land. I identify these with painstaking research and investigation (ie I see them mentioned positively on Twitter enough times).
My latest addition is Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, the Gary Oldman-starring UK spy thriller, which was nominated for multiple Emmy awards this year.
Between the show and my endless cinematography nerdery, I was particularly intrigued by this IndieWire article about the relationship between the show’s DP Danny Cohen and its colorist Adam Glasman:
…the color work on the series isn’t just about pulling off the tricks that every DP would like to make a TV show look a little more appealing — darkening uninteresting blank spaces within a frame, making the color consistent between shots, and smoothing out any variables in the lighting. It’s about creating a feeling that deepens our sense of immersion in the story.
For “Slow Horses,” …this starts with a LUT, or lookup table, that applies an idea of the eventual final color to what everyone can see on the monitors on set.
“The feel of the [LUT] tends toward green, particularly in the shadows,” Glasman told IndieWire. “We really created that look thinking about Slough House, because that’s the constant all the way through the seasons. [Then] as a counterpoint, the idea was that MI5 would be blue, steely, very ‘Bourne Identity’… so essentially the look is shifting toward green cyan, particularly in the shadows.”
This level of granular control over the look of a show is super cool. I love turning something on and immediately knowing what it is just by eyeballing it!
Yet I also urge our modern day showrunners and filmmakers to make sure they’re not just lighting and coloring for high-end HDR monitors and ignoring all the other ways people might be consuming their movies and TV shows. If the show doesn’t look good everywhere, it’s not going to matter!
Take Our Reader Survey! (Pretty Please)
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Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
The king of streaming devices is… Google??? (link)
AI startup Runway is launching a film fund. (link)
The drama behind the Disney/DirecTV fight. (link)