DaVinci Resolve “full of color” ‘Frankenweenie’, Tim Burton's new film

Colorist Rob Pizzey at Company 3 has given a very special touch to the look of the finish of Burton's new film shot in black and white with the stop motion technique.

The London studio Company 3 has used Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve to finish Tim Burton's new 3D film, Frankenweenie.

Shot with stop motion technique and produced by Walt Disney stop motion, the film tells a touching story about a boy and his dog. After unexpectedly losing his dog, Sparky, young Victor harnesses the power of science to bring his best friend back to life, albeit with a few minor adjustments. Working with filmmaker Peter Zorg, colorist Rob Pizzey has achieved a Tim Burton-style color look.

Although this was the first stop motion film that Pizzey worked on, it was not the first time that he was under the direction of director Tim Burton. In fact, much of the Company 3 team had already worked with Burton on Sweeney Todd.
Pizzey has commented that “Tim and Peter approached us in the summer of 2010, with a few initial shots of Frankenweenie for a gradation test. Our mission was to maintain strong contrast, deep blacks and make the characters stand out. From the beginning, Tim was very sure of the final look of the film. One of the biggest challenges has been maintaining his distinctive style in the world of 3D, where the inherent loss of light can ruin the look of a film.”

black and white color

Carrying out a black and white finish presents unique challenges for color correction. Frankenweenie It requires some actual sculpting to bring out specific areas of the structure and accentuate certain elements to tell the story. DaVinci Resolve's auto tracking features were essential in achieving this grading. In particular, Rob has used DaVinci Resolve's auto-framing feature for difficult hand shapes in animation.

“So we had to be very careful with the contrast range, so as not to push it too far. If abused, it can introduce strobe effects, which are undesirable. We had to play with a lot of shapes on the characters to make them stand out more. Since the film is in black and white, the character costumes don't stand out as much as they would in a color film, so we worked on creating different shades of gray to create better separation," Pizzey said.

“In addition, we also spent a lot of time creating the LUT. The final delivery was a color negative for color printing on a black and white job. As you can imagine just a slight wobble in the print and the film can look off. However, the LUT created by our technical department worked very well,” he added.

It is noteworthy that, while in some 3D films, a 3D eye is common to the 2D version, in Frankenweenie this was not the case so the team actually worked with three films for adjustment and grading: 2D, right eye and left eye.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MquUxWXEOLU[/youtube]

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