refine the Barbie toy language to build out the world further. After some more visual development, and working closely with Greta in postproduction, we settled on a finalized logic to Barbieland that was a mixture of the miniature aesthetic blending seamlessly with built sets and painted backdrops.” What exactly is Barbieland supposed to feel like? Production Designer Sarah Greenwood observes, “It’s like that special moment when a child opens up the perfect toy and it really is as perfect as the commercial. There’s no disappointment.” If Greenwood’s right, then a huge part of that was due to the Herculean attention (on everyone’s part) given to the film’s color palette. Greenwood’s art department sifted through hundreds of different pinks, including “Rosa Mexicano,” which Prieto says is unique to his home country. [Note: Mattel has trademarked a bright, magenta-ish pink for more than 100 categories of Barbie products.] “I know Rodrigo probably cursed the color pink after all was said and done,” Greenwood laughs, “as many of the pinks the art department loved would completely change during his camera
36
JULY 2023
testing. Depending on what other color you put up against it, that pink we thought was perfect in our research would suddenly go gray when Rodrigo put a blue next to it. It was a bit maddening and quite the process.” Prieto created a LUT for Barbieland that needed to have a similar “innocence” as the camera. Working closely with Company 3 Colorist Yvan Lucas and Greenwood’s team, which included her long-time creative partner, Set Decorator Katie Spencer, Prieto’s “Techno Barbie LUT” (as Gerwig dubbed it) was based on three-strip Technicolor film (which Prieto and Lucas had previously explored for Killers of the Flower Moon). “Technicolor is interesting,” Prieto offers, “as the colors become simplified when seen against different shades of the same hue, enhancing this strong feeling of saturation that the format’s known for. To me, that simplification of the color dynamics had an innocence that seemed perfect for Barbieland.” The “Techno Barbie LUT” has an interesting evolution dating back to Prieto’s work on The Irishman. As Lucas explains: “Rodrigo and I had many philosophical discussions [during The Irishman] about how color behaves with
film [capture] versus digital. Rodrigo has always talked about how specific film stocks can embody different eras in cinema. And as I started in photochemical color timing, in the 1980s at Éclair in Paris, I have a strong attachment to the film image, which informs my digital grading. What emerged from those discussions is that color behaves differently in each [format]. In ‘digital land’ we speak of saturation or luminance, but film chemistry and dyes were designed for very specific renderings or color palettes, more like a painter would think about color.” Lucas says that Color Scientist Christophe Souchard turned the design he and Prieto dubbed “PPL” (for Prieto, Color Scientist Philippe Panzini and Lucas) into an OFX plug-in for the Baselight grading workflow. “It allows me to push and pull colors in ways that result in a very filmic rendering,” he adds. “For example, if we want to move the yellows more towards red or green, or make them darker or brighter without affecting any other colors, we can do that within PPL. The tool isn’t perfect – if I push a color too hard it can break. But as I grew accustomed to it, I was able to do things that would have been extremely difficult to achieve, if not impossible, otherwise.”