Colored by Anders Bloch-Rose

Gold Coast is set in Danish Guinea (now Ghana) in 1836 during the colonisation. Slavery has just been abandoned and the young naive botanic Wulff is set out by the king to learn the former slaves to farm. But things don't turn out the way he had dreamed.

I spent a lot of time talking with DoP Martin Munch and director Daniel Dencik. It's a very sensuous film and by adapting their words and thoughts, I could better assess how far I was able to go look-wise. We weren’t interested in giving the film a special look, nor boost or dim colours. 

We added grain in the blue channel to simulate film in the style of the Kodak 500T

- Anders Bloch-Rose -

Gold Coast is shot on Alexa Amira in 4444 ProRes with Zeiss high-speed optics, and no filters in front of the camera. It was my first job working with AMIRA and I was excited about it possibly giving me some limitations. But I really had a good feeling about it, all the way through. 

In fact, two more formats show up in a few places in the film; Sony F3 with Pix recorder in 4444 and Black Magic Camera in ProRes 422 HQ. It's up to you to find out where.

The inspiration for grading were 'The Thin Red Line', 'The Tree of Life', '12 years a Slave', 'Imitation Game', 'The Hunger Games' and District 9. The common elements were the dusty blue/magenta blacks and slightly warm highlights. It was important for us that it didn't have a classic historic look but a fresh contemporary feel.

The movie was color corrected on the Baselight Two system and projected with a Christie 4K. I’m always experimenting with different LUTs the first days of grading, but they all added an unnatural look, so we ended up using the Arri Rec709 LUT. It primarily provides the natural colour saturation and separation.

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