Colored by Maxine Gervais

Sully was my third collaboration with the Malpaso team and I got involved from the very beginning supervising the dailies. This allowed me to get very familiar with the material and gave me an opportunity to discuss certain scenes with them prior to the main grading session.

Since the event depicted in the movie was set in more modern times, we aimed for a look that would reflect that. I did look at some footage of the actual day of the crash to have a feel for the whole thing. It was a cold day in New York when they landed in the Hudson River and it was important to see how difficult it was for the people that went through this miraculous day. 

I like blending layers, subtracting, adding and playing with the opacity to create a unique feel for certain scenes

- Maxine Gervais -

Overall, the movie has a nice natural feel. Some looks were falling into place pretty nicely as Tom Stern is very good at exposing and lighting things in a way that makes the DI more straight forward. Then it’s a matter of nuances and color rhythm to suit the narrative of the movie. 

I must say it’s been a real delight to be able to collaborate with Clint Eastwood and Tom Stern on these movies.

Color space management

Baselight has a built-in color space management that can convert between logarithmic and linear color spaces. It does the mapping pretty accurately without having to trim too much from one color space to another. What I like about it is that you are not confined to a LUT profile and it gives you more control over the color science itself. 

I addition, I use a special DRT (Display rendering transform) flavor made by our color science team, here at Technicolor. DRT happens before the color space transform is applied and helps to smooth the curves depending on the color space journey and RAW camera data.

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