Black-and-White in Color
The comedic fantasy Pleasantville provides a unique opportunity for the digital and photochemical production worlds to momentarily merge.
by Bob Fisher
Black-and-White in Color
The comedic fantasy Pleasantville provides a unique opportunity for the digital and photochemical production worlds to momentarily merge.
by Bob Fisher
Writer-director Gary Ross can't tell you precisely where he got the idea for the feature film Pleasantville, but it hatched in the back of his mind about six years ago. It took three years for the concept to take shape, a year to outline the script, and another three months to write it. The result is a black-and-white fairy tale which employs the gradual use of vivid color in many scenes to illustrate the personal and emotional growth of the film's characters.
Ross ventured into unexplored territory by making a hybrid movie. Some 163,000 frames of 35mm film were digitized for the purpose of removing most colors and manipulating others. This type of image conversion and manipulation has been routinely done in commercials, but never before in a live-action, feature-length film.
Ross describes himself as a contemporary fabler, and has earned Oscar nominations for scripting the comedies Big and Dave, but Pleasantville is his first outing as a director. The central characters in the picture are David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), twin teenagers living in 1990s suburbia. David is addicted to reruns of 1950s TV shows, and his favorite program is entitled Pleasantville, whose prototype could be Ozzie and Harriet. Later in the story, a peculiar TV repairman (Don Knotts) gives David a remote control that magically zaps the twins into the black-and-white world of Pleasantville, where they have ready-made parents, the Parkers (Joan Allen and William H. Macy).
There is no breaking news or unpredictable weather in the perpetually cheerful yet gray-toned world of Pleasantville, and all roads stop at the edge of town. For David (a.k.a. Bud Parker), it's a perfect world where the high-school basketball team never misses a shot. It's a different story for Jennifer (a.k.a. Mary Sue Parker), who rebels against the blandness — thus causing her skin tone and clothing to return to their normal colors. Her influence on others has magical results. The town artist (Jeff Daniels) begins painting in color. When another character begins to develop skin tones, her husband assures her it will go away. With cautious hesitation, however, she replies, "I think I like it."
Some of the town's monochrome population struggles to maintain the status quo, while others begin to question the values espoused in their sterile world. A rose turns pink, the grass becomes green, and eyes turn hazel. Pleasantville becomes a divided city.
New Line Cinema cast Bob Degus in the role of Pleasantville's producer, and he assumed responsibility for overseeing and driving postproduction, which involved creating nearly 1,700 visual effects shots. "This is the kind of film I've always dreamed about making," Degus says, "because it has the ability to touch people and make them think."
Ross recruited visual effects supervisor Chris Watts, who organized a boutique facility for the project (aptly dubbed Pleasantville Visual Effects), and color effects designer Michael Southard, who was responsible for supervising color-timing during the transfer of the original negative into digital data files and for colorizing the images. It was an ironic twist for Southard, who began his career at Color Systems Technologies (which included colorizing black-and-white movies for Ted Turner) and has also added spot colors to black-and-white commercials and music videos.
"One of the initial hurdles was finding a practical way to convert the negative to data without compromising image quality," says Degus. "We investigated using a high-resolution digital film scanner, but that process would have been too slow and costly."
Watts suggested using the Philips Spirit DataCine at Cinesite Digital Imaging in Los Angeles for converting the film to data. Cinesite developed and plugged in new software for the task, which enabled Southard and senior colorist Richard Cassel to preview and color-time the camera negative on a video monitor before it was converted to data.
Phil Robinson (director of Field of Dreams and Sneakers) and Sean Daniels (producer of Michael) steered Ross to director of photography John Lindley, based on their own collaborations with him. Ross called Lindley, and told him the entire story of Pleasantville during their first discussion. "His enthusiasm for the story and the process was infectious," Lindley says. "I read the script before we met, and I loved it. I liked the allegory and the message, but what appealed to me most was that the photography was an integral part of the story."
Lindley and Ross began their preparations by looking at still photographs. "I had a book of hand-tinted, black-and-white pictures from Japan that provided a good jumping-off place," the cinematographer recalls. "We agreed that if you had a black-and-white scene with one person in color, [the color individual] should be desaturated so that he or she wouldn't jump out too much — except in some scenes, where that person should be heavily saturated in order to purposefully jump off the screen."
Lindley and Ross decided to shoot in the standard 1.85:1 spherical format to stay closely in tune with the visual style of the 1950s. "The anamorphic format would have been overpowering," the cinematographer explains. "Gary felt strongly that when David and Jennifer were in Pleasantville, it had to feel like the real world, where there is something around the corner, rather than it being a set for a TV show. I thought that was a great instinct on his part."
There was considerable discussion between Lindley and Ross about the possibility of shooting in black-and-white and adding color in postproduction. However, after shooting many tests, they decided to originate their live-action shots with Eastman EXR 5248 and 5298 color negative films. "The driving factor was that every frame of the movie was going to be scanned, digitally manipulated and recorded back onto color intermediate film at 2,000 lines of resolution," says Lindley. "When we tested black-and-white film, it was evident that by the time it was run through a recorder, it wouldn't be sharp enough to create the feeling of reality we wanted. Modern color films have multiple T-grain layers and therefore record much sharper and cleaner images."