If you haven’t seen Touchstone’s Pearl Harbor, you’re one of the few–the film, directed by Michael Bay and starring Ben Affleck, Josh Harnett and Kate Beckinsale, has taken in an estimated $160 million at the box office since its May release. And if you haven’t heard of the movie–an action/romance hybrid from the director of Armageddon–then you’ve probably been living under a rock. Pearl Harbor is a high-octane mix of old-fashioned love story (best friends in love with the same girl) and new-fangled technical fireworks.
The special effects-and stunt-laden action sequences have been garnering interest, but nowhere is attention to detail and technical expertise more evident than in the work of the film’s colorist, Stefan Sonnenfeld of post house Company 3, Santa Monica. Discussing his work on Pearl Harbor with SHOOT, Sonnenfeld observed that digital technology–which he used in Pearl Harbor–"is a newer thing, and it’s nice to apply to the big screen the color correction that you’re used to using in commercials and music videos."
Sonnenfeld opened Company 3 in 1997, with colorist Mike Pethel and Four Media Company (4MC) CEO Rob Walston. Previously, Sonnenfeld had worked at The Post Group, Hollywood, where his reputation for making film "glow" began to grow. Since then, he has become a ubiquitous figure in the commercial post world. He is credited on some of the industry’s most high-profile work, like E*Trade’s "Monkey II," from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco (a 2001 AICP Show honoree); Nike’s "Freestyle" (with Company 3 colorist Rob Sciarratta) via Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore. (which some believe might cop the Grand Prix at Cannes this year); and such Super Bowl fare as EDS’ "Running with the Squirrels," through Fallon Minneapolis, and Mountain Dew’s "Cheetah" and "Mock Opera," both out of BBDO New York.
Sonnenfeld explained that "Traditional methods of color-timing are typically not as versatile; you don’t have as much control and you can’t manipulate contrast and color as you would in a telecine suite. Therefore, the whole process of telecine or digitally color correcting a movie becomes very helpful in that it gives you a huge amount of control and it operates in a real-time environment.
"Now," continued Sonnenfeld, "with the digital [method], you can go through hundreds of scenes in a day and immediately see the results of your work. You can experiment and manipulate the work into ways that it wasn’t actually shot-you can make something [appear] cool [toned], even though it was shot warm. There are all kinds of things you can do." Sonnenfeld used a Spirit DataCine from Philips and a da Vinci color corrector [from Dynatech] on Pearl Harbor.
In film, color often serves as shorthand for emotion: warm tones often equal happiness, while darker shades suggest more somber feelings. Pearl Harbor is no exception. "When the Japanese pilots are leaving the aircraft carrier in the fighter sequences, we made it really dark," Sonnenfeld offered. "The scene was shot that way, but we accentuated it to make it very blue and moody." After all, "If you made it bright and sunny, it wouldn’t look as dramatic," he pointed out.
Sonnenfeld’s own feature resume (he was also the colorist on Gone in 60 Seconds and Armageddon) is heavy on the action/adventure work, in part because of the meticulous nature of action sequences: "So many of the scenes are shot over so many different days and over so many different times. It’s difficult to match [colors]." For example, "In Gone in Sixty Seconds, the big car chase is twelve minutes, but it was shot over thirty days with over five hundred shots. Some of it was shot in the morning, some in the afternoon, some at twilight. But you want it all to look about the same time, because it’s twelve minutes [in real time]. It’s very difficult to color time that in the traditional method."
Sonnenfeld declared, "Pearl Harbor itself was so spectacular and so state-of-the art, and the composition and the shots were so incredible. Even if we weren’t doing the digital color correction, it [would have been] really fun to work on."
