A24’s The Green Knight was graded with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio at FotoKem by colorist Alastor Arnold. The film was lensed by cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo.
An epic fantasy adventure based on the timeless Arthurian legend, The Green Knight tells the story of Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur’s reckless and headstrong nephew, who embarks on a daring quest to confront the eponymous Green Knight, a gigantic emerald skinned stranger and tester of men.
Palermo, a longtime collaborator with FotoKem and Arnold, was happy to team up once again. “I believe this is our fourth feature film together, plus we’ve done a number of commercials and shorts, so we have a shorthand which is valuable in regard to color and taste,” said Palermo.
In creating the look, Palermo and director David Lowery worked closely with Arnold before shooting, using only test footage and their own creativity. “I shot some footage and I took that back to the color bay to build our show LUT. I prefer to shoot with one look only, and if all works well, this will be the same LUT we start with in postproduction, which was the case for The Green Knight.”
The LUT needed to be carefully crafted because Palermo knew the cinematography would be very demanding. “We aimed to make this LUT handle under exposure while still maintaining some color contrast, as well as being able to be stretched to far out places either with CDLs or with on camera color filters. I knew I was going to go pretty psychedelic with colors at times.”
Arnold explained, “Andrew and I sat with David in the DI theater and came up with a look together, organically. Andrew guided me as to what he was going for in terms of tone curve, color bias, etc, and we fine tuned until everybody was happy. It’s a very dark, bold looking film, and I consider it some of my best work as a colorist.”
