For Company 3 senior colorist Jason Hanel, though most visual decisions have already been reflected in the film’s rendered and re-rendered final imagery, in post, he still provides a tremendous amount of scene by scene fine-tuning to get the film’s look just right.
Senior Colorist Jason Hanel of Company 3 has made color grading animated films something of a specialty. His work can be seen in such high-profile animated films as Despicable Me, the Minions films, Luck, Back to the Outback, Sing and many more. Most recently, he served as colorist for Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Based on the classic Nintendo videogame about the guys who are very likely the most famous plumbers in the world, the animated feature voiced by Chris Pratt (Mario) and Luigi (Charlie Day) shows off Illumination’s digital animation, which brings a unique blend of both magical and realistic looks to their movies. Audiences more than embraced the movie, making it the highest-grossing film of 2023 to date.
Hanel’s color tool of choice is Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve and, and as with live-action filmmaking, his work on animated films consists of adjusting parameters such as saturation and luminance and isolating portions of the frame for secondary corrections using tools such as Power Windows and keys to finetune a project scene by scene.
“Something shot with actors on location,” Hanel says, “will naturally have subtle changes in lighting shot-to-shot, especially if a scene was filmed over many days, under varying weather conditions and possibly with different types of cameras. And, very often, the overall look will evolve as the filmmakers see how the actual shots and performances come together.”
He contrasts this with animation from a company like Illumination, that really pushes the envelope. There the directors and animators can plan, render, and re-render the imagery with tight control over every facet, so most of those decisions are already reflected in the work when he starts the grading process. But there’s still quite a lot of fine-tuning that is best left to post.
For subtle adjustments to skin tone, costumes, sets, skies, etc., Hanel notes, “If they do those final adjustments as part of their lighting or compositing process, it will take time to re-do and re-render each small revision. And they’re locking themselves into that result.”
He adds, “They know we can fine tune and experiment with different approaches and see them onscreen and see how a correction affects the whole shot and the surrounding shots. If it’s not quite right, we can keep at it. I don't need to render while we're working if we decide ‘that sky should be a little less saturated here,’ I can select the sky, alter the saturation, hit play and then we can watch it in real time.”
For Mario Bros. Hanel worked in his grading theater at Company 3’s Hollywood location with the film’s post supervisor Sean Laurence, Bruno Chauffard, head of the creative team, David Pelle, computer graphics supervisor, and John Benson, the stereographer, all of whom have received notes from directors Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic and Pierre Leduc, as well as adding their own input during the sessions.
Hanel points to a pivotal scene in which Mario and Luigi go out on a job to try to fix a major citywide plumbing incident and end up down in the depths of the sewer system, where they discover a mysterious pipe that launches them out into this other world where most of the movie then takes place. “It kind of goes from being this very real sort of basement area to intense colorful worlds. It’s a very dramatic change that happens,” he says.
“They enter a pipe which launches them through a rainbow-colored tube of light and end up in this alternate world. The difference in look is very pronounced. The place is a delicate combination of fantasy and reality. Part of Illumination’s goal was to have it look like it was actually filmed. They added in digital lens effects and flares and atmosphere in the air to make it feel like a camera shot it.”
Mario soon finds himself transported to the Mushroom Kingdom, while Luigi gets transported to The Dark Lands. Mario lands in a field of grass with big mushrooms everywhere. It's a beautiful day and there’s a light beaming into the scene. The Dark Lands are very different. That is a spooky forest of dead trees. It keeps the viewer engaged because they’re going through these different looking adventures. “We enhanced all those things in the grade,” Hanel says. “That was where we went in and emphasized some elements and directed the viewer’s eye exactly where it should be for the story.”
In the Dark Lands, for instance, the work came in with the darkness built into the look but with some wiggle room in the light levels so that they could be brought down to the perfect place in the grade. “Often,” Hanel says, “they didn’t push it right to the edge of the black levels they’ll ultimately want, knowing we can go in and have some leeway to experiment to set the look of the creepy dark scene in the color grading environment.”
Illumination has specific ideas about sunlight – what it should look like and how it should interact with people and objects. “They want it to be natural looking, so it should feel like real sun is coming down and lighting the scenes. But the characters are also in a fantasy world. So, we would work a lot in the color grade to blend these concepts.”
Likewise, there are very specific parameters for the colors of the characters’ skin and clothing but once the digital lighting is introduced in the animation and rendering phases, the characteristics of the light affect those attributes, just as happens in live-action cinematography. But just as occurs when grading actors under particularly warm or cool light or light colored in some other way, the final effect isn’t always exactly what the filmmakers hoped for. In a scene with real light and real actors, Hanel will go in and use windows or keys or some of his other tools to isolate the skin or clothes in order to pull back on, or enhance, the affect the colored light is having.
And for an animated film like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, he does the exact same thing.
“I'm there to get this to its most perfect version for them,” Hanel sums up. “I become part of that process where I'm looking for all the things that are ‘off model’ as they say in animation get it back ‘on model’ so that everything looks and feels exactly as intended.”
