Colourist study · four films · 51-film control · 66,986 shots

The Colour of the Dark

Four films graded by Jill Bogdanowicz, read against every re-measured shot of 51 films. Their darks are not more colourful than cinema's. They are coloured by subtraction: one channel leaves the toe before the others, so black turns cyan, or in one film magenta, and reads as saturated without being chromatic.

New this week

Eight new studies of four films, and one colourist behind all four.

New this week

The eight new studies

Grade reconstruction · Skin at One Pole, Sky at the Other · The Aviator, its two-colour first 53 minutes
Grade reconstruction · Small Pools in a Black Room · The Bride!, its dark scenes
Grade reconstruction · The Colour Was Built Before the Camera · The Grand Budapest Hotel
Grade reconstruction · Sodium, Fluorescent and Greasepaint · Joker
Slide lab · Orange Satin, Ballroom Cyan and Marquee Bulbs · The Bride!, 36 frames
Slide lab · Sodium Amber, Stairwell Teal and Clown Red · Joker, 43 frames
Slide lab · Arkham Teal, Stage Orange and a Blue Moon · Joker: Folie à Deux, 31 frames
Slide lab · Mendl's Pink, Elevator Red and Lobby-Boy Purple · The Grand Budapest Hotel, 44 frames

What was measured

The corpus, and its floor

Corpus. 51 films · 66,986 analysis-eligible shots, every one re-measured

Subject. Joker, Joker: Folie à Deux, The Bride!, The Grand Budapest Hotel · 5,970 shots

Pixels. full resolution on a two-pixel stride · no resampling

Toe / mids. L* 2–10 against L* 25–55

Floor. ΔE00 0.13 and 0.45° between adjacent 8-bit toe colours; differences called only above ΔE00 2 and 7°

Intervals. bootstrap over films, 2,000 draws

Masters. Joker and Folie à Deux also read from 10-bit PQ masters, the same frame of every eligible shot

The question

"Coloured, oddly saturated shadows" can be measured three ways, and each needs the corpus to mean anything.

Cut one · how much

Only Folie à Deux keeps unusually much of its picture dark and coloured, and none of the four puts more chroma into its toe than the corpus.

Measured on: census.

Not more colour in the dark

Figure 1 · Cut one: how much of the dark is coloured

One dot per film, stacked where films crowd; the four studied here are inked and named, and the dashed hairline is the median film. Only Folie à Deux stands out on the first rule, and on the second three of the four sit inside the crowd....

Cut two · which way

Most films' shadows turn warmer than their midtones. The three Sher films' turn cooler, towards cyan; Folie à Deux turns furthest of any gamma-2.4 film.

Measured on: census.

The dark turns the other way

Helms Pharmacy at dusk — Joker, shot 113

A brick building at dusk with a white, red and green neon pharmacy sign above lit windows, a yellow taxi and dark cars blurred in front.

The dark turns the other way

Helms Pharmacy, the dark lifted — Joker, shot 113

The same street with its dark areas lifted and intensified: brick, cars and pavement all turn blue-cyan, the taxi alone stays amber. — red lowest 97% · saturated toe 74%

The dark turns the other way

Figure 2 · Cut two: from which side each film's colour enters black

Each path is one film's mean colour, band by band, from its lightest band down to black where the axes cross; the crosses are the toes of the other 47 films. The median film comes down the warm side. Folie à Deux comes in from green-cyan...

Cut three · the mechanism

The look is one channel leaving first. In Folie à Deux the red code reaches black before green and blue, so dark pixels sit near a single hue: saturated, at ordinary chroma.

Measured on: census.

Saturated by subtraction

Green Mirror — Joker: Folie à Deux, shot 1160

A figure half-seen through a grimy mirror under a green fluorescent tube in a tiled room.

Saturated by subtraction

Green Mirror, painted by the channel that left — Joker: Folie à Deux, shot 1160

The same frame with every dark pixel painted cyan: nearly all of the room's darkness has red as its lowest channel. — red lowest 99% · saturated toe 89%

Saturated by subtraction

Blue Spotlight, painted by the channel that left — The Bride!, shot 645

Two dancers under a single spotlight in a black club, painted so every dark pixel is cyan. — red lowest 100% · saturated toe 90%

Saturated by subtraction

Breaking point, the dark lifted — Joker, shot 717

A man's face in close-up in a teal-lit room, with the dark areas lifted and intensified to cyan. — red lowest 91%

Saturated by subtraction

Figure 3 · Cut three: which channel each film's dark gives up first

Each bar is one film's toe, divided by the channel lowest in each pixel: teal where red left first, rose where green did, ochre where blue did. Films run from most red-first to least; the four studied here are ruled heavy and the dashed ...

Cut four · at what depth

The deeper the pixel, the more often red is gone: in Folie à Deux red-first rises from about a third of pixels in the mids to nine in ten at the floor.

It happens on the way down

Figure 4 · Cut four: at what depth red leaves

Every measured pixel, pooled per film into bands of lightness, darkest at left. The hatched bed is the middle half of the other films and the dashed line their median; the engraved lines are the four films, named at their light end. The ...

The control · her fourth film

The Grand Budapest Hotel does not lose red at all. Where it loses anything unusual, it loses green, and its dark goes magenta-red.

Measured on: census.

Same colourist, another channel

The Red Elevator — The Grand Budapest Hotel, shot 108

Four people in a red lacquered elevator: an operator and a lobby boy in purple, an elderly woman in a red coat, a concierge in purple.

Same colourist, another channel

The Red Elevator, painted by the channel that left — The Grand Budapest Hotel, shot 108

The same elevator with the purple uniforms painted magenta and the red walls grey: green is the lowest channel in their shadows. — green lowest 83%

Same colourist, another channel

Lobby Boy, the dark lifted — The Grand Budapest Hotel, shot 117

A young man in a purple uniform and cap, eyes closed, with the dark of his uniform lifted to a vivid magenta-violet. — green lowest 90%

Same colourist, another channel

Running in the Snow, painted by the channel that left — The Grand Budapest Hotel, shot 699

Two small figures on a blue snowfield, the few dark pixels of the figures and trees painted cyan. — red lowest 100%

Cut five · the rivals

The toe's hue is as coherent as any film's, and in Folie à Deux the red-first dark holds through every tenth of the running time; Joker and The Bride! switch with the scene.

Measured on: census.

Not noise, and not a few scenes

Red Lampshades, painted by the channel that left — Joker, shot 542

A woman smiling beside red-shaded table lamps in a dark club, every dark pixel painted amber. — blue lowest 100%

Not noise, and not a few scenes

Stage Orange — Joker: Folie à Deux, shot 672

A performer on a stage washed in orange light. — blue lowest 97%

Not noise, and not a few scenes

The Kiss by the Lamp, the dark lifted — The Bride!, shot 13

Two women kissing beside a small table lamp in a dark restaurant, the dark lifted to a warm brown-orange. — blue lowest 98%

Not noise, and not a few scenes

Figure 5 · Cut five: whether it holds through the film

Each film's running time as ten cells, read left to right: the median red-first share of the toe in that tenth, a heavy rule where it is over half. Folie à Deux is ruled end to end. Joker and The Bride! switch, as lighting would make the...

Cut six · what a film keeps

A saturated toe belongs to the film more than anything else measured here. It does not belong to one person: the films nearest Folie à Deux are not hers, and her fourth film does something else.

Measured on: census + documented.

What a film keeps, and whose it is

Figure 6 · Cut six: what a film keeps

For each measure, the share of its variation that lies between films rather than between shots of one film, with a 95% interval from 2,000 draws of whole films. The saturated toe is what films keep most; how much of the frame is dark and...

The record

The film on which Jill Bogdanowicz began, the first full digital intermediate, has the warmest kind of dark there is: blue is its lowest toe channel in every pixel.

Measured on: census + documented.

Cut seven · the better copy

Two of the four films were read again from 10-bit masters, frame for frame. The finding survives and sharpens: Folie à Deux's master is red-first in 85.5% of its toe and 32% fully saturated, against the 83% and 26% this report measured in its web copy.

Measured on: census.

The same frames, from a 10-bit master

Figure 7 · The same shots, from the master down to the web copy

Each film's median over every paired shot, rung by rung: the 10-bit master at the white its web copy implies, shown at 1080p, at 8 bits, with 4:2:0 colour, through x264 at the web copy's bitrate, and the web copy itself. The x264 rung is...

The answer

In these films the dark is coloured by taking a channel away, not by adding chroma — cyan where red goes, magenta where green goes — and the clearest case is the middle of one documented LUT line.

What would change it

How this was made, and what would change it

Every figure the prose quotes is declared with the path it came from in the measurements and re-verified at build time; a number that drifts fails the build. The figures read the same measurements, so none can disagree with the sentence beside it without the build noticing.