‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ is a 2015 post-apocalyptic action film co-written and co-produced by George Miller. This film stars Tom Hardy, Charlie Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Zoe Kravitz, Hugh Keays-Byrne, and Abbey Lee. This was set in a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland where gasoline and water are scarce commodities. In an overall, it follows the life of Max Rockatansky, who joins forces with Imperator Furiosa to flee from a cult leader, Immortan Joe, and his army—this now leads to a road battle.
Colorist Eric Whipp was behind the stunning visuals and life of Fury Road. This digital film has been re-colored to resemble a very rich and vibrant 1980’s movie palette.
And whoa, that’s absolutely cool.
RECOLORING
It’s strange how draining out the color can transform a movie, but ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Black & White feels like a different film despite featuring exactly the same footage.
As we can see, the film was filled with a lot of colors orange and blue. That was their main point—to have this film saturated and graphic, that night scenes should be in blue. They achieve the perfect colors of the film, to be honest.
Fans of Fury Road will know and new watchers will soon realize how the film was filled with colors that sets bar on the standard of apocalyptic thrillers.
Aside from the strong night scenes with strong blue colors, they also want to achieve night scenes that will give the viewers a silvery look. But they opted to push with a graphic rich blue.
Set in a desert, they also put the colors red and yellow to emphasize the day environment. A desert would look boring if they only incorporated boring yellows in it.
Colorist Eric Whipp’s mindset at that time was to never set this film as dull as it can be – he made sure that the type of coloring he was doing was to make sure it will stand out as an amazing movie, incorporating a graphic novel feel at the same time.
The overall recoloring looked as if it also used a theatrical lighting. The gorgeous blue lights matched the redness of the sand—a refreshing change for traditional dystopian films. Refreshing in the eyes.
FILM BALANCE
The film was shot on the Arri Alexa in Raw. The Alexa camera has such great dynamic range which was amazing for a film like Fury Road. They also used soft keys to add contrast in details to avoid the extremes. Cinematographer John Seale and VFX Supervisor Andrew Jackson, worked out a technique of shooting over-exposed shots on day shoots. Their theory is that, with an over-exposed image, they can expose the shot back down in the color suite, grade the image to create the night blue look and the perfect orange.
According to Eric Whipp, HDR coloring is a different level of ballgame. It’s a new phase when it comes to color correction—something that needs to be normalized most especially if you want to do a feature film that will give you a cinematic approach.
When asked if it’s better to shoot a t flat range to achieve a look that you want, he said: “Not necessarily and it just depends on what you’re trying to achieve for certain looks. That might be a perfect thing to do. But I think, the big takeaway is just having a conversation about what your what your ultimate goal is going to be. Because there’s some things that look so much better if you just shoot it right in camera, then we don’t have to do that much.”
CONCLUSION
‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ is indeed one of the best films ever created. Jampacked with action and thrilling adventures, the visuals were highly captivating and impressive. George Miller elevated action and violence to a true art form in this remake of a classic. It features a lot of great acting with surprisingly good performances from all the cast.
Overall, the film was full of adrenaline race across the desert of a post-apocalyptic future—ambitious and exhilarating.
