Abstract
A film's visual design is increasingly determined digitally, after principal cinematography. This essay charts the nature of the digital revolution in relation to digital colour grading. Faced with the new digital devices, filmmakers are casting about for appropriate, respectable functions. The paper examines how the first two mainstream Hollywood releases to feature digital colour designs, Gary Ross's Pleasantville (1998), and Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), work as aesthetic prototypes. It argues that digital colour may not so much entail a revolution as careful and considered integration, and one role of the early digitally graded film has been to set out concrete methods for reining the technology to craft norms. Close formal analysis of colour design in these films also illustrates how the aesthetic problems of the digital age replay the dynamics of stylistic development from the classical era.
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