Set in 1966 Baltimore, the Apple TV+ series Lady in the Lake is based on the novel by Laura Lippman. Following a couple of shocking local murders, Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) decides to leave her comfortable middle-class existence in the suburb of Pikesville and seek out work as a reporter for a local newspaper, where she hopes to try to piece together answers to the question of why young a girl and a bartender were brutally murdered. It's a time when women of her class rarely worked at all, much less in the gruff world of newspapers, and certainly not the crime beat. The series also follows the arc of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), a local advocate for Baltimore’s underprivileged citizens, whose situation is similar to Maddie's in some ways and very different in others.
Lady in the Lake takes an epic journey through different social strata of the Maryland city, with a prism on race relations, city politics and dark secrets. The series’ design, cinematography and post work transport viewers into a long-gone era, taking brief excursions into dream sequences and flashbacks to the 1940s.
Photo: Natalie Portman and director Alma Har'el
The series was directed by commercial/music video/feature director Alma Har'el (Honey Boy), who brought very specific ideas about color to the grading theater at Company 3, where she worked with senior colorist Yvan Lucas. Lucas, whose 2023 feature credits included
Barbie and
Killers of the Flower Moon, used Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve to achieve the look created by designer JC Molina (
Honey Boy) and cinematographer Lachlan Milne (
Stranger Things).
The look of the series kicks off with a Thanksgiving Day parade in downtown Baltimore, immersing the viewer in a specific palette, with the blue of clear skies and mailboxes reading as more cyan than pure blue and reds in structures, and clothing skewing slightly orange.
Har'el, who takes a strong interest in the fine detail of her work's color, presented Lucas and his team with a book of photographs from German-born Canadian photographer Fred Herzog. His mid-20th-century fine art photography was shot mostly in color on slide film. “Fred Herzog: Photographs” served as the visual bible for the show. Herzog's work focuses on life in and around Vancouver in the '50s and '60s, and has a naturalistic feel.
Lucas, who is known for his meticulous approach to period color in in films like Flower Moon and The Irishman was with a kindred spirit when it came to Har'el in the efforts to avoid the kind of pure electric blue and intense yellow that simply wasn't present in dyes, paints and fabrics until very recently. About a specific jacket that Maddie wears, he says, "It's not about [filmstock] or whatever. It's more about how things actually looked at the time. So, it's more what we called mustard yellow." He then went on to make the title cards for the show the exact same shade of yellow.
Lucas, who started his career as a photochemical film timer in Paris, working on internationally renowned films for directors such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Darius Khnondji (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children), is a purist in the sense that his preferred work method involves the use of one or sometimes a combination of LUTs to serve as the digital "filmstock" for a project, and then to make as many adjustments using "printer light" controls as possible, getting it as close to complete as he can before then starting on secondary corrections.
He started with a basic film emulation LUT that he's used many times before to bring the Arri Alexa LF-originated imagery into a space with a toe and a shoulder that responds to adjustments the way film would, and then went through the show, evolving the look with more of a scene-by-scene approach using a variety of techniques.
Work on Episode 1 in particular took a bit longer than usual, Lucas notes, "because we were discovering the look as we went — adding the different elements (bleach bypass, hue shift, halation, d53) during different review passes," since Har'el was so specific about what she wanted shot-by-shot.
The colorist made use of a number of tools within Resolve to complement this filmic aesthetic, including adding a subtle layer of grain, the selective node-based addition of a "bleach bypass" LUT he created, HDR wheels to finetune exposure in very specific sections of the image, and several other tools to latch onto certain hues, such as the blue of skies or yellow in some clothing, bringing them into the Herzogian spaces they would occupy had the photographer captured the scenes at the time. He also fine-tuned some foggy night scenes using a number of halation tools to add fog in some cases and sharpen the scene to reduce some of the practical fog effects wherever that was the best approach to revealing important story points.
Additionally, he altered the white point of his working color space from the usual D65 to D53, closer to the white point of print film, as another method of introducing an overall warmth to certain interiors, bringing reds in the scenes more into the brownish hues that fit the show's palette.
Notwithstanding all the color grading refinements, Lucas is still very much attuned to what he sees when viewing the pre-graded material in terms of the cinematographer's intention. He's not a colorist who approaches the ungraded footage as a ‘tabala rasa’ to push in any direction that his color correction tools can go.
"I look at the scene and I understand the lighting — the ratios, the intensity and color — and I always want to be true to the scene," he explains. "I'm always looking for what the light is trying to do."
While his work with Har'el took longer than the average series would because of her specificity, Lucas enjoyed the collaboration.
"She knew what she wanted, but she trusted me to find the best ways to get there, and the final product is something I'm very proud of,” says Lucas. “I like working with people who know exactly what they want. The real frustration is if you do your work and the people you're working with don't even see what you did."