Pandora colour creates look for six Cannes films

This year's Cannes Film Festival has been a successful one, not only for the digital film medium, but also for Pandora whose colour processing equipment was used in digital post-production for five Palme d'Or entries.
As well as the Palme d'Or entries, 'Klapisch's L'Auberge Espagnole' – a feature which will be placed on general release – was also finished digitally using the Pandora MegaDEF at Duboicolor in Paris.
Operations manager Thierry Beaumel, who worked on Robert Guédiguian's Palme d'Or entry 'Marie-Jo et Ses 2 Amours' at Mikros Images in Paris, said: "The film was shot on Super 16mm, then scanned at 2k resolution into a Quantel iQ fitted with Pandora colour processing."
Beaumel said that one of the major challenges was to match the very slow and very fast stocks DoP Renato Berta used on the film. To overcome this problem, the colourist used the Spirit to match the gamma of the fast stock to the outdoor material and blended it with Pandora on iQ to complete the job.
He said: "The digital intermediate process enabled us to maintain an excellent image quality from Super 16mm origination to 35mm delivery, and it allowed the director to create multi-layered dissolves.
"These are excellent creative and technical reasons for choosing the digital intermediate route, even though none of it is directly visible to the viewer."
Other Cannes films finished by Pandora include, 'The Pianist' by Roman Polanski, 'Irreversible' by Gaspar Noe, 'Demonlover' by Olivier Assayas (all finished at Scanlab) and 'L'Adversaire' by Nicole Garcia (finished at Éclair).
Pandora International was founded in 1986 and has been an innovative manufacturer of telecine controllers and colour processors since 1990. Pandora is an independent company with its headquarters, research and manufacturing facilities in the UK.
Pandora, www.pandora-int.com
(GMcG)