InCamera article

Sinefekt Laboratory helps ratchet the tension in police drama.


Turkey’s Sinefekt Laboratory, a KODAK IMAGECARE Program accredited facility, has just completed post-production work on Ejder Kapani (Dragon Trap) which relates the pursuit of a serial killer by a chief police officer. Director Ugur Yucel and DP Tolga Kutlar decided that zoom lenses, handheld cameras, wide-angle lenses and extreme close-ups should be the general visual expression of this movie. They felt that this would dramatically increase tension.

Freelance colorist Pascal Nowak takes up the story. “We scanned the film on a Spirit 4K on 10 bit log files and used Lustre to color correct it. The DP, Tolga Kutlar, wanted to move away from the cold desaturated look normally associated with this type of movie. We chose to enhance the color according to the location of the victims. So one is discovered in a very red light, another in his green and gloomy apartment. A man is found on a seat lit by an orange lamp and another in a blue cellar. We kept the killer and the policemen in a less colorful scheme and we also took care to keep the contrast strong without damaging the faces of our main characters.”

“Shooting in 35mm instead of HD makes a big difference in this case. When you want to select a very precise hue, you can play with it without being limited by the compression. We never had to waste time trying to ‘save’ something because the wide dynamic of the negative allows us to get details in every part of the frame.”

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