I have worked on several movie projects with director Park Chan-wook since my time as a junior colourist. The very first time I worked on his Oldboy DVD I was with a more senior colourist.

Park Chan-wook’s partner, DOP Chung Chung-hoon, has also worked with me continuously. This meant that when The Handmaiden project started, I was able to join in discussions at the pre-production stage. This gave me the time to test and adjust the camera and lens characteristics that had been chosen by the DOP in advance.

Chung Chung-hoon used the Alexa camera and vintage lenses to try to create the feeling of Joseon during the Japanese occupation of the 1930s.

In recent years, most movies use very similar digital cameras and lenses. In the case of The Handmaiden, the Alexa was combined with the Hawk 74 Anamorphic to create a differentiated look in terms of texture and aspect ratio. I felt that it was the closest expression to the film texture among the projects I have worked on recently.

I tried to tread a line that did not harm the texture already created by the combination of camera and lens. But I made the overall tone dark and cold to represent the historical background suppression of the Japanese colonial period, and the pitiful human relationships of deception and exploitation.

To keep the under saturation of the overall movie, yes, I graded these scenes in a similar way.

The colour grading work was completed in two weeks, but it took about four weeks to wait until cuts of the CG work were applied and could then be graded again. The longest time was the wait for the red brick to change to gray in the Seoul asylum.

The challenge was to express the wet and humid weather after the rain. It was difficult to recreate the sense of a wet and muggy scene on the screen. I found it really useful to mix several grades in one stack. It meant I could catch a thought and grade immediately before the idea disappeared, then blend it into the overall grade.

Within Baselight, I think it is advantageous to mix the main UI, the timeline and the layers in colour grading work. It is easier to grasp at a glance, easier for communicating and cooperating with the DOP.

And of course, Baselight ‘undo’ is one of the powerful features and means that anything can be restored at any time.

I lowered the overall saturation and desaturated the reds and blues further using Dkey. I use Dkey a lot, independently or alongside MatteMerge or other tools. It’s one of my favourite Baselight tools.

In the early days, tone matching played an important role in the field. Now the emphasis seems to be more on providing tone matching with more incidental creative colour.

In addition, the Korean production system is still significantly lower than the Hollywood system’s capital strength, making it impossible to shoot with perfect settings on location. So it seems that there are lots of cuts that depend on CG or DI for at least part of the image. In the past, if the emphasis was on getting the look right at the scene, it seems that the frequency of fixing the colours during post production is increasing.

I recently completed Taxi Driver, Steel Rain and will be releasing or grading more than ten movie projects including,  What a Man Wants, KongJak, Changkwoul, Knight of Shadows: Walker Between Halfworlds (Jackie Chan). I am also ready to work for Netflix originals and Korean dramas.