Technicolor Brings Denzel’s Passion From The Stage to The Screen

• Technicolor provided digital dailies and color finishing for the film.
• Technicolor Sound handled the final mix of the film, ADR recordings, and Foley sound effects performances.
• The sound mixing team worked a compressed schedule to help the project meet expected release date requirements.

Denzel Washington won the 2010 Tony Award for his performance in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Fences. So for the film treatment, he was passionate about his involvement throughout the entire filmmaking process – a passion leading to the ASC Board of Governors Award and Golden Globe nominations.

On Fences, Technicolor provided not only digital dailies, but both sound and picture finishing, designed to match precisely the creative intent of Washington and his DP, Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen. Washington’s desire to ground the production in reality – with filming limited to a small house in Pittsburgh – affected everyone’s role in capturing the time, place, and characters.

Senior Supervising Digital Colorist Michael Hatzer, who oversaw the color grading, had just worked with Christensen on Girl on the Train, so they had an instant rapport. “We developed a vintage film emulation LUT with Technicolor's VP of Imaging Science Josh Pines,” said Hatzer in ICG Magazine.

Scott Millan, Sound Re-recording Mixer along with his partner Gregg Rudloff, noted that the entire production took its lead from Washington: “Creatively, our guiding light was to be true to the story… everything had to feel organic and have purpose.”

Washington and Picture Editor Hughes Winborne painstakingly chose the performances, which required the use of almost all production sound, and ultimately minimized the amount of ADR. This added responsibility on the Sound team to make sure the machine gun-like delivery of the dialogue and the rest of the soundtrack worked seamlessly with the storytelling.

Watch the official teaser trailer for Fences below.