Technicolor on Moonrise Kingdom

Director Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom opened the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. The film, co-authored by Anderson and Roman Coppola, is a magical and celebratory homage to childhood romance, set on a mythical island somewhere off the Northeast coast of the United States in 1965.

The film features an all-star cast led by Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Francis McDormand, Bob Balaban, Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton, and two young unknowns playing the teenage lovers, Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman. The project was shot on film, in super 16mm and, along with some wonderful art direction, costuming, and elegant overall direction, depicts a tender time in the lives of many adolescents when they experience the first blush (and first challenges) of true love.

Technicolor’s New York laboratory handled the front-end film negative processing (from the production’s East Coast location photography) and digital dailies – performed by Chris Gennarilli. Tim Stipan, arguably the fastest-rising star of New York digital intermediate colorists worked with the film’s cinematographer, Bob Yeoman, ASC, and Mr. Anderson, to provide a warm nostalgic look for the film’s 1965 period and magical Northeastern coastal climes. Technicolor subsequently provided its Los Angeles facility to the filmmakers who were on the West Coast shooting a commercial, and completed their color-timing work in the company’s flagship Hollywood post-production suites through its “tech-2-tech” networked service which allows grading work to be conducted in “real time” from multiple locations around the world…with total precision. Technicolor Hollywood also provided film-out and digital cinema mastering for the film’s premiere showing.

Moonrise Kingdom opened theatrical in the United States, on a limited and exclusive basis with a handful of theatres in New York and Los Angeles, to record-breaking “per screen” average…and stellar reviews.