How Greta Gerwig Recaptured Old Hollywood Technicolor Magic for ‘Barbie’

Prieto and his closest collaborators had no choice but to devise their own process for ground-up creation of the film’s palette, dubbed TechnoBarbie by Gerwig in a nod to their analog forebears. He had come to the table with a handful of ideas about the temperature and texture of the overall look: one, that Barbie Land should have a “boxed-in” feeling at once overtly fake to us and real to the characters, and two, that it should also have an “innocence.” (Prieto describes this as “when, as a kid, you open up a present to find a toy you’ve been wanting.”) He saw uniformity as the key to both and set out to find an all-purpose tone for each color, as if the “saturated, less nuanced” greens of the grass and trees were both manufactured at the same toy factory. (Warren Beatty and his director of photography Vittorio Storaro did something similar on 1990’s Dick Tracy, limiting themselves to a single blue, purple, etc. to emulate old-school comic book printing.)

“We did talk about shooting the whole thing on film,” Prieto says. “Then I had this idea that because toys are pristine, they’re clean, they have no brain, that all of this would make digital appropriate for Barbie Land.”

He had conducted some experiments with synthetic substitutes for three-strip on the final scene of his previous project, Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, but Barbie demanded a full overhaul. To establish a unique “lookup table”—a sort of digital filter that allows for precise manipulation of each shade—Prieto first asked production designer Sarah Greenwood to cover a wall with squares of different colors for a screen test with stand-ins wearing costumes meant to clash. That session formed the basis for what would become TechnoBarbie, but clinching the peppy brightness required a finer level of finesse.

Prieto and his trusted colorist Yvan Lucas regularly join forces with Philippe Panzini, a programmer and “color geek like no other” responsible for the imitation of vintage film stocks like Kodachrome and Ektachrome on The Irishman. For Barbie, he developed a proprietary software called PPL (as in Prieto-Panzini-Lucas), a color correcting program that separates a camera image into the three basic components of blue, green, and red, which may then be tinkered with individually. “This doesn’t necessarily mean saturating,” Prieto explains. “It’s more like enhancing.”