With a career spanning two decades, Vicki has extensive experience grading an impressive roster of feature documentary and scripted titles for major streamers, broadcasters and for theatrical release. With awards season well underway, nominated and winning titles including "Adolescences", "Bugonia", and "Hamnet" and others alike are demonstrating a stylistic choice of notably subdued, restrained colour grading over bold or overt stylisation. Residence Pictures' Vicki Matich, discusses why this restrained approach is becoming increasingly prevalent in high-end film and television.
Another award season has quietly confirmed a defining trend in contemporary colour grading. Across film and high-end television, we’re seeing a growing shift away from bold, expressive palettes towards more restrained, minimal use of colour.
Increasingly we’re seeing colourists and graders tapping into minimalistic and neutral palettes to create a grounded, engaging visual world. The impact of this use of colour is in the control; when colour is dialled back, it can sharpen a story’s emotional focus and reinforce tone. Often what’s not emphasised visually becomes just as powerful as what is.
Colour can be used to shadow a character’s arc or journey, be it a journey from ignorance to enlightenment, or innocence to evil, colour is often used to reflect where we are at on that journey. Shifting colour palettes throughout different scenes illustrates each characters’ arcs and emotions in a stylised way, while not overwhelming the story. This is an intentional technique we put into practice on the crime thriller Lynley for BBC1. To intensify the darker narrative, the grade balanced warmth with cool for a feeling of openness with a subtle sense of tension. For each character, the grade preserved natural skin tones, as well as carefully shaping the greens and blues of the landscape, and controlling contrast and shadow, to let the acting speak for itself and for audiences to make up their own minds about each character.
A modern picture that uses this technique without overpowering the narrative is the Golden Globes winner, and Oscar and Bafta nominated Sinners from Ryan Coolger. The prominent use of red and blue for the Moore twins subtly but clearly separates their identities, perspectives as well as their fates. Hannah Beachler, the production designer, uses these red and blue tones as the basis to world-build the fantastical version of the ‘American Southern Gothic’. The character “Stack” is rooted in warm, vibrant tones, while the character of “Smoke” is presented in cool blue hues, allowing the colour to accentuate the narrative labour.
While teal and orange remain a familiar and widely used complementary colour scheme across cinema and television, its dominance has noticeably softened in recent years. Audiences are drawn to authentic colour grades that appear motivated by the characters and environment itself.
Awards season (surprise?) contender Song Sung Blue uses colour to embrace vibrant and saturated hues, giving us bright, bold colours, reflecting the neon world of show business that they inhabit. By contrast, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt adopts a much more subdued palette of warm greens, yellows and warm whites to reflect elite American academia. The restrained grade allows the tone and performance to shine through.
In recent popular series that we have graded at Residence Pictures such as Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue for MGM+/BBC we can see the use of much warmer tones. There are times when the mood of a scene is built by stripping away vibrancy and beauty and where impact comes from restraint. Our role was to marry a sense of
scale with the creation of a claustrophobic visual identity. We pushed the use of saturation into unexpected places, through warm hues of campfires and the soft glare of the jungle sun.
Another award season has quietly confirmed a defining trend in contemporary colour grading. Across film and high-end television, we’re seeing a growing shift away from bold, expressive palettes towards more restrained, minimal use of colour.
Increasingly we’re seeing colourists and graders tapping into minimalistic and neutral palettes to create a grounded, engaging visual world. The impact of this use of colour is in the control; when colour is dialled back, it can sharpen a story’s emotional focus and reinforce tone. Often what’s not emphasised visually becomes just as powerful as what is.
Colour can be used to shadow a character’s arc or journey, be it a journey from ignorance to enlightenment, or innocence to evil, colour is often used to reflect where we are at on that journey. Shifting colour palettes throughout different scenes illustrates each characters’ arcs and emotions in a stylised way, while not overwhelming the story. This is an intentional technique we put into practice on the crime thriller Lynley for BBC1. To intensify the darker narrative, the grade balanced warmth with cool for a feeling of openness with a subtle sense of tension. For each character, the grade preserved natural skin tones, as well as carefully shaping the greens and blues of the landscape, and controlling contrast and shadow, to let the acting speak for itself and for audiences to make up their own minds about each character.
A modern picture that uses this technique without overpowering the narrative is the Golden Globes winner, and Oscar and Bafta nominated Sinners from Ryan Coolger. The prominent use of red and blue for the Moore twins subtly but clearly separates their identities, perspectives as well as their fates. Hannah Beachler, the production designer, uses these red and blue tones as the basis to world-build the fantastical version of the ‘American Southern Gothic’. The character “Stack” is rooted in warm, vibrant tones, while the character of “Smoke” is presented in cool blue hues, allowing the colour to accentuate the narrative labour.
While teal and orange remain a familiar and widely used complementary colour scheme across cinema and television, its dominance has noticeably softened in recent years. Audiences are drawn to authentic colour grades that appear motivated by the characters and environment itself.
Awards season (surprise?) contender Song Sung Blue uses colour to embrace vibrant and saturated hues, giving us bright, bold colours, reflecting the neon world of show business that they inhabit. By contrast, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt adopts a much more subdued palette of warm greens, yellows and warm whites to reflect elite American academia. The restrained grade allows the tone and performance to shine through.
In recent popular series that we have graded at Residence Pictures such as Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue for MGM+/BBC we can see the use of much warmer tones. There are times when the mood of a scene is built by stripping away vibrancy and beauty and where impact comes from restraint. Our role was to marry a sense of
scale with the creation of a claustrophobic visual identity. We pushed the use of saturation into unexpected places, through warm hues of campfires and the soft glare of the jungle sun.
Alongside this increased use of restrained colour, there is also a growing appetite to see images that are less ‘clean’. Following the huge international success of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, there is a clear attempt to renew audiences’ interests to get back to a more organic feel on screen. Visual textures are also coming through on the small screen too. Having a less polished look breaks through the more typical grades we have been seeing in recent years. DOPs are more likely to request bokeh (soft, out-of-focus blur), aberration (colour fringing) and grain in a grade, in a
conscious effort to step away from the overly polished look that the digital world delivers – reiterating this real craving for the authenticity.
Audiences are drawn into this type of restrained and grounded aesthetic in two unique, distinctive ways. One on hand, it can feel aspirational. The use of a controlled colour palette can convey a quiet confidence and taste, that is considerate
in its approach and avoids being overstated. And on the other, it offers comfort to the audience by mirroring real environments and known, relatable visual experiences.
In an era of visual saturation, where bold colour and hyper-polished imagery have dominated screens large and small in film, TV and advertising, restraint has become a currency in itself in the form of visual trust. When colour grading steps back, audiences stop scrutinising the image and start inhabiting it. Subtle shifts in tone carry greater emotional weight, performances are allowed to breathe, and narrative moments feel earned rather than imposed. Ultimately, this move toward minimalism is less about rejecting stylisation and more about recalibrating it - placing colour back in service of story, collaboration, and emotion.
Residence Pictures’ colourist Vicki Matich talks about the trend for restrained minimalistic and neutral palettes in an article with Cinematography World.
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