Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s paean to the original glamor girl, represents a feat of studio filmmaking firing on all cylinders, a Hollywood production of the first order. From the committed performances of Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, and their troupe of Barbies and Kens to the daffy humor to the musical numbers, a charming showbiz spirit perks up the action on screen, and the world in which they inhabit is no less vibrant. Barbie Land stands as a candy-colored, eye-popping utopia of backlot beauty. But the plastic, fantastic surfaces of its setting are far removed from the muted muddiness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney’s deeply uncanny photorealistic remake series, and other standard-bearers for the modern blockbuster default aesthetic.
Gerwig likes to wear her influences on her sleeve, and as she’s gushed about her admiration for The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, and other classics from the golden age when posters shouted “In Glorious Technicolor!” The eye-popping hues of those films resulted from the groundbreaking “three-strip” camera, which created some of history’s most ravishing moving images through a clever innovation. A beam-splitter divided the light coming in through the lens into two, which passed through colored filters onto three strips of black-and-white film negative. One would record green, the other two would be sandwiched together to capture red and blue, and when combined through dye processes, they’d form the full spectrum of a supercharged rainbow.
Gerwig wanted to recapture this lustrous jewel-tone brilliance for Barbie—but three-strip Technicolor shooting has been impossible since the ‘50s. Enter cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who warmly greeted the prospect of a new challenge in a three-decade career that’s previously paired him with Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. “For me, this was a stretch,” he tells GQ from his home in Mexico City. “It’s a total break with everything else I’ve done, which is what I loved about it.”
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.”
They would “tweak and tweak and tweak” until they landed on a pink they were happy about, or a single cyan for every daytime sky. Their finished TechnoBarbie lookup table dictated the look of the Barbie Land segments, an altered version was used for the 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof prelude, and the real-world scenes were shot without any stylized spiffing-up at all. (He and Gerwig discussed doing everything outside Barbie Land on good old film, “but that became impractical,” as Prieto says, and they went with a common-use digital camera instead.)
They also worked out one additional version of TechnoBarbie for specific use on a “volume stage” surrounded by LED monitors for lighting, the same that gave tighter control to the crews of Gravity and, more recently, The Mandalorian. When Barbie takes her car for a drive down the main drag of Barbie Land or on the montage to our dimension its simple, lateral movement taken from Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch’s cinematic slow ride around Memphis—the vehicle moves on a giant treadmill with a ring of LED lights that allowed Prieto and his team to shine color onto the actors’ faces. When Barbie passes by a yellow building, for example, a slight buttercup glow passes by her face in keeping with the CGI environment inserted later. “We anchored the look with soft skin tones to balance the beautiful rich colors,” says Lucas via email. “We can adjust the color the same as when I was a photochemical timer in the lab for film.”
A dedication to craft bridged the gap between the lost treasures of Technicolor and the high-tech updates of classical filmmaking tricks. We can’t return to the heyday of the celluloid filmstrip, its lived-in warmth noticeably absent from the flat, streakless, high-polish cleanliness of Barbie Land. But when operated by professionals with expertise and attentive care, a computer can simulate the next-gen next best thing. “I just tried to break my own dogma,” Prieto shrugs.