O Brother, Where Art Thou?

I had the privilege of seeing the Coen Brothers film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' during Signs & Wonders on Thursday night. There are a few different aspects of the film that I could write about, but I would like to focus on Roger Deakins' cinematography.

The first thing I noticed visually about 'O Brother…' is its sepia tone. This was a decision made by the Coen Brothers to "give the images we were going to shoot the feeling of old hand-tinted postcards", according to Deakins. I did some reading about it, and found out that after doing some test shots, Deakins decided that it would be best to achieve the desired effect digitally, as opposed treating a physical roll of film. The filmmakers used Digital Intermediate (DI), which was new technology at the time. ('Oh Brother Where Art Thou' was one of the first feature films to use it extensively.) Deakins used this method to chroma key out the green so that it would be a shade of brown. The result is an film that is artistically competent as well as enjoyable.