Filmed in Sydney and released 20 years ago this week in 1998, Alex Proyas’ Dark City surprised many by instantly becoming a neo-noir sci-fi classic. Fans of Proyas’ earlier works, including The Crow, were perhaps not surprised at the director’s adept skills in crafting a film around a dark sun-less world run by a mysterious group known as the ‘Strangers’.

Helping Proyas to achieve a distinctive look and feel to Dark City was Peter Doyle. Doyle is best known as championing the digital colour grading on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as lending his colorist skills on the Harry Potter films. Now he’s a supervising visual colorist at Technicolor, with recent credits on films such as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Darkest Hour and Paddington 2.

But before Lord of the Rings and all those other blockbuster films, Doyle made his mark at Dfilm in Sydney, a film production services lab formed in 1995 that Doyle joined to help establish a wider digital post-production ambit. One of Dfilm’s first prominent gigs in that regard would be Alex Proyas’ Dark City (the company would later go on to work on The Matrix, also filmed in Sydney).

On Dark City’s 20th anniversary, vfxblog asked Doyle, who is credited as visual effects creative director on the film, about his time on the project, which came right as traditional film workflows were truly transitioning to digital, and as Australia’s own visual effects industry was just ramping up. Continue reading “Dark City at 20: a conversation with colorist Peter Doyle” →