How 'Spider-Noir' nailed the looks of 1930s New York in black-and-white and color

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With “Spider-Noir,” starring Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly, the web-slinging, crime-fighting private eye in ’30s New York, we get two vintage-looking options: a high-contrast, shadowy, black-and-white version, and a Technicolor-esque alternative (“True-Hue”) that pops in primary colors.Which you’re watching definitely shapes your view of the strange world that the hard-boiled Reilly inhabits, where noir and sci-fi converge with gangsters and other mutant “Supers” (including Jack Huston’s Flint Marko/Sandman).MGM+/Prime Video’s eight-episode series was inspired by both the Marvel comic “Spider-Man Noir” and the monochromatic version of the character voiced by Cage in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” (They executive produced “Spider-Noir.”)“This was enormously challenging, but once the task was laid out in front of us, everybody rose to the occasion of trying to figure out just how to do this, because it hadn’t been done before.Things have been converted after the fact,” said co-showrunner Oren Uziel, a noir specialist who previously served as a writer on Lord and Miller’s “22 Jump Street.” He developed the series with superhero expert Steve Lightfoot of Marvel’s “The Punisher.”The initial plan was to shoot only in black and white to capture the iconic Expressionistic look.

But when the additional request for color came during prep, a new visual strategy and workflow were devised to accommodate both formats simultaneously.“The question of whether or not the technology allowed us to do that was unknown when we first started,” Uziel explained.“There’s lots of programs for steering the information for what it’s going to look like, but it was challenging to find the right palette that would make the color of the lipstick or the walls look good in both formats.

But I didn’t want a colo...