Maintaining Color Palettes Across Locations

I recently handled logistics on a short film that shot in two distinct locations (a brightly lit art gallery and a dimly lit, grungy basement bar) aiming for a visually cohesive color palette despite the disparate environments. We decided to define a core palette early on, focusing on desaturated blues and warm ochre tones to represent our protagonist's internal state.

In the gallery, our gaffer primarily used a SkyPanel S60-C with light grid to gently shape the natural daylight coming from large windows, adding subtle washes of our chosen blue gel. This worked well for maintaining the palette without it feeling artificial. However, in the bar, we ran into trouble. We used an ALEXA Mini as our A-camera and initially tried to achieve the ochre by pushing practicals with amber gels, while filling in with a Forza 720B gelled blue. This made the bar scenes too muddy and lost the intended warmth, looking less 'grungy' and more just 'dark and dull.'

What ultimately worked was stepping back from trying to force exact colors from the gallery into the bar. We embraced the bar's existing warm practicals and instead used the Forza 720B with a subtle CTO to enhance the warmth, letting the 'blue' come more from practicals we hid and shaped, or even shadows, rather than aggressively gelling our key light. This allowed the inherent mood of the bar to shine through while still feeling like part of the larger, desaturated world. It taught me that sometimes maintaining a palette isn't about replication, but intelligent interpretation. What are your go-to strategies for unifying vastly different locations visually?