[Class Assembling]
Hi Welcome to FilmmakerIQ.com. I'm John Hess and today we'll cover the basics of
color in modern digital filmmaking and some things you need to think about as you consider how to color your productions.
There is a place in my heart for Black and White photography. But black and white, as
beautiful and nuanced as it can be - is a world onto itself. Color, to me, is much more
versatile and when used correctly, a much more evocative tool.
Take for instance, the 1999 film, "The Matrix" - directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski.
This is your last chance.
After this there is no turning back
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland.
And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
All I'm offering is the truth... nothing more.
Notice the subtle use of color as a visual cue for the location. When Neo and Morpheous
talk inside the Matrix - there's a sickly green cast to everything - reminiscent of
those old green monochrome computer monitors that folks of a certain age are familiar with.
When out of the Matrix, the colors are more natural.
Compare that to this opening scene from Sam Mendes' "American Beauty" also from 1999.
I love your tie, that color!
I just love your roses, how do you get them to flourish like this?
Well I'll tell you, egg shells and Miracle-Grow
Man, I get exhausted just watching her.
She wasn't always like this...
She used to be happy.
We used to be happy.
Mendes relies very much on a strong Red White and Blue color palette to underline the idealised
facade of Lester Burnham's suburban family. Even the folders Lester drops in this opening
scene are Blue and Red - a deliberate continuation of the chromatic theme.
Compare those bold primary color scheme to the earthy tones of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's
2001 film Amelie.
Jeunet uses a rich warm palette of Greens, yellows and reds - a signature color palette
of his that gives his films a sort of grotesque yet magical warmth to them. Blue is used sparingingly,
and when it is it's a bold contrast to the established earthy tones.
These three films, coming out just a few years apart, represent just a small part of of the
creative use of color filmmakers employed coming out of the 1990s and into the new millenium.
The movies that we just looked at were all shot on celluoid film. It's only very recently
that digital camera systems have started to reach the level where they can emulate the
look of film - though that debate is still open among the purists. But to this filmmaker,
digital aquisition represents freedom the likes of which has never been seen before.
So let's start out by asking how do digital camera capture color?
The answer is actually similar to the way that color film captures color - by breaking
down and recording the light as three primary colors - red green and blue. But that's
sort of where the similarity ends.
I don't want to get too technical here so we'll just cover the essentials. In earlier
digital camera systems, professional cameras used a specially designed prism that split
light into red green and blue onto 3 different sensors - a digital analog of the technicolor
three strip process.
But as sensors grew from the 1/3rd or 2/3rd inch chips to 35mm film sized chips and beyond,
Manufactures started using a single chip - using a colored filter array to assign different
color channel duties to individual pixels. A common color arrangement is called a Bayer Pattern.
Look closely at the pattern of red green and blue pixels - notice how there are twice as
many green photosites as there are red and blue. And even though a sensor advertises
a particular resolution, the Bayer pattern means there's actually half of those pixels
dedicated to capturing green and a quarter of those pixels to capturing red and a quarter to blue.
Now before you feel like your eyes are being cheated of color data - relax - these are
systems not only designed but modeled after our biological limitations. Our eyes are not
as sensitive to changes in color, as they are to changes in brightness - luminosity.
Because of this biological quirk, engineers designed digital cameras to deliver more resolution
in the black and white luminosity using the green pixels to serve not to serve up the
green channel but to help create the luminosity channel.
So as the raw data comes off the sensor, the digital cameras uses mathematical algorhytms
to interpolate the missing pixels in each of the color channels and the luminance channel
and then combines the red green and blue color channels into what's called a CbCr colorspace.
Then that color can be further compressed for storage in a process called Chroma Subsampling
- which is the process of reducing the color resolution while keeping the luminance resolution the same.
For watching back video, compression is not a terrible thing... Perception of resolution
is not a simple numbers game - more pixels doesn't necessarily mean a better image
as things like motion dramatically affect our ability to sense fine details.
But, from a production standpoint, compressing color data leads to less flexibility when
color correcting and grading in post production.
Consumer cameras and DSLRs use what's called an 8bit 4:2:0 chroma subsampling which can
"break" when heavily color graded because there's not that much color data available.
The 8bit part refers to the number of possible levels in each channel - 8 bit is 2 to the
eighth power for 256 possible levels of color in each of the color channels. 8 bit is fine
for playback, you're watching this video in 8 bit color.
Contrast this to the Blackmagic line of cameras. The Blackmagic Cinema Camera can record a
much more robust 4:2:2 10bit compressed file in either ProRes or DNx.HD. 10 bit means 2
to the 10th power 1024 levels of color in each channel - 4 times as many levels. And
4:2:2 has twice the color resolution of 4:2:0 and is considered robust enough to stand up
to most professional needs.. Further up the quality line, the Blackmagic Cinema camera
is even capable of 12-bit RAW files - 12 bit meaning 2 to the 12th 4096 levels of color
in each channel and RAW meaning the data is straight sensor before interpolation or any
mathematical mumbo jumbo.. Of course you will start to pay dearly in terms of storage space
when you're shooting in that kind of pristine quality.
Now before we move on from this technical overview of color and digital cameras, we
need to talk a little about colorspace. Digital Video uses a colorspace called REC 709 - an
HDTV colorspace standard that was first approved in 1990. REC709 is a linear colorspace and
is fine for your final output.
But camera sensors have now exceeded the dynamic range that REC709 can capture. So what's
the solution? Use a flatter logarithmic curve to represent the data - a colorspace commonly
called LOG. There are many flavors of LOG color but they all function essentially the
same way - they flatten the curve which information is captured on the camera. This encodes the
extra details that would normally fall outside the dynamic range of REC 709. When viewed
back on a REC709 monitor, LOG images will look flat and washed out but you gain the
flexibility of recovering shadows and highlights details in post. Here we're comparing the
video mode Rec 709 and the LOG like Film mode from the Blackmagic Cinema Camera - when corrected,
we can recover much of the detail from the blown out windows.
Basic Color Theory Technology and filmmaking are intrinsically
tied together, but enough is enough. Let's talk about the aesthetics of color. No understanding
of color in film can be complete without a real solid grounding in the basic tenets of color theory.
We'll start with the RGB Additive color wheel - this color wheel is a little different
from the color wheels you can find in art stores but this is the one used in color suites.
Our three primary colors are Red Green and Blue - arranged in an equilateral triangle
along the edge of the circle. The colors that bridge the arc between the primary colors
are made combining the two primary colors together. The area inside the color wheel
is made of colors that are created when adding the third primary color into the mix. When
all three primary colors are combined equally and fully they create white - this is an additive system.
Right away we can see the most important color relationship - opposite colors called complementary
colors. Drawing a line from a primary color through the middle of the circle we find that
the opposite of Red is Cyan. The opposite of Green is Magenta and the opposite of Blue is Yellow.
Complementary colors when placed next to each other create strongest of color contrasts.
But that's not the only common color relationship scheme. Triadic colors are three colors that
are equally spaced on the color wheel. Triadic color creates the widest sense of color variation.
Tetradic uses 4 colors evenly spaced around the color wheel. Similar to Triadic is the
split complementary which pulls colors from each side of complementary color but doesn't
give us as wide a sense as Triadic. And the least color contrast most harmonious color
combinations are called analogous colors which are colors that lie next to each other along
the color wheel. Color in Production
So many tutorials on the internet regarding color focus primarily on the process of color
grading from a post production standpoint perhaps because with things like LOG, technology
has been shifting us toward making color decisions later in the filmmaking process. But this
misses the point entirely... Having good color in your coloring suite begins at the art direction stage.
In preparing a demo for this lesson I wanted to recreate the famous scene from Stanley
Kubrick's Lolita, but put my own spin on it by fleshing it out in color. Because I
wanted to emphasize the range of color, I went with a Tetradic color scheme using Blue,
Green, Red and Yellow as my dominant colors - shooting indoors in the studio to create
an artificial yet really bold colored look of Technicolor studio films from the past.
For the set I purchased recycled artificial turf pulled from USC and sold by a dealer
- unfortunately it's chock full of tiny rubber pellets which get all over the place
- mountains of them. I flushed out the set with green fake plants from Salvation Army
Thrift shop and put hung a blue patterned muslin for a backdrop. To keep my beautiful
model Victoria Patton from getting covered in black rubber pellets I bought a blue and
white striped beach towel which also serves to adds some blue tones to the bottom of the
frame. For costume we went with white and red stripes - because I just love stripes
- and a three dollar novelty heart shaped glasses purchased on Amazon as a nod to Kubrick's original.
Lighting wise, I used ikan's IDMX1500B to light a blue backdrop, two ikan IB1000 LEDs
to as fills for my model's face and body. I placed a single 2K with a Color Temperature
Blue Gel to blast my talent with a strong backlight.. Since I knew I was going to be
shooting photos as well using strobe lights... I chose to set all these fixtures to 5600K
- Being able to dial in the color temperature is a great feature of these ikan LED fixtures.
Using Blackmagic Cinema camera, I shot the scene in uncompressed 12-bit Raw Mode using
a Sigma 12-24mm and a Nikon 50mm lens.
Working with RAW files adds an extra step in the post process but luckily DaVinci Resolve
makes the process as painless as possible. Resolve is a phenomenal color program used
to color lots of well known projects and the free lite version Blackmagic has available
is one of the most powerful free programs out there definitely worth checking out. But
the folks at Blackmagic have added a lot of workflow tools as well. I used Resolve to
open the RAW clips and render them out to lower quality proxies which I can use to edit
inside Adobe Premiere Pro CC. When I'm satisfied with my edit, I export an XML and import it
into Resolve having the program automatically relink the original RAW clips based on the proxies.
Now I must confess, when I first saw the images coming out of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera,
I was a little bit stunned. Even shooting in LOG, the images fresh off the drive where
beautiful.. I usually shoot studio work under tungsten balanced lighting but Shooting under
the ikan daylight balanced LEDs created this extra punch to my images - a fuller and richer palette of colors.
Even though the camera recorded in LOG color, the attention I had paid to color and lighting
on set meant that all I had to do in Resolve was just fine tune the image.
I started off with a basic first color correction - bringing up the gamma and gain in the primaries
to make my image feel a little lighter. Next I wanted to punch up Red Green and Blue parts
of my image. I created a new node and used the Qualifier tab to only select the blue
parts of the frame and upping their saturation a bit. Since I only wanted the blue towel
to pop and not the backdrop, I added a window mask to isolate just the towel.
Then I did the same thing adding another node this time focusing on the red - especially
that red hat which looked a little faded. Using the Qualifier I tried to find just the
red hat and darkened and increased it's saturation. Then it was another corrector
node, this time focusing on just the greens by adding green and taking out some of the
reds in the green parts of the frame.
With the colors punched up, I wanted to add a little softness to the highlights - adding
another correcting mode and using qualifiers to find the bright parts of the image. I three
on a blur and then pulled back the transparency key to taste.
Finally, I added one last node to do just a little relighting. I created a circular
window and placed around her body. Then using the automated tracker... and this part always
blows my mind... Resolve actually tracks the camera movement and move the window so it
corresponds with the camera movement. How cool is that?
By having made strong color choices ahead of time, using Blackmagic Design's Cinema
Camera and it's flexible RAW recording format, lighting with ikan's color temperature adjustable
lights set to 5600K and fine tuning with Davinci Resolve I was able to create a bold colorful
scene inside my studio that I'm just incredibly proud of.
Color is an extremely important and but extremely nuanced part of modern filmmaking. We've
only begun to touch on the major topics of how color relates to filmmaking and how to
manipulate color both in the art direction and in post production. As you become more
skilled in the craft, you will begin to see how every decision in the filmmaking process
carries with it it's own baggage both positives and negatives - every choice has an impact
on your final film. Even if you don't have huge budgets for precise art direction and
custom made wardrobe, you should still pay attention to the details of what you're
capturing on set. It can be as simple as choosing the red folder over the manila one.
Just because modern tools give us flexibility in post, it's not excuse for lazy filmmaking.
Think and plan for Color and then let these fantastic tools we have take you the rest
of the of the way. Go make something great. I'm John Hess, and I'll see you at FilmmakerIQ.com