Comparative research

After I finished my short film, I made it to two visual effects, one is colourful and another one is black and white, in order to test the audience. I made it into one screen. It's more easy to compare these different pictures at the same time.

The same colour can be a connected symbol

In films, the same colour can be a link between different frames. We connect different objects with the same colour. Because of the changing objects, the audience can focus on the same colour and think about what is the relationship between these images. It can have the effect of metaphor for the film.  Sometimes, it also can create the new meanings for the story.

Like this advertisement. The blue colour is the main body to link different objects, make the film more consistently. During the audience watch this advertisement, the blue colour was repeated again and again through these visual images. It can make the audience remember this color or symbol. So that it also achieved the purpose of the advertisement - let the audience remember it.

Reflective: DSLR Tutorial

The most important thing is that you must plan your look before you even starting shooting your film. Think about what kind of films it is. It’s better to set the depth of field, colour, contrast and saturation. And the manual settings and control: iso, shutter speed and aperture.

Don’t over exposed images. Over exposure is one of the worst things that can happen to our footage, because you are losing details, details that we can’t bring back and post. It is better of the footage a little bit too dark. Then we can still corrected in post without losing details.

Analysis for my short film feedback

After I finished my short film, I made it to two visual effects, one is colourful and another one is black and white, in order to test the audience who are selected members of the cinema going public, get some feedback from them.

Here are the feedback comments.

 

For the first question, “When you watch films in generally, will you pay attention to the colours in the film?” almost all the people selected “yes” in my questionnaire, only one people selected “not sure”. We can know that, colour is a very important aspect that the audience will pay attention on that, especially for the women, they will spend more energy to pay attention on the colours in films.

Most of people think, the colorful things will bring people more happy feelings, so they can feeling happiness, cheerful and some happy emotions. Compare with the black and white part, some think it's not suitable for the story, so it looks a little bit strange. Otherwise, some people can not be attracted from the start of the black and white images. And some other people think that black and white part is more silent, dark and deep, feels like some bad things will happen.

Compare with The kaleidoscope part and the green screen part, the purpose of this part is to compare the different feelings about the Abstract color combination and the specific color combination. Most people like the green screen part, they feel a bit confused about kaleidoscope part, they can feel the green screen part more directly and can understand the story of that part, and they can also received the happy mood through that part.  The small percentages of people are more preferring kaleidoscope part, they felt that this part is more colourful and more abstract, and they can imagine many things through the colourful kaleidoscope images.

Questionnaire about colour in film

Questionnaire about colour in film

1.     When you watch films in generally, will you pay attention to the colours in the film?

 (  ) YES              (  ) NO             (  ) NOT SURE

 

2.     What emotions my short film brings to you?

(  ) Happiness    (  ) Cheerful    (  ) Distrusting   (  ) Trusting

 (  ) Confuse       (  ) Isolated    (  ) Lonely         (  ) Others_________

                   

3.     Did the use of colour in kaleidoscope part and green screen part make you have different feelings? What is it?

4.     After you watch this short film with black and white colour, what different feelings bring to you?

5.     Does it change the story with black and white colour?

Short Film " L'accordeur "

Directed by Olivier Treiner (2010)

Adrian is a genius pianist, he had learn piano for more than 15 years, , but he failed in a piano competition and then he fell to the bottom of his life. After a period of time Adrian refreshed to became a blind piano tuner. In fact he just wear contact lenses, it will make others think he hearing more acute, and thus get more sympathy and consumption, even peeking into other people's life and privacy, he is bound to immersed in such a place downtown and the detachment of somewhere else. One day, he came to work in a family, but it just happened together with murder.

This is really a good short film to see at least three times.

Concentration of 13 minutes tells us a lot of details through this short film. At The beginning in the frame of this film, an old man was sitting on the sofa, another man wear shorts to play the piano, feels peaceful, no one knows what happened in this room. And then, the music suddenly stopped, put an end to the sound of gunfire or door shutting (after I watch this film at the second time, it may not the door shutting sound). This is the most wonderful part, because the outcome is not important. The important thing is what you judge about it. We can know many different details about the story of this film after we watch it twice, even in the third time.

Reference: L'accordeur, 2010. [Film]. France: 2425 Films. [Directed by Olivier Treiner.]

Film：Turn left, turn right (2003)

Color as a symbol, it can highlight the theme of the images (the main characters and the main items).

Like this Chinese film - turn left, turn right. In the boundless huge crowd, two main characters have their own life, they don't know whether they can meet or not. The visual images in the film use a lot of black umbrellas and gloomy rainy day as the main tone. The actress - hang a red umbrella, the actor- hang the green umbrella.  Compare with the grey dark background, these two colorful umbrellas, can make the audience focus on it; the audience will notice the two main characters in the story immediately.

Reflective: compositing

Films are always fakery, but they must be fakery that is convincing and does not disrupt the audience’s suspension of disbelief. This doesn't just apply to compositing effects, of course, but to lighting, sound effects, in short every aspect of the movie experiment continuity, the audience’s immersion in the story is disrupted.

In its earliest form, this was simply a plate of glass I front of the camera lens, with the matte area painted in black paint. This prevented the matted areas from being exposed; then the negative was rewound and a glass plate with the reverse of the original painting was used to expose the previously matted area with another image – usually a painting. Nowadays we can use many software help us to do it.  

Nearly all movies today have special effects created using a digital intermediate, even if the movie was originally shot on 35mm film.

Final look through green screen part

Keying part of my short film

During the Easter holiday I was still doing my short film. I was making the green screen part which was the most difficult part of this short film. Because I know this part will be keying with after effect in the post production phase, so I asked the little girl don’t wearing green clothes, but the little girl have the big green eye which I cannot avoid. So I need to be more careful and use more time to keying in that part, and try to make sure the little girl’s eyes are still there. After add some unreal background, I use some lights and petals to make this part look like in a dream.

before

after

after

Choose green screen to shoot

One scene I choose green screen is to do the experiment in order to make a contrast between the real people- the little girl and the colourful garden- the 3D background.  At the same time, it's also more easier to make a process to change the background from color to black and white. So that the little girl can isolated from the picture.

Scene design

This was the scene design for the background of the green screen part of my short film, in order to create a colorful garden in children's world. However, I don't want this garden is too real, because it was in the little girl's dream.

THE IMPOSTER – Colour of Deception

Colourist Rob Pizzey played an important role in developing the looks for the different locations and timeframes in the story and overall mood.

They use different types of cameras to film it, so it looks different in each frame. “There were a few shots on one camera where the highlights were a little hot, so I created a layer that would isolate them and allow me to tone them down a little,” he said. “The home movie footage was low resolution so I just tried to pull out as much information as possible. The archive news footage was extremely saturated. I backed the colour down on this.

Bold Contrast

Through the grade, Rob was able to contribute to the director’s themes of deception and self-deception, clarity and ambiguity, and intentions to introduce elements and tones of a thriller into his documentary. “Bart explained that he wanted the reconstructions to be distinctive and stand out against the interviews. We used bold contrast and colour manipulation to achieve this and highlighted various parts of the image to draw the audience into the journey. Depending on the context, I simply emphasised elements of what Erik had captured in the frame,”

Rob said. “We used a lot of power windows and tracking shapes to mould the image and increase the dramatic impact, adding more shadow and texture. I also used colour isolation in the frame to play certain colours off against each other. It will lead the audience focus on the things that director want the audience to see.

Locations were also graded subjectively at times. The looks created for San Antonio, Texas, where Nicholas Barclay’s family live, change quite a bit throughout the movie, with a glowing early morning look, and wide blue skies with white clouds. Erik Wilson noted that a specific location among the re-enactments was at the town’s square with a telephone box in the middle, where the narrative returned several times, needed a special look.

Rob said, “I wanted to really pull out the skies in the grade to make them stand out against the landscape. We have some classic evocations of the American panorama in the shots, such as highways, diners and so on. Most of the locations were enhanced during the grading process to give a hyper-real feeling, especially the flashback sequence when Frederic is recounting the first time he meets Nicholas’ sister as she shows him the family photos.

Light and Shadow

To help with some fairly complex dissolve sequences with multiple layers, Rob graded each shot separately and rendered out to the Smoke for the online editor to composite together. “We then viewed the sequences back in the DI theatre and tweaked the opacity of each layer to make sure that each element stood out at the right time,” Rob said.

As the film was shot digitally, they carried out grain addition tests on the footage to make it appear more filmic. 

Color adjustment plays a very important role in the movie, it can change the picture quality, and reshape the image of feeling, even can build a different atmosphere, so that it can achieve the director's requirements. It also can add some interesting elements for films to enhance the story.

Adriene Hurst, 2013. THE IMPOSTER – Colour of Deception [online]. Available at: http://www.digitalmedia-world.com/Features/the-imposter-company-3-rob-pizzey?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed [Accessed 1^st April 2013]

Film "The Imposter"

Few days ago, Jools recommended one article for me. It talks about one documentary film “The Imposter”. Before read that article I decided to watch this film first.

This documentary film is really as creepy as it described in the poster, even it’s scarier than many other good fiction films. I can feel the director was trying to use some very exquisite ways to express the characters of each people in this film to the audience. 

A documentary film is based on reduction event, but in order to enhance ornamental, director was intended to keep the film in an atmosphere of suspense, so that the movie was inserted into many post-production elements to restore the scenes again. The director use many scenarios (such as the characters' language overlap, eyes confrontation, etc.), this more or less make some narrative sense of reality.