How do you alter Colours

[Guest Nathan Hernandez]

Hey, was seeing if anyone could tell me on how do you alter or enhance a certain colour, and do you do it in post production or on shoot with different filters. Examples like the enhancing of Green in Amelie(Bruno Delbonnel) or Reds in say Hero(Chris Doyle)

[Dominic Case]

Amelie was a Digital Intermediate: so the film was shot, digitised, and the colours were altered in postproduction to give that slightly over-saturated look, before recording the final results back onto film.

 

Hero was a mixture of techniques. Mostly, the colours were in the original cinematography: a combination of very careful selection of dyes and materials by the art department - working with Zhang Yimou and Chris Doyle of course - and appropriate choice of filmstocks, filtering and processing - where Chris Doyle worked with colour grader Olivier Fontenay. The final colour grade in the lab is of course vital to getting all of this right, just as is the choice of camera negative stocks: some stocksrespond to particular colours in a different way from others.

 

In one scene (the final fight scene in the great hall), the dyes in the green curtains didn't work as expected, and so the green colour was enhanced (quite a lot) by digital grading of the curtains. Not something you take on lightly, there was about 3 months work to fix up the 7 minutes of screen time.

 

In general it's infinitely better to get it right in the shoot, but if you want a quite unnatural effect, then post is the way to go.

[Elhanan Matos]

Surounding any color by its compliment will always help bring it out. Research color theory online, try Google.

[David Mullen ASC]

Interestingly enough about "Amelie" -- they weren't absolutely sure that they would be doing a digital intermediate so the film was shot with Corals and Antique Suede filters on the camera to warm up the image. Some of the post digital color-correction was less about creating that warm yellow look than it was about restoring some of the color to blue objects that was lost due to the yellow-ish camera filters.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> Amelie... slightly over-saturated

 

Slightly!

 

Interesting that they managed to re-blue blue objects shot through antique suede - I'm surprised there was any blue left!

 

Phil

[jeff striker]

if you're curious, you should watch the 2nd disc on the amelie dvd. there is an interview/documentary with the cinematographer and he explains all this stuff with lots of detail.

[Kim Sargenius]

Hero was a mixture of techniques. Mostly, the colours were in the original cinematography: a combination of very careful selection of dyes and materials by the art department - working with Zhang Yimou and Chris Doyle of course - and appropriate choice of filmstocks, filtering and processing - where Chris Doyle worked with colour grader Olivier Fontenay. The final colour grade in the lab is of course vital to getting all of this right, just as is the choice of camera negative stocks: some stocksrespond to particular colours in a different way from others.

 

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Being very modest there Dominic : ) I think you deserve to give both yourself and Olivier a pat on the back - great work!

 

 

cheers,

 

Kim Sargenius

cinematographer

sydney