Grading, matching and enhancing.

What is colour? I wish I’d spent more time on colour this semester. The colour wheel and its applications affect so much. Colour can change tones, interpretations, flavours spectrums, moods, genres and approaches. As visual animals, it is one of the dominant ways we consume the world.

But how does it work? Is it like media? Is it made in the moments? How can I distort it further? We’re too used to a single spectrum, and like lighting, we go for efficiency rather than meaning and driving the story, or just saturate the whole thing with a filter. People treat colour like cinematic tone too often, they say it should be constant throughout, when really, as long as it fits the story, you can do anything.

As a side point, why don’t more people make films in infrared or ultra-violet? We forget that we only live in so much of the spectrum, and the world of colours, like the worlds of maths and ideas, is far beyond what we can comprehend at first glance.

Should we also seek to overturn the industrial models of colour and colour correction? The typical views we have of colour are merely those mandated by the industries of making. What does colour really mean? How does it cross cultural and sociological boundaries? Some languages don’t have words for certain colours or shades, and they therefore can’t ‘see’ them properly. If cinema is a language, how can we take this fluidity into account? Is our view of colour simply a dominant Western discourse? We are all members of the same species, but the way we think and process is often different.

Research also shows that people like colours strongly associated with objects they like (e.g., blues with clear skies and clean water) and dislike colours strongly associated with objects they dislike (e.g., browns with feces and rotten food). Further research shows t that, even though the colours of many modern artifacts are almost completely arbitrary do not have significant signal value, deeply ingrained natural color signals (e.g., the redness of a blushing face) may be strong enough to influence colour preferences.

This lends cinema considerable visual richness, and there is a depth to colour processing that I really want to examine in future. How can we reconcile the semiological and sociological with the biological? Where does colour begin as a property and end as a feeling?

Here, we can see the ways in which I graded and saturated the footage. I reallly wanted to make the colours pop and find the ecological reality of the shot, communicating the feeling of life and vibrancy.

It’s just a start, really. I used these settings over the rest of my footage, to match them, however, I really need to spend more time with colour. I can make certain things happen, but I haven’t mastered masking and I don’t know enough of the why of colour to justify doing too much to my footage after the fact.

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