#5 Colour Grade

It was a new knowledge for me before I watched the tutorial from Lynda Videos. I realized that color grading requires patience and are carefully chosen to fit the film. Then I looked at a research of Learning and Applying Color Styles From Feature Films, I understand that

 

 Professional color artists Hurkman describes a three-step process for color grading: the first is luminance correction, the second is the adjustments of hue and saturation, and finally is the adjustments on masked regions. I think it has a similar principle as painting, I like drawing so I think I have a good scene of color.

I picked up a CU shot of Adam in the documentary we shoot on intensive, I think the color looks real, it has a good balance, the nice shadow with a bit bright highlight. However, I want to convey the documentary into a feature film, and I did color grade to fit the story by using three color correction in Premiere. The first experiment is that I want to make a romantic film. I changed the color temperature and made it warmer. The original skin tone looks a little bit red, so I added a bit more orange.

We shoot this film on the sunny daytime, and I was trying to make it look like a gloomy day. Then, I added more blue of mid tone and made it dark, and I decreased the exposure slightly, cooling the color temperature. Then dropping the saturation a little bit. After color grading, the shot of Adam has an overall hue of blue with gray and the original color becomes convergence and subtle.

The third experiment, I made the color look unrealistic, so I increased the saturation, added an extra contrast of brightness. I added more green of mid tone and highlight and added red of shadow. Overall the color looks a little bit scary.

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Then, I took a clip from my CMWP project, which is a crime film. This scene is about a detective analyzing the dead body. First,  I want to make the red color more lively, and I want to add extra intensity of the shot because the character is dead. The color doesn’t contrast each other, the overall color is red. It is hard to control how much is enough and I think this clip is too red.

The second one, I changed the color completely, switching to  red monochromatic one to a blue based color. I just simply clicked ‘master’ and switched the wheel to blue color. Then, I adjusted midtown and shadow in order to reduce the contrast between the color.

The third experience, I made overall color into dark and gray by decreasing the input level and I decreased the situation of mid tone and highlight and increased the situation of shadow. Therefore, the blood is the only single color in this shot and the red color  can attract the audience’s attention. However, the red is too dark after color grade.

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I took this shot from CMWP project as well. I want to make a complementary color, so I dragged the shadow and mid-tone wheel to the opposite color, the first one was blue and orange, the second was yellow and purple, the third was green and red. It is weird that using red color for skin tone. However, after the three experiments, I still prefer the original footage because the low saturation is the most suitable one for this crime film. I felt that after color grade, I can’t distinguish the skin color of two characters.

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After these three experiments, I don’t think the color grading has specific rules, The color can be an association of emotions, time, setting in films. I can’t say red represent one single emotion. It can be associated with danger either love. We can’t generalize and the use of color is not only base on the genre of film. Even in the same film, the color could be different. Color grading makes a film come alive, it can set a mood and influence our emotions in order to attract attention and helps genres to tell the story.

Reference:

1. HURKMAN A. V.: Color Correction Handbook: Profes- sional Techniques for Video and Cinema. Peachpit Press, 2010. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

#4 Keyboard shortcuts.

I am writing this in RMIT design hub with my housemate at midnight, there are still many people working on their assignment. I was so happy that we got an extension of this assignment.

I had no idea there were so many shortcuts. I only knew a few basic keyboard shortcuts and I used the mouse all the time. It is a bit harder to remember.

There are the keyboard shortcuts of Adobe premiere that I used before:

Shortcuts	Mac Os
Undo	Command+Z
Paly or Stop	Space
Save as	S
Import	Command+I
Duplicate	Command+A
Selection tool	V

 

There are the keyboard shortcuts of Adobe premiere that I never used before:

Shortcuts	Mac Os
Shuttle left (tap twice for faster)	J
Stop	K
Shuttle right (tap twice for faster)	L
Ripple edit tool	B
Mark in point	I
Mark out point	O
New Sequence	Command+N
Ripple edit tool	N
New bin	Command+I
Zoom in/out	-/=
Ripple delete selected from timeline	Delete
Speed duration	Command+R

In addition to the above keyboard shortcut that I can use my mouse with my right hand and use keyboard shortcuts with my left hand in order to edit faster and work easier.

For me, a non-English speaker, it is easier to create a new sequence with a keyboard shortcut rather than find ‘add new sequence button’. Using keyboard shortcut allows to work  faster than working with the mouse, here is a good reason to reducing the use of the mouse. During these four weeks, I found out that I used ripple delete many times in editing, it’s worth to remember the shortcut ‘delete’ in order to save time. I’ve been using the mouse to mark a point which is not accurate sometimes. In terms of shortcuts, I can use ‘arrow’ to move one frame which is the best way to choose what exactly I want. The time I spend to looking for a cursor is much more than using shortcuts, I will try to get used to these when I edit the next project.

I tried Shuttle left/right ‘J,L” in Adobe After effect but it doesn’t work.  The problem of keyboard shortcut is that we can’t change from software to another software. therefore, we have to keep memorising these.