Week 9 FINAL CUT It Came From Beneath the Sea LECTURE Color in Film

ACTIVITY: Dailies, final cut, It Came From Beneath the Sea

Lecture/Demo

• Early Color in Film


• Explore Color Wheel


• Discuss Color Grading

Georges Méliès was an early innovator in filmmaking who led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema, known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and dissolves.



One of his hallmark achievements was to enhance his movies with color. The problem was that back then, film was only available in black and white. The solution was to hand-paint every frame of a film to get the following effect:

With his background in theater, he considered color an important visual component on a stage, for actors' costumes, makeup, and set dressing.

A decade later, director D.W. Griffith began making very influential feature-length films and was perhaps the first important auteur to make color a key part of the narrative filmmaking process.

Since Griffith's films were much longer than Méliès's short subjects, hand painting was not a practical option. His solution was to tint his film footage in a variety of colors. The film Intolerance is an excellent example of how different tints of color represented various periods of time in history.

Other filmmakers were influenced by this method and began to experiment with the psychological effects specific colors have on an audience. It was discovered that an audience tended to feel much more on edge when a screen was covered in red. Shots bathed in blue tended to have a much more serene effect. This led filmmakers to incorporate color as a tool in character development. One thing to understand, though, is that color reactions can vary, based on cultural backgrounds and personal experiences. Ultimately, in the 1920s and '30s, experiments in mixing the colors red and green gave birth to the Technicolor process, and vibrant colors became an important part of filmmaking.

The Color Wheel

In the 17th century, when the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton took a glass prism and positioned it between the sun and a flat surface, he saw an array of colors projected from the prism onto the surface.

What he came to understand was that pure white light actually has the entire spectrum of known colors contained within it. In fact, what he discovered forms the basis of the color wheel.

A color wheel is a useful tool for artists. One of its most popular uses is for choosing colors that work well together. This is because of the way colors are arranged, naturally, on this wheel. This arrangement of colors gives you three color relationships: complementary, analogous, and triadic.

Complementary Colors = CONTRAST

If you choose a color and draw a straight line across to the other side of the wheel, the color you will find is your chosen color's complement. This basically means that the colors are opposites. As shown in the picture below, yellow is the complement of purple.

What is really fascinating is that complementary colors are found everywhere in nature:

Analogous Colors = HARMONY

This technique involves choosing a color on the wheel and then the two other colors found next to the chosen color. As you can see in the image below, orange was the selected color and the analogous colors are light and dark orange. Here you are sharing a common color set, but with orange being the dominant color, you create a sense of harmony.

Triadic Colors = VIBRANCY

If you draw a triangle and place it in the center of the color wheel, you will align with a specific set of colors.

As you can see, these colors are evenly spaced around the wheel. Triadic colors, working together in a painting, photograph, or film scene (and if done well!), create a sense of vibrancy.

One more thing to say about the color wheel is that it can be split into two sections: warm and cool.

If you think of the colors you associate with summer, for instance, you tend to think about orange, yellow, and red. Warm colors are vivid and convey an energetic sense. Cool colors create a calm effect and a soothing impression.

It is an understatement to say that auteur filmmakers are aware of how the color wheel works and of what they can do with the wheel in telling their stories visually.

Color Grading

Now that we know how a color wheel works, we can apply this knowledge to how it is used in filmmaking. A director will use color to influence a wide range of emotions in an audience. Romantic comedies, science fiction, and horror are a few examples of film genres that have a specific range of colors attached to them. A color can also be focused on a single object in a film frame to bring the audience's attention to that spot in the frame's composition.

With this in mind, then, we can define color grading as altering and enhancing the color of a film to manipulate a mood or evoke a specific response. The auteur director understands the power that is inherent in this process and is always looking at how to use this toolset to maximum effect.

The first movie to be entirely digitally color-graded was the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? The following video segment explains the auteur's motivations for doing the color alteration:

This film demonstrated to the world the potential advantages of using computers and software to enhance visual storytelling. Color grading in the early days of film required using photo chemicals and manipulation of film exposure, and it had significant limitations. Digital color grading was a powerful new way to alter film in a variety of ways not possible before. Soon, other filmmakers were applying these tools for influential films like The Matrix:







Another color scheme that is currently popular in filmmaking is orange and blue, or sometimes known as orange and teal.







As you can see on the color wheel below, orange and blue or teal are complementary colors, and the contrast between them works to create a visually effective dynamic. Subjects in a scene that are orange pop out and have enhanced details when you contrast the frame with a blue/teal background.

Unfortunately, this color scheme seems to be everywhere right now, sometimes without any real cinematic justification, and is therefore developing a reputation of being overused.

Alfred Hitchock's Vertigo

We have already discussed the use of camera techniques in Vertigo. We discussed types of shots (CU, med shot, long shot, up angles, down angles) editing (over the shoulder shots, montages) and the invention of the Dolly Zoom. Sometimes the camera can be seen pushing in to convey heightening tension and to underscore some revelation or pushing out of key scenes  to create distance, both emotional and physical, from the subject. 

But just as important, the auteur Hitchcock was masterful in how he used color to tell this story of murder, obsession, fear, and manipulation. Red and green (complementary colors) play a major part, with blue and yellow in supporting roles.

Scottie, played by James Stewart, is a retired detective with severe acrophobia (fear of heights). He is hired by an old acquaintance, a wealthy shipping magnate, to follow his wife, Madeleine, a beautiful blonde played by Kim Novak, because he fears she might commit suicide soon.

In the first part of the film, Scottie is dressed in red, or various shades of red.

Madeleine is in green, or shades thereof.







The scene below is a POV shot of Scottie following Madeleine (note the green car).







As the story develops, Scottie becomes obsessed with Madeleine and her belief that she is possessed by her great-grandmother. She tries to commit suicide by jumping into San Francisco Bay, but Scottie saves her and takes her to his home. Note the red door of his home in the picture below.







When he brings her to his home and falls in love with her, the characters change colors. Scottie's wearing green symbolizes the love that has consumed him. The colors change places as the characters develop.







The film is a complex psychological thriller that any film buff should see at least once a year. In a nutshell, Madeleine is a fake. She is an actress the shipping magnate hired to help him murder the real Madeleine, which he succeeds in doing. Scottie is devastated, but after some time, he comes across a young lady who looks just like Madeleine. He finds the actress! Soon he obsessively starts to dress her exactly like the "Madeleine" he fell in love with. As she starts to take on the Madeleine look, we see this color come back:

The high-contrast complementary colors in the movie represent the following:

Red: Obsession, love, fear (of heights)

Green: Ghostliness, divergence from reality, mystery

Few films have ever incorporated color in such a way.

Wes Anderson's Color Palettes

Director Wes Anderson has a unique style and a distinct vision for how color should be used in his films. His style is easily recognizable because of his careful development of a series of eye-catching color palettes. Artists and designers from different fields use Anderson's aesthetic concepts as inspiration for their own work. He incorporates these palettes as major components of his compositional framework. Themes that are common in his films are nostalgia and the yearning for what once was, as well as dreams and the potential to dream. From pastel hues that frequently fill his scenery with a painterly look to the attire of his characters, it's hard not to see that you are watching an Anderson film.

Let's explore some examples:

Moonrise Kingdom

The use of greens, yellows, and browns creates a world where the colors used do not have a strong contrast to one another.

This is pleasing to look at and calming. It is also an important factor in the narrative scheme of the film, which has a strong nostalgic tone.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The pink that defines the grand hotel is really designed to cast the building as perhaps the most significant character in the film.

Inside the hotel, an ensemble of memorable characters (and the mysterious death of a hotel guest) live in a world of young love, shown in vibrant pastels;

obsessive character behavior, shown in bright red;

and even film noir–ish sequences that are desaturated and very unlike most of the film.

While there is no one "look" in Anderson's films, a clear pattern is evident in his thought process.

Color is a powerful tool in cinematic storytelling. Specific filmmakers approach color in distinct ways and their understanding of the color wheel allows them to manipulate emotions, as well as make specific elements more visible than others in a scene.