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Colour Grading Research

The reason why colour grading is so important in post production is because footage straight from the camera will often looked washed particularly on expensive film cameras. This is because the camera preserves as much lighting and

detail as possible, to allow the production crew/editor to achieve the look they want.

Colour relationship

The reason the colour wheel is an important tool is because it shows the relationships between the colours. The colours that are close to each other on the wheel are similar in tone so look well together. Complementary colours are opposite each other on the wheel. The complementary colours are the most different to it's opposite colour so they stand out when put together.

COLOuR TEMPERATURE

The wheel is divided in two halves; red, orange and yellow colours on one half representing the "warm" tones, and green, blue and purple on the other being the "cool " tones. The temperatures are another concept used to determine how colours work with or against each other; they also are associated with the feelings people associate with them.

COLOuR HARMONY

If you want your artwork to be visually pleasing, you can use the colours next to one another. If you want to create a clashing, uncomfortable image, then you need to use the complementary colours.

This picture is from a scene in Dark Shadows by Tim Burton, colour grading has been used in this scene to add tension and emotion. In the scene she is about to jump off the cliff after being 'possessed' by a witch, Burton used dark greys and black make the scene more intense and dramatic. Due to the lack of colour in the scene it shows the audience that this scene is not a happy one as well as adding a bit of fear to the scene as most horror films/scenes happen in the dark. The overall colour of this scene purposely shows how she is feeling and her grim future.

In my 'Going Local' project I want to show the gradual change in mood that someone feels after losing someone they love. At the start of the film I'm going to decrease the saturation of the clips to remove some of the colour and make everything more dull and uninteresting. As the film goes on I will gradually increase the saturation to show that things get better and you can see the good things in life again. I'm going to use colour grading to achieve this effect also; I'm going to have the shots of the outside of the church almost black and white and the shots of the inside of the church to have a slight red tinge to it to hopefully mirror the emotion of the scene. In my final scene I'm going to increase the saturation past 100% to make it look really colourful and use colour grading to make the sea more blue and the sand more orangey so they will contrast nicely and it will really enhance the colours. This will also hopefully show the emotion of the scene as a happy peaceful one.


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