Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Let there be Colour

So we started colour grading! Wow the film is re born for my eyes again. Having spent so much time looking at the film over and over the colour grade is making the film look new for a moment. It is stating the obvious, but colour determines the way you feel...and in a way asking exactly the same sort of questions as when we first startedproject. 'what is this scene about, what is the intention, the mood.' After hours of staring at the screen you cease to see the actual picture. ( is a bit like life) you loose perspective, and no longer can say if something really does look too yellow or too green.There is a word for it being 'metamesmorised.' I guess you can be metamesmorised by too much information, by living in thesame city for your whole life and no longer really being able to 'see it' So our colour grading answer is to look at white walls or to go outside to reset the eye, or more precisely the brain.
Here is a little bit of really interesting information about colour perception.

' The objects that we see usually reflect/emit a very wide spectrum of light, with different frequencies emitting at different intensities. Essentially, our take on the colour of the object is done with a three-point sample. We miss a lot of the complexity of the true “colour”.
What this means, is that you can have two objects that reflect wildly different spectra, that will, none the less, appear as exactly the same colour to us because of the sampling errors of our eyes. This is called metamerism. It’s only really a factor when you create a representation of that colour - for example, a painting, a photo, or an image on a screen. To us, it looks like a good representation of the original object, but in fact, it’s lousy - it would look ridiculously wrong to someone who had, say, four or five colour receptors in their eyes (even if their colour sensors didn’t extend into UV or IR) instead of the three we have.'

So as we spend days sitting in the dark, yesterday Marcus made a funny comment and said it was like being in a casino. You sit in a dark room, with no perception of time spending large amounts of money. The unfortunate effect is that I want to colour grade my dreams, maybe lift the highlights, make the sky a little bluer, make a vigniette around the face. Likely we are working great people at PAY a post production company in Poland and a fabulous colour grader who drives the Quantel and machine with ease and great skill. See photos below.
Annika