CHAPTER 8

Telling the Story

Most of this book has been a fairly one-sided discussion from the perspective of the colorist. As I’ve pointed out before, though, color correction is a very collaborative art form or craft and one of the main collaborators—and the originator of the image itself—is the director of photography.

In addition to my conversations with colorists, I also spoke to several DPs, including David Mullen, ASC.

In this chapter, we’re going to discuss how the colorist helps to tell the story, which is arguably one of the most important points of color correction. How does the colorist get the viewer into the story using color and keep the viewer’s attention and focus in the story? What can the colorist add to the visual process that was started by the director and DP?

“The majority of movies today are shot in a style that could be called romantic realism,” begins Mullen. “Sort of naturalistic lighting and photography, but naturalism pushed to kind of its most dramatic or interesting. So we try to make things look realistic, but manipulated for the mood of the story. Sometimes when I’m breaking down a script, I’ll list the obvious visual devices that the script seems to call for, then I ask myself if those are clichés and whether the opposite is really what the film needs. It’s like the Hitchcock thing where he liked to set a murder scene in a sunny field with flowers, just those kind of opposite choices. But this is all stuff you have to talk about with the director. Sort of bounce these ideas off of them. Sometimes they want kind of off-the-wall suggestions that kind of spark new ideas, but generally there are certain cultural associations like warmth for passion or coldness for badness or isolation or something like that. It’s not always true.

“I’ve read interviews with directors from northern Europe who feel that cold colors are pleasant and relaxing and warm colors are aggressive and disturbing. You can pick a symbolic style for the film in terms of color and contrast and as long as you clue the audience as to what your symbolism means … I mean it’s sort of like a code, when someone comes up with a code in the spy business, they also have to come up with a key to break that code so the person at the other end can decipher that code. So you can decide that red symbolizes something or blue symbolizes something and as long as the audience is told in the beginning what that structure is, they sort of accept it for the rest of the film. When you look at Little Buddha, Storraro has all of the scenes in Seattle in very cold, blue/gray colors, and wherever possible he tries to have the scenes set at twilight with deep blue light out the windows. So there’s always a blue accent in the frame somewhere. And all of the scenes in Tibet are very golden. And sometimes you can flip those two ideas.”

Mullen continues, “I remember in the film Dolores Claiborne where they shot the modern scenes on Kodak film with a blue, uncorrected tungsten look and the flashbacks all on Fuji film with a warm, saturated color scheme. Now, one could say that you could shoot the flashbacks on Kodak and shoot that saturated and the present on Fuji and make that desaturated and cold. Maybe the present should be saturated because that’s the colors of real life and the past is manipulated and desaturated to suggest a distant memory where the colors are missing. But as long as the film-maker has a kind of structure, it doesn’t mean that everyone has to use the same palettes for everything. So that’s how I break down a script. I think of it as a sort of series of color and contrast arcs that match the plotline of the story. Some stories are structured in what I’d call an ‘AB’ comparison and other stories are structured in an ‘A to B’ arc. Some visual designs of a film is a character starts at one point and ends at a different point, so you try to create a gradual change throughout the film. And other films more intercut the lines of two characters, or one world versus another world, so your visual structure is more of a back-and-forth thing. And there are some films that have no visual arc in terms of color and contrast.

“You just try to create a single, solid world that has a consistent structure and look to it: a cold, desaturated look, let’s say. A film like Letters from Iwo Jima, let’s say, which has a consistently almost black and whitish look to it. A relentless kind of look. They don’t lighten it or darken it that much from scene to scene to scene, so it’s kind of meant to be oppressive. ’Cause the world there was oppressive and it never really changes. So, there isn’t like one way to approach a film but mental games that you can use to spark ideas, basically. Sometimes I play a game of opposites, you know. I think of all the opposite ideas for a scene: wide angle or telephoto, blue versus red, fast movement versus slow movement, static shots versus moving shots, lots of cuts versus very few cuts. And I break down a scene and try to think which one of those ideas is most appropriate,” Mullen concludes.

I asked Bob Festa if he felt that there are visual clues to story that the audience expects. “I think so. I think generally if you look at American cinema, Americans are trained on some really stupid levels. They see a dark blue picture and they know that’s evening even though it’s day-for-night. I think those types of associations are pretty popular. But I work in a primarily commercial and music video environment, so I’m pretty much product driven. So if you look at the types of things I do that tell the story, they are generally based around selling the product. The things that I might do and I might be influenced by are things that heighten or bring to the surface the product focus. I might use traditional dodging and burning techniques to bring the product up and not really be so concerned about the general tone because I’m here to sell things.”

I argue that commercials need their stories told even faster than films and that if the story of the commercial is “Your life sucks until you use our product,” should one start the spot cool and desaturated until the product arrives, then have the images go warmer and more pleasing once the product “saves the day”? “I think in my world where I’ve got 30 seconds to tell a story, that’s a little too vague,” states Festa. “I think I practice it on a small scale, but 9 times out of 10 I’m going to blow the product up and stick it in front of your nose and hit them over the head.”

Level 3 colorist Larry Field explains one of the ways he works with color to promote the story in his work. “With 24, if one of the main characters is doing something bad, we’ll make it a very gritty and aggressive look to go with the action.”

So the question is: what should the shot look like to tell the story? Mullen responds, “Everyone wants context. Without context, you can make a billion different choices, but as soon as you know the context of the shot, it narrows the choices. To me to know whether that scene is late in the day, or whether a character turned off half the lights in the office, so this office is not as bright as it normally is. So if they haven’t seen the shot where the character turns off the lights, they might try to match the look of the office from the last time they saw the office in the movie, so you need the kind of story context in order to make the final decisions on stuff. Especially since some cinematographers shoot a kind of flat image and then create the look later, the DP definitely needs to be there to give an idea of what the intent of the scene was.”

CBS’s Neal Kassner agrees, “You’ve got to know the story, because color is part of the storytelling tools.” Kassner related several stories about how he had corrections go off track because he sometimes started grading before he understood the story.

I continued this train of thought with Encore’s Pankaj Bajpal. I asked, “When you try to tell a story through color correction, do you feel like there are specific visual clues that the audience will always understand or do you feel like you can give any clue, and as long as you stick with that clue, then the audience is clued in? For example, take the Artbeat’s shot of the boxer. What if we said he was sad because his mother died? Do you color correct it differently than if he’s getting ready for the big fight? What are some of your storytelling thoughts?”

Bajpal responds: “Rather than going into the specifics of that, I’ll tell you aesthetically what I need to get to and it could be any situation. For me, there is a point where realism meets that something else and it is very critical for me. When you’re looking at [an] image, do you feel like in that circumstance, in the moment in the story, are you physically there? Does the image feel three-dimensional enough? If somebody is a good storyteller, you forget that you’re sitting in the chair and you’re transported into that world, so for me the rule of thumb, the guiding principle in any and every circumstance of storytelling is to be able to break that barrier down.

“You can do it in a very stylized way: for instance, if you’re working in science fiction, you could have very high contrast, all these punchy blues and cyans and greens and all of that, but you’re transporting that person into that science fiction place, so you’re transporting them into that environment and it has to feel real because just by crushing that contrast and painting everything in cyan, it may not have any soul. How you do it, I couldn’t tell you, often I don’t look at the buttons, I don’t look at the dials, it just happens naturally, but the mindset is ‘Are you able to transport that person?’ and it doesn’t have to be realistic; in fact, more often than not it isn’t.”

Company 3’s Stefan Sonnenfeld agrees that there is no specific color that tells a story: “First of all, there is no strategic kind of sit-down where we say okay, what are the complimentary colors and this is what we are going to do. This is why you have to try things. There are accidents that happen and I have learned through accidental process. That is in my information bag and I can go back to that and that is where some people without that process fall short. I can say I did this once and it worked great, (so) I can try this. Sometimes guys like Tony Scott will just let me do my thing and he will look at it and he will say, ‘I never would have done that for this scene, but it works really well, so let’s keep that.’ Whoever gets anything right on the first go? That is another thing to remember. There is always trial and error. You have to try things.”

Color Changes the Story

When Shooters’ colorist Janet Falcon looks at the Artbeats image of the Marines in the desert (Figure 8.1), she believes that the image could tell two different stories, depending on the color scheme.

“I look at this and I think, ‘It’s the desert and it’s hot,’ and it came up really warm, so without any direction my feeling is that it should be brownish, goldish, not so blue-sky.”

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2 Tektronix WVR7100. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: RGB Parade expanded to see blacks.

Again, for Falcon, it’s all about context. “That’s just a judgment call; if I had to start somewhere,” she explains as she desaturates the image. “That’s what I’m trying to go for: this tobacco look. I could be wrong. That’s why clients are important. Because you need somebody telling you—like that story you told me about where something’s supposed to go,” says Falcon, referring to a story I told in my other color correction book about how Bob Sliga was working on an image before the client arrived. It was a beautiful image of a woman in a flowing dress carrying milk jugs under a green tree toward a big red barn. With no input from the client, he began by turning into a pretty Kodak moment. But when the client arrived, he told Sliga that the woman had cancer, so Sliga switched gears and took the saturation out and changed the warm look to something more cool and depressed.

Returning to the image of the Marines, Falcon continues her assessment, “I mean, it doesn’t look like a happy moment. It looks like a more serious moment.” With the context of “a serious moment,” I ask Falcon what she would do. Her assessment: “You think less saturation. More contrast probably. Serious moments don’t have to be low color, but I think it definitely helps to convey a message” (Figures 8.3 and 8.4).

Fig. 8.3 The primary correction reduces saturation and lift while cranking up gain to create contrast.

Fig. 8.4 Data for Primary room.

She adds a vignette and darkens the edges (Figures 8.5 and 8.6). The darkened vignette serves several purposes for the image: It focuses the attention on the Marines. It gives some depth and texture to an otherwise flat, burned-out sky. And it also creates a degree of tension by claustrophobically “surrounding” the soldiers.

Fig. 8.5 First secondary gives texture to the sky and focuses attention.

Fig. 8.6 Data for outside of first secondary correction. Lift, gamma, and gain on the edges of the image have all been lowered.

With the vignette done, she qualifies an HSL key on the bright skin tones, blurs the key, and pulls the saturation out (Figure 8.8).

Fig. 8.7 Second secondary qualifies and brightens skin-tone highlights.

Fig. 8.8 Data from inside of second secondary.

“Let’s see if we can do a luminance key to the sky.” She pulls a key and blurs it. “I’m trying to make it look like a nuclear holocaust. Now if I lift up the blacks, it gives it a ProMist-type look. And I was trying to get some yellow in there, but I think it’s just clipped out. Okay, there’s my nuclear holocaust” (Figures 8.9 and 8.10).

Fig. 8.9 Falcon’s third secondary qualifies the sky and blows it out.

Fig. 8.10 Data from inside of the third secondary.

Here’s another look at the same image from Falcon’s colleague at Shooters Post, Bob Lovejoy. Lovejoy worked quickly and barely spoke as he went through this correction, saying only, “This one speaks to me. Often in the absence of direction, I just let the picture just take me. It’s a subconscious process” (Figure 8.11).

In addition to the primary correction, I believe this image also shows the effect of a Color Effect that was placed on the image to give it the blown-out look. Due to a bug, I couldn’t get the Primary correction to show without the Color Effect (Figures 8.12–8.17).

Fig. 8.11

Fig. 8.12 Primary data.

Fig. 8.13 Color effect tree. The blur was set to about 1.5, the scale was set to about 2, and the Nattress plug-in “G_Blend” was set to blend as a “screen.”

Fig. 8.14 The first secondary was an HSL key with a garbage matte to qualify the sky and bring the gain down.

Fig. 8.15 First secondary data from inside the qualification.

Fig. 8.16 The second secondary was a vignette to focus attention and give texture and depth to the sky.

Fig. 8.17 Data from the outside of the second secondary.

Talk Like a DP

One thing to note as Falcon was describing the image was that she often used terms that a director of photography could relate to. The creative arts are filled with jargon and specialized language and colorists, and DPs are no exception. The trick in becoming an effective communicator and collaborator is to learn the language of your collaborator, who in this case is the cinematographer.

Specifically, Falcon mentioned the words “tobacco” and “ProMist.” Both of these are filters that a DP could relate to. Cinematographers like photographic terms, so learning these terms is a valuable thing. Instead of referring to a general sense of how bright something should be, cinematographers will often describe is specifically in terms of f-stops, saying, “That needs to be a stop brighter.” Or sometimes they’ll discuss an image in terms of the film negative, as in, “That image seems a little thin.” A thin negative is the result of underexposure or under development. The resulting print will be muddy and low contrast.

Understanding color in terms of some of the filters that a DP uses is a valuable skill. Although some filters vary in color, you should be familiar with some of the popular colors and filters and what affect they have on an image.

David Mullen, ASC, explains that the relationship can go both ways: “I find that the more I sit in on color correction sessions, the more I can talk to a colorist on their level. I don’t tell them how to turn the trackballs on a DaVinci or any of that stuff, but generally when you’re looking at a scene, you’re either adding or subtracting primary or secondary colors, so I tell the colorist, ‘That warm light needs a little more magenta in it.’ Or ‘It’s warm, but warm with a yellow bias.’ Or ‘It looks like the shadows have a little cyan in them.’ If you talk in terms of red, green, or blue—a little more or a little less, it sort of gives them a good idea of what you want. If you start talking to them in terms of colors that don’t have any photochemical or electronic sense, if you say, ‘I want that light more turquoise with some chartreuse color cast or burgundy’ then everyone’s going to start to wonder, because we sort of know what those colors are, but we don’t sort of all agree on what those colors are. And there’s another tendency for cameramen to use photographic terms, like filters, like ‘That’s a coral filter.’ Well, a colorist may not have any photography background, and they might not have ever seen a coral filter, and even coral filters don’t match each other from manufacturer to manufacturer, so it can be a meaningless term when you get into the color correction space. I’ve seen cinematographers say to colorists, ‘I shot this with an antique white filter and you got rid of all of it.’ And I’m like, ‘What’s an antique white filter to a colorist?’ You have to talk to them in terms of colors that they understand, which is red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow. When you start getting things like brown, let’s say, that’s a very tricky color to create in post and my theory is that brown is really warm minus saturation.”

Another popular reference for cinematographers is the way film is processed—for example, bleach bypass or cross-processed, or which film stock they want it to look like. We’ll discuss those in more depth in Chapter 10. Cross-processed looks come from having one type of film stock developed in a chemical bath or process that is meant for a different film stock, such as processing “slide” or “positive” film stocks in baths of chemicals meant for a negative film. As a reference, check out Tony Scott’s 2005 film Domino.

The Story Is the Script

LA freelance digital intermediate colorist Greg Creaser takes on the same scene from “Kiss Me In the Dark” that Mike Matusek covered in Chapter 6. Creaser believes the story to be so important that he likes to read the script before he works on a film.

“I think story is really important. I know any time I’m going to grade a film—if I’m doing a DI—I’d either like to read a script or at least see a cut of the movie before I do it to know what’s involved or to know what the genre is, because I think that has a lot of say on the color as well. I think that’s really a key. I think that’s extremely important to do that,” states Creaser.

He doesn’t have that option as he starts grading the bedroom scene from “Kiss,” though, so he has to make up the story as he goes. “If I were the DP on this, I’d want more of a mood, so it’d be definitely warmer. And I would probably dip right into the shadows with this and probably the midtones: probably want to drop it down a little bit density-wise.” (Note that Creaser uses the photographic/cinematographic term “density” to describe the brightness of the image. “Density” is also the term used by the original “colorists”—negative timers.)

“I’m just going to look at the highlight color and see if pushing it to the warm side makes it nicer. I think that makes more sense,” he says as he checks back from his grade to the original image (Figure 8.18). “That’s a little cyan for me,” he comments, then switches back to his grade (Figure 8.20). “That’s a little more in the mood. I’d leave it there to start with for the client” (Figure 8.21).

I point out that pretty much all of the colorists who worked on this image warmed the shot up and darkened it. Creaser adds, “That’s the whole point of this. Somebody—the DP or director or producer—is making these choices. Somebody’s got to say, ‘My taste is to have this shot darker or warmer.’ And you know what? I think that’s what makes a good colorist. I think being able to have that interaction, being able to help the client make creative decisions—a lot of time they maybe don’t. I’ve heard from clients about being in a room where they didn’t get what they wanted and they kind of didn’t even know what to do with a shot themselves—so it’s kind of helpful if you help them with that a little bit.”

Fig. 8.18 Source image courtesy Seduced and Exploited Entertainment.

Fig. 8.19 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: YRGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: vectorscope blown up 5x.

Fig. 8.20 Creaser’s final correction.

Fig. 8.21 FinalTouch UI of data for correction.

Emphasize Elements to Further the Story

Filmworker’s Club colorist Pete Jannotta sees an interesting storytelling challenge in the shot from Chasing Ghosts in a basement corridor of a museum (Figures 8.22 and 8.23). Due to the very dark nature of the correction, it is difficult to reproduce the effect of the video monitor image on the printed page. I have enhanced the print images to closer match the video image. My apologies to Pete for having a very nice grade compromised by CMYK color on paper.

“The first thing I would do is make sure I’m getting as much out of the bottom as I can,” Jannotta begins, digging into the blacks with the master setup control. “Stretch a little gamma out of there, pull the whites down to make sure that what ever I can get out of the top, I’m getting. But I know if nothing comes down where it’s clipped, it’s clipped … clipped on the source material.” Jannotta points out that the fluorescent tubes in the image are clipped. “But for shadow detail, depending on how much noise it generates, I would always try to pull up whatever is hidden towards the bottom, just so I know what’s in there. Except, for this shot, stretching it isn’t going to do me any favors. Just set black on the baseline and compress the gamma. Push all the stuff from middle black down, toward black, because when I’m looking at this shot, it’s asking for much more mystery than the way it comes up, to me. And I don’t particularly care for it green. I see it more cold to neutral, and I see him more lit up. Make more out the flashlight stuff and less out of the side walls. And less out of this up here for sure,” he says, pointing to the ceiling detail (Figure 8.24).

Fig. 8.22 Basement scene from Chasing Ghosts. Image courtesy Wingman Productions, Inc.

Fig. 8.23 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: YRGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: vectorscope expanded 5x.

“I’m just looking at the vectorscope now and pulling the vectorscope away from yellow, without making it overly blue, which it looks like it’s getting. I constantly go between looking at the image and looking at the vectorscope … and the waveform.”

Jannotta is getting comfortable with where he’s taking the image, except for the wall in the foreground. But he decides to attack that in secondaries instead. “Maybe push a little blue in the grays, this way. Because that’s mostly the middle of the grayscale,” he says, pointing to the shadowed foreground wall on the right side close to the camera. “Also I see that this blue waveform”—indicating the RGB Parade scope—“is, or was, a little more compressed than the other two channels in that area,” he adds, indicating the shadows. ‘So that’s a pretty good spot for just a general balance, I think. Let’s see if I can put a little more blue into it, ‘cause I don’t mind if he’s a little cold.

“Then maybe compress the grays a little bit,” Jannotta continues, moving the gamma lower. “I want to make it look a little more mysterious.”

Fig. 8.24 Jannotta’s primary correction.

Fig. 8.25 Data from Primary room.

“What I’m thinking I would do in secondary is take that green … isolate that greeny/yellow stuff and take it down,” he says as he goes into secondary and selects the bright highlight on the right foreground wall with the eyedropper and then customizes his selection (Figure 8.27). “Now I want to bring the saturation down in that area. I didn’t like the green stuff. I want to take that matte and make the gain come down. That’s what I want. So I’m just seeing what I can do with contrast in that matte. I’m just seeing what I can do that looks natural” (Figure 8.26).

I notice that as he’s trying to dial in his correction, he’s constrained in where he can take it by some funkiness that’s happening in the highlight on the wall under the fluorescents. “Yeah. I’m seeing edges that I don’t like, but I’d like to bring it down. I want to snap him out and make more of this light made by his flashlight spilling on his clothes and that light,” he says, pointing to the pool of the flashlight on the floor (Figures 8.28–8.30).

Jannotta also wants to diminish the detail in the image above the actor’s head. He decides to do this with a window, or vignette. Jannotta draws a custom vignette shape and softens it (Figures 8.31 and 8.32). “I would make him a little warmer. But first I want to change the shape so that it covers less of the top of him and is bigger at the bottom where the flashlight pool is. So my thought is to keep his head cooler, and it will be more interesting if more of the warmth comes from the bottom,” he explains.

Fig. 8.26 First secondary correction lowers the glare on the wall and hides detail in the shadows.

Fig. 8.27 Data from first secondary.

“I’d like to keep his head cool, and it’s too dark up there,” Jannotta continues as he plays with the original shape to better define the beam and pool of the flashlight. “So I’m just trying to now to see if I can—even though it’s not like a flashlight beam—try and have it feel more like a source light. I’m pulling out the softness on the bottom, ‘cause I really want to feather that bottom.”

Fig. 8.28 Second secondary focuses on the flashlight.

Fig. 8.29 Data from the inside of the second secondary.

Jannotta creates another secondary vignette. “What I think I’m going to do now is get his head with a triangle kind of thing. So they’ll be overlapping, but this one on top is going to be so I can light up his head a little bit, but keep it cool. I like the way that shot feels now.”

Continuing with his definition of the image using secondaries, Jannotta draws an upside-down dome along the top middle of the picture, selecting the bright practical lights near the top of the frame then pulls the highlights down (Figures 8.33 and 8.34), explaining that he didn’t like emphasis on the bright lights over the actor’s head. “That looks more interesting to me. To me this tells the story better. This guy’s looking for something … he’s looking for trouble. It’s all about being in a dark scary place with a flashlight. So I brought all of the shadow detail down and it becomes more about him and his flashlight.”

Fig. 8.30 Data from the outside of the second secondary.

Fig. 8.31 Third secondary focuses some attention on the face.

Fig. 8.32 Data from the third secondary.

Fig. 8.33 Fourth secondary lowers gain on lights, helping focus attention on the subject.

I stepped in briefly to save Jannotta’s grade for him, but before I did, I moved the timeline to a more representative frame of the grade. “So you grabbed a thumbnail at a better place? I do that all the time,” Jannotta says approvingly.

Fig. 8.34 Data from fourth secondary.

Imposing Story on the Boxer

Nolo’s Mike Matusek and NFL Films’ Chris Pepperman both decided to create their own story around the Artbeats image of the boxer (Figure 8.35).

Matusek begins, “So you wanted me to pick something and make up a story. I just saw Rocky, so I’m going to say that this guy is training for the big fight. He looks like a mean guy, so I don’t know if he’s the villain or if he’s the hero, but I’ll say he’s the bad guy. So I would want to give it a kind of unsettling look, so first I started off by crushing the blacks, basically giving it more contrast. I went a little green with it. Desaturated. Trying to give it a more menacing. Obviously it was lit to be contrasty, because of the difference between dark and light, so I’m just playing on that contrast and seeing how far I can push it. If I crush the blacks too much, I’ll lose too much detail.”

Matusek looks at the original image. “So that’s where it was. Looking a little muddy. I think I crushed it down too much. I think this is a better place for it, but maybe go back to the greens and see what that looks like. Again, this guy’s the villain, so give him a more menacing look. Try going a little more warm with it in the highlights. Give it a different look. Basically I started off going kind of going kind of dark with it” (Figures 8.37 and 8.38).

Fig. 8.35 Image courtesy Artbeats.

Fig. 8.36 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: RGB Parade expanded to see black balance.

“Then I decided I liked it brighter. So the highlights are somewhat clean. I guess they’re a little green,” Matusek continues (Figures 8.39 and 8.40).

Fig. 8.37 This was done with just a primary grade.

Fig. 8.38 Data from Primary room.

“Then I decided to go warm with it. I think that’s a better fit. It has more contrast anyway. And this one (bright and warm) has the most grittiness to it I think” (Figure 8.45).

Chris Pepperman also worked on this image and had this take on it: “The first thing I think about is what this picture can look like. And I see this guy in an element that is real gritty. I see that it’s a monochromatic, almost black and white, with a little bit of color and a very hard shaft of light coming through and he’s training very hard. He’s getting ready for a fight and he’s really intense about it. How can we tell a story with color? I’m going to start by doing what I typically do, and that is adding contrast. I’m going to see what I can work with clip-wise. So I’m coming down on highlights and I’m coming up on setup to see where my detail is,” Pepperman explains as he adjusts both tonal ranges simultaneously with the dials around the trackballs that control master gain and master setup.

Fig. 8.39 This was done with just a primary grade.

Fig. 8.40 Data from Primary room.

“All I’m doing is seeing what my parameters are. I know what it’s going to look like clipped. I’m really seeing what I have in the image. So now what I’m going to do is just add a little bit of contrast to it and start letting the light fall off where it wants to be.”

I explain to Pepperman that the image has already been touched by a colorist. “I was just going to say, balance-wise, it’s almost there. There’s not much to balance.”

But I prod him to take the image further by pointing out that we’re telling a story, so the balance isn’t necessarily important. “Right,” he agrees. “And that’s just what I was doing. I’m fine-tuning the balance where I am comfortable. So I really want to see that smoke. I really want to see that highlight. So I’m going to start kicking the highlights. I don’t care if his back blows out. As a matter of fact, I want his back to blow out. I want you to see this really hard, edgy light screaming and kind of cutting him out of the background. And I just want to bury the blacks to where it’s not going to hide anything but it’s where it wants to be, which I’m going to say is right about there,” Pepperman states as he looks into the shadow areas to see if he’s losing any important details. “There’s nothing back there, so I’m going to get rid of it completely. So I’m going to take the black levels all the way down to about here.”

Fig. 8.41 The image with just the primary grade.

Fig. 8.42 Data from the Primary room.

Fig. 8.43 Color Effect tree for highlight glow. Both blurs are set to 5. Sharpen is set to 2.

“That’s where I’m going to start (Figure 8.46). The next thing I’m going to do is take the color almost all the way out, then I’m going to come back in a little bit. So I’m liking where I’m going, but I’m still not happy with the contrast.”

Fig. 8.44 The data for the HSL key in the Color Effects tree.

Fig. 8.45 Final image with primary correction and Color Effect.

Pepperman explains an important point: “When you add contrast, it also affects the saturation, no matter how separated it is. Anytime you build heavy contrast, you’re going to have to come back on the saturation if you want to stay consistent. Meaning if you create something that is this green and you like that color, but then you stretch that signal and make it more contrasty, inherently that green is going to get more saturated, so you have to pay attention to that. So I’m going to add more contrast and I’m going to come down on the midrange a little bit. So I like that. Now what I want to do is accentuate that shaft. I want it to be really warm light. I want it to look like it’s late August. Like it’s this hard, hot, humid day. This is how I envision it.”

Pepperman enables a secondary and a vignette and creates a shape diagonally across the screen in line with the shaft of light. “Now I’ll go inside and kick it up a notch.” The highlight on the fighter’s neck really starts to look good. “Keep coming, keep coming. I want to see how far we can go with this. That’s what it’s about. Now I want to warm it up,” he says as he pushes warmth into just the highlights and midtones (Figures 8.48–8.50).

“So that gave me what I wanted,” he concludes. “That was pretty easy, actually. Let’s talk about what I did. First I checked to see where my range was. Then I added contrast. Then I desaturated it. Then I created the window. I brightened the inside. I went back and darkened the outside. I kept going back and forth until I go the ratio that I wanted between outside and inside the vignette. Then I applied overall primary warmth to it.”

Fig. 8.46 Pepperman’s primary correction is largely a drop in saturation as the image was already nicely color corrected by Artbeats.

Fig. 8.47 Data from Primary room.

Fig. 8.48 This secondary is the one that really imparted the look.

As he explains his finished process, Pepperman decides to add a few more touches. “Now let’s just say I like the warmth in the highlights, but I want to grab his skin tone and mess around with his skin tone. So now I’m going to go to another secondary.”

Fig. 8.49 Data from inside of the vignette.

Fig. 8.50 Data from outside the vignette.

Pepperman grabs an HSL key based on the fighter’s skin tone and plays with it. “Finding that key is all trial and error. That’s really what that is,” he states as he adds a vignette to the same secondary, creating an oval to garbage matte the skin tone and eliminate the punching bag, which is also a skin-tone color.

With the skin tone qualified, Pepperman starts to tweak. “I’m actually trying to eliminate the red in his skin tones without affecting the highlighted areas of the smoke. As opposed to doing an overall correction, I’m trying to see if I can grab that skin tone without affecting anything else and just desaturate it. I liked where I was overall, I just wanted to desaturate his skin tone a tiny bit. So I really like what I’ve done here (Figure 8.51). I like this feeling of ‘It’s hot. It’s warm. He’s sweating.’ And that’s where I really wanted to be.”

Fig. 8.51 This secondary is a slight desaturation of the skin tones.

Fig. 8.52 Data from the second secondary.

Well, not quite. Still seeing yet another tweak, Pepperman continues his correction with and additional secondary. “Okay, I want to try one more thing. I like this a lot but I just want to see the blue in his pants a little bit more. So why don’t we do this. Let’s go into yet another secondary.” Pepperman draws a square, resizes and rotates it, and positions it over the fighter’s shorts. “So right now I’m opening it up to see how much I have and I want to add a little artificial blue,” he says as he pushes blue into the shadows of the square vignette, then softens the shape. “That’s much better” (Figure 8.53).

Fig. 8.53 A minor tweak to the color of the boxer’s shorts.

Fig. 8.54 Data from the third secondary.

In an effort to save time with the colorists and have them touch as many images of interest as possible, we didn’t follow all of these corrections through the entire process that would be needed to truly finish them. In this case, each of these windows would need to be tracked to the motion of the shot.

New Hat’s Bob Festa also delivered three different story lines on the boxer shot. He describes his three looks: “The first one is Raging Bull. High contrast, black and white, noisy, grainy, ratty” (Figure 8.55).

“Then it’s Rocky—1970s, well-balanced, strong” (Figure 8.56).

Fig. 8.55

Fig. 8.56

“And in this third image: Clint Eastwood. Million Dollar Baby. Desaturated, green wash #2, 1998 written all over” (Figure 8.57).

Fig. 8.57

Story Epilogue

For me, the thing that stands out in this discussion of color correcting to help promote story is that the colorist really needs a strong sense of the story to focus the direction of the corrections. Without context, as David Mullen mentioned, the creative choices are unlimited. Context helps to focus those creative decisions.

There are several books that attempt to define the emotional clues that color delivers. Patti Bellantoni’s If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die (Focal Press, 2005) is a prime example of this school of thought. Another excellent example is Bruce Block’s The Visual Story (Focal Press, 2001).

I don’t believe that defining hard-and-fast rules about what specific colors always say is valid, due to cultural differences and trends and fashion, but the colorist definitely has a strong storytelling capability through the use of color and contrast in the collaboration with the other storytelling artists on a film as they attempt to influence and engage the audience.

As an exercise, watch a few films and try to determine whether there is a story-based reason why the director, DP, art director, and colorist are using certain colors and how they are using contrast and tonality to help tell the story.