Secondaries with the Pros - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 222

Commercial projects include clients such as Disney, Nintendo, McDonalds, AT&T,
GoDaddy.com , Kelloggs, Miller Lite, Sears, and Bally's Total Fitness. Feature films include
Chicago Overcoat, Of Boys and Men, Baby on Board, The War Tapes, and Kubuku Rides
(the first film from Steppenwolf Films).
He's also corrected ESPN's edgy 30 for 30 doc, “The Trial of Allen Iverson.”
Matusek is a graduate of Southern Illinois University.
Fun with Windows
Larry Field, the colorist on FOX's 24, was reminded of a trick he'd done with a Power
Window on his DaVinci color corrector. “On one of my shows I needed a sunrise, so we
picked a spot behind a mountain and I grabbed a Power Window with a pretty broad soft
edge to it and created a pinpoint and dropped another window and graded off that and
basically produced a sunrise using Power Windows.”
Vignette to Create Day-for-Night
NASCAR senior colorist Chris Pepperman (formerly of NFL Films) used
vignettes to create a day-for-night look in the “Michigan Ave. Pumpkin
Lights” scene ( Figures 6.25 - 6.28 ) . Normally, in a day-for-night shot, you
would want to avoid shooting the sky, because even if you darken down
the entire shot, the contrast between the sky and the rest of the image
is usually a clear giveaway that the scene was not shot at night. To bring
that contrast under control, Pepperman used several vignettes through-
out the image.
“So the first thing I'm going to do is create a circle. I'm going to take
it down below the pumpkins and I'm going to rotate it and now I'm
going to stretch it. I'm situating this window where I can now work on
the outside of it and I really want to knock down the sky even more.
I'm gonna really crush the you-know-what out of it.” As he does this,
he notices something that bothers him. “Can you see the noise in there
a little bit? So what I'm going to do is come up on the black levels to
get rid of that noise and leave the black levels alone, because there are
some blacks here in the building. I'm going to bury (the highlights) and
add even more dark blue.” But as he does this, he sees another prob-
lem develop ( Figure 6.29 ) . “I don't like what it's doing here. I should
be able to track more of that blue in there. And I see some posterizing
going on.”