Telling the Story - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 324

“I've read interviews with directors from northern Europe who feel
that cold colors are pleasant and relaxing and warm colors are aggres-
sive 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 some-
one 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 tung-
sten 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 desatu-
rated 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.
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.
- David Mullen, ASC.
“You just try to create a single, solid world that has a consistent struc-
ture 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