Telling the Story - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 326

to blow the product up and stick it in front of your nose and hit them
over the head.”
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.
- Larry Field, Level 3
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 char-
acters 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 cinematog-
raphers 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.”
Without context, you can make a billion different choices, but as
soon as you know the context of the shot, it narrows the choices.
- David Mullen, A.S.C.
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