Telling the Story - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 337

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 under-
stand, 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 pro-
cessed—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.
The Director Speaks: “Kiss Me In the Dark”
In this sidebar, “Kiss Me In the Dark” director Barry Gilbert describes trying to color cor-
rect this image himself. (Also see the sidebar on “Kiss” in Chapter 6 . )
“With the husband kissing her, we've established that she is lonely to the point of
perhaps being obsessive in her attempts to recapture her memories with her husband.
And we've made it clear to the audience that this person is dead and that she is a griev-
ing widow. We see her fall onto her side in bed and cover her face in her hands, then
we cut outside and see the lightbulb on the porch. Then we see her house through the
surveillance monitors and the light goes out. Her eyes flutter open and he appears in the
frame and they kiss. I really wanted to crush the blacks and get him to emanate out of
the shadows. I spent more time coloring that shot than any shot in the movie. If there
was any shot that I wish that I'd had the power of full-scale correction [he originally
graded it in Final Cut Pro], it was that one. Because I found it very challenging to crush
the blacks without having the color range., because I was working in DV. To have a nice
skin tone and crush the shadows without it looking ghastly, I just couldn't do it. I wanted
to have that shot be as shadow-filled as possible, and that was difficult. This is the first
project that I'd shot that was all about shadow. The projects I'd shot before were all
comedies and very poppy and that was quite easy to color because the neg was good so
it was really just a matter of taking what you had and plussing it.”