Matching Shots - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 361

CHAPTER 9
Matching Shots
This chapter is devoted to one of the basic colorist tasks: matching shots.
This skill is critical because it is the colorist's job to ensure that in any
scene, all of the shots look like they happened in the same place and time,
even though they may have been shot over the course of several hours,
days, or even locations. It's critical, especially in a dramatic piece, that the
audience doesn't get pulled out of the story because the color or contrast
or luminance levels shift from shot to shot inside of what is supposed to
be a single contiguous scene.
This area is one of the least subjective skills in which a colorist must be
proficient. Either the shots match or they don't. You'll see that there are
numerous strategies and tips to make these matches easier, but that the
more experienced you become, the more you simply rely on your eyes.
Until then, learning to match shots is a valuable skill and training method
in learning to force a very specific look on a shot with a clearly definable
and quantifiable result.
Many times, the need to match cameras is due to some technical
mistake during production, but matching shots still needs to occur with
even the most skilled director of photography and most diligent crew.
The reasons for these matches often have to do with the quality or color
temperature of natural light changing over time. But it can also happen
on a shooting stage with completely controlled lighting. Sometimes it
can happen between lens changes—for example, with a wide shot, on
which the actual exposure of a face matches the close-up, but because of
the perception of the light levels, the wide shot may need to be adjusted
to match the perceived level. Stephen Nakamura said just such a case
happened when he did the grading on David Fincher's Panic Room . In one
scene, the perception of the light level of the wide shot was affected by
the light bouncing off of a large wall. But in the close-up, even though
the exposure values of the skin on the face were identical, the skin tones
seemed brighter, because the eye wasn't taking in as much of the wall.
361