Creating Looks - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 415

I ask Matusek if it's a big help when someone provides visual references
to other media. “Do you feel like you have to be up on the latest movies or
watch a lot of media or TV so that if somebody says, 'Hey I want it to look
like Crash ,' you can say 'I know what that means'?” Matusek responds,
“Totally. I get Netflix. Newer films are a good place to look for looks. With
older films, it was color timing and they were not as extreme. Commercials
are great resources to look for really pushed looks. I did the GoDaddy spots
the last few years and the look we were going for in those spots was CSI:
Miami . Hypersaturated . . . well, not hypersaturated, but make the sky yel-
low and the water cyan and push the contrast. Generalizing, that campaign
had that look. Or the 'Diamonds Are Forever' spots were kind of contrasty
and cyan, duotone with a flesh tone that's desaturated. It's tough to have
seen the same movie as your client, or see the same spots as your client. It's
mostly about saying, 'Is this what you mean?' and doing a look and then
trying something else. Usually you can find something you've both seen.”
As for looks from movies that are often requested or copied, Stefan
Sonnenfeld has developed some of them that have been copied so much
that he almost feels as if the look is being parodied, “There are a lot of
looks that I have been teased for. I think I was one of the first or if not the
first to do those kind of greenish and orangey skin tones. (Think Trans-
formers , though the look goes back at least a decade before that.) Then I
did a film like Man on Fire and I guess there are three other movies that
are literally copies of that.”
Matusek picks out the Marines shot from Artbeats ( Figure 10.29 ) and
decides to give it a look of another popular movie. “For this image, I'm
just trying to give it a more high-contrast, maybe go for a skip bleach kind
of a look. Kind of a Blackhawk Down —I hate to be cliché, but it is kind of
a cool look.”
Matusek begins his grade. “So in this shot, I'm just playing on the
contrasty image, because there's already nice highlights here. I'm just
kind of pushing that. Letting the sky blow. There's some nice blue there.
Sometimes a client will have you spend 20 minutes on making the sky
blue—the subject is the soldiers” ( Figure 10.31 ).
Matusek points to the highlights on the bright sides of the helmets and
continues with a great tip: “I'd probably grab a highlight and defocus some
of that stuff, because if you defocus the highlights, you can push the con-
trast even more. When you do too much, some of these pushed highlights
start to look a little clipped, which doesn't look that good. So if you throw
a nice, soft defocused highlight, that kind of smoothes out that transition
and allows you to go a little more heavy-handed with the contrast.”
If you defocus the highlights, you can push the contrast even more.
- Mike Matusek, Nolo Digital Film