AS Media Visual Effects Practical

Visual Effects Practical

Brief

In most social realism films, editing is very minimal to heighten the realism. So instead of exploring and experimenting with interesting effects, I chose to look at colour grading in films.

From the below videos, I was intrigued by the effects colour has on a film's atmosphere without all the fancy technological special effects:

Research and Planning

I was especially interested in "Fight Club"'s 'grungy and grimy' style which I thought had colour grading suitable for a very 'gritty' urban drama. Although our film lacked the whole violence and night life aspect which would work with the low lighting and fluorescent lights, I really loved the dark, low lighting and cold, greenish tones.

The neon colours idea also prompted me to look at "Trainspotting", which uses vivid colours. In the bar fight scene mentioned earlier, the violence is also represented using dark and exaggerated bright hues like in "Fight Club". Throughout, the vivid colours seems to be used, not only does this represent the time period, but also this night life aspect.

I learned that dark cold tones presented a more depressing feel compared to lighter, warm hues. In our film, this colder feel would work the best.

However, as analysed in my filming evaluation, some shots like the graveyard scene lacked detail and didn't suit the urban, 'gritty' feeling of other shots like the waking up shots by Gala Bingo. In the above video, the narrator explains that a film doesn't just rely on colour grading but also careful planning of set.

Instead, social realism films like "The Selfish Giant", the colour palette of mise-en-scene is muted and creates an almost dawn like feeling with the country locations. Unlike, the warm, light colours, "Shank" has fairly muted colours that use the blue tones and darker colours. Perhaps, like analysed, this is to convey a certain mood as we feel tense when watching "Shank", having to focus on the dark image of the confrontation scene and hence, gripping us. Whereas, "The Selfish Giant" is almost dreamy.

Therefore, I really think that more research should have gone in the tiny details of our film for a professional cinematic approach, but in relation to our story boards the shots we recorded accomplished most of what we had on paper.

Post-production

In After Effects I altered some of the clips filmed in Maidstone. These are documented below in the following clip:

Firstly I started by using the 'Warp Stabilizer' tool to remove the shakiness of the videos.

Then, with the guide of the above video I altered the video's colour curves. In the video, the cinematic feel was supposedly achieved by darkening the shadows and making the highlights lighter and more prominent. I experimented with this idea by altering the white curve on the graph so it appears to have a 'sigmoid function' (in other words an 'S' shape).

I also attempted at altering the hues of the video. In my research, bluer and colder tones presented a depressing feeling which we wish to convey. Consequently, I lowered the red hues and the green hues slightly. This definitely made the tone blue and it appears to blue.

I thought the very cold tone was not helped by the fluorescent blues, so I tried using black paint to remove the blue. This resulted in the below photo. The line of black caused by the hard paint brush meant that it was very obvious.

Consequently, I tried to use the 'Mask' tool and create a black solid layer to put in the fluorescent blue places. With the 'Feather' option, I made the prominent paint line more subtle.

Although this was a lot better, in the next frames the masks covered the actual image. Instead of trying to use 'Track Mask' etc. I just got rid of the attempts to cover the bright turquoise.

After this I tried altering the colours further.

The difference is shown below.

These colour curves and correction was applied to other shots. I felt the below shot was too dark, but the contrasting blue and red creates the effect I wanted. 

I tried attempting this with the graveyard seen, however, I felt this was hard to colour correct due to the different lighting, which was more natural and the green hues. Hence, when adding blue and removing red like the previous shots it appeared to cold. I couldn't add green because it turned out more a sickly green blue colour. Hence, I cut this out as this was not successful,

Outcome

Overall the result can be seen below.

Personal Comments

Upon watching this again and talking to my group, the colours were too dark and made the video appear gloomy and almost horror like. I definitely believe that I should have mean more subtle with exaggerating the shadows and highlights.