HOW TO COLOR A FEATURE FILM: Pro tips and tricks from a case study in Davinci Resolve

hey today we're going to be doing a little bit of a case study on a feature film I recently graded we're going to talk about some of the intentions we initially had uh before we started grading and how those intentions carried themselves out throughout the feature film so let me give you some background uh back when we were first starting to work on this film we talked about how uh we wanted color to kind of move with the film so that means in certain scenes depending on how the characters are feeling we wanted to either dial up or dial back certain elements to help with the story and so we started talking about what what could some of those different things be and we ended up coming up with a number of story dials as we called them so it was uh the story dials we had were contrast saturation image balance and then a certain highlight Hue which I'll I'll show you later the reason why we use the term uh kind of like color dials or story dials is these weren't meant to be light switches it wasn't meant to be you know on or off but rather we'd fade these effects in or out depending on the the mood and feel of the scene one of the things that helped was the cinemat phographer Dan Parsons actually put together this document which helped kind of have a a guiding overview for where we wanted things to go one of the things that Dan did in the document was he started to set the tone for what he called modulation of the color and that is we don't want things to feel like every scene is a separate film we want to have kind of this Baseline to work off of but as this story moves along be able to make little adjustments here and there to emphasize those story beats an example would be uh one of the things we wanted to emphasize in the film was the revelation of Truth so when a character finds out something we we wanted to be able to to lean into that from a color and cinematography perspective another is this idea of jail so the main character's name is Jason and he jail is a physical location that he spent some time in in the film but also there's this like emotional prison he has his past that really hangs over him so we wanted to be able to take some color elements and uh use that to indicate when he's feeling the burden of his past broadly speaking when it came to the look of the film uh when we're thinking about contrast the thought was a good highlights a good highlight roll off a good shadow rollof um more often than not we were going to lean towards more contrast than less that that wasn't always true and then at the very end of the very bottom of the contrast we wanted a teeny tiny little scoop of the black levels not much it's if you watch the film you probably won't even notice that we scooped it but we didn't want things to clip and there's a couple dark scenes in the film that if we just scoot that blacko just up a little bit it helps us see more I would say perceived detail it doesn't add any detail of the footage that wasn't there but it kind of tricks our eyes into thinking that there might be a little more in that Darkness as far as broad Hues go uh we talked about you know Hues in the sky we didn't want to lean magenta you know we wanted to to pull them away from magenta and that's largely true of the uh the blues throughout the film so that was one of those across the film things we wanted to be true another was we we do see the green of nature coming up quite a bit and when it comes to the green of nature we would prefer a slight bias towards the warm tones in greens of you know like grass and trees rather than cool tones so that was one of those considerations as well and then to wrap it up we wanted to pursue uh 35mm grain along with some very light halation so let's take a look at how we accomplish some of this inside DiVinci resolve so let's start with this shot here it's kind of on this Hillside where uh two of our our main characters are talking to each other now what's interesting about this shot is it's a good way to Showcase kind of the base level of color for this film so when I when I was initially uh just doing some testing I I tend to work in the uh the timeline level and then just kind of you know put some very basic color Management in place so uh right now I have color Management in the uh pregroup clip but uh any of these disabled nodes were kind of uh for the experimental testing time so you know this gray I could check you know what's it doing to Middle gray throughout the process and I was experimenting with some adjustments of that middle gray point now here's what we landed on as far as the elements that are going to touch every single clip in this film we landed on a uh a very uh light-handed 23 83 uh look and uh I'm actually using a l here but the Lut is actually something that uh it's a combination of both some previous work that people had done as well as some some power grad that had mixed together uh for ease of uh playback I ended up just baking it all into a single L just to throw into here but the thing to know about it is it's it's pretty light-handed a lot of those elements that we were looking for as far as the global look things like trying to not have blue bias towards magenta and trying to make sure that the greens of nature lean a little more golden those are the elements that were included in this L and you can see how the sky is not leaning magenta although the sky really didn't have any magenta uh to begin with in this scene the uh the greens the the highlights of the greens are especially leaning a little more towards uh the the warmer tones the shadows in general are getting a little bit of cooling I I'll show you here if I jump over to just kind of a uh a gray ramp you'll see the uh the overall kind of split toning happening of just our Global look so a slight bit of warming in the highlights and a little bit of cooling in the shadows there from there we had this little bit of a shadow lift and it's not a lot going on but it's just that little bit to SC sort of uh scooch up the uh the bottom end of the image and make sure we're not clipping any detail then we have some uh grain and very minor halation happening and then uh kind of The Da Vinci wide gamut direct 709 color space transform on the end of the image uh just to show you uh kind of what that halation is doing uh if if we were to zoom in really close to the edge of this tractor here right on this uh this kind of like silver spot let me disable the h and now let me enable it do you see how when we disable it it's a little more clean around the edges whereas I enable it we're getting this little more of kind of a a glow it's incredibly small and minor but I think it's a great little example of what the halian can do uh as well as if you look up here kind of on the edge line of the trees if I pull the halian and grain out it looks like that pretty clean I add it back in we get this slight edge of uh this kind of warm halian Edge which I think is beautiful so that's a good look at the Foundation that the film was built upon now I'm going to move from the timeline level to the group post clip level and this is where we kind of uh did most of our scene wide adjustments so uh the adjustments we did scene wide were actually really subtle the first thing was a very small exposure adjustment to to bring us to the place we were looking for as well as we slightly backed off the contrast uh the the balance was great uh we we faded in a little bit of midtone detail and mtone detail was one of those other story dials that uh kind of throughout the process we were tweaking of this SC need to feel you know a little harder H we could you know dial that midtone needle up or a little softer and we could dial it back from there the only thing left was a very very slight bit of desaturation with this uh right here uh it's really hard to notice it if I toggle it on and off um it was really subtle so let's now jump over to the beginning of the film and look at what happens when we start to turn some of these story dials as it were up so this is a good example of uh where we can see a couple of these story dials in action so uh keep in mind that the uh the time Tim line level uh nodes I haven't adjusted at all but on a scene wide level let me back these out and show you what's happening so overall we did a slight exposure uh up for the scene and we kept the contrast where it was at uh we like the level of contrast uh overall image balance was in the right place but we did a nice little bit of upping the midtone detail to give a little more uh Clarity and Edge to some of the uh elements in the image and I'm going to skip over this node right here and jump to this so uh hu shift is a uh a plugin that I've been uh playing around with from from Pixel tools the it's it's a very similar tool to what uh kind of Curves do over here in the the Hue verses um but uh I've been I've been liking experimenting with it uh what I did was I pulled out uh saturation in this node but tried to leave a little more of the Blues in place so that's kind of what's happening in this node uh but you'll see I've only faded it in about 50% so we're we're not using all of its effect so uh I'll pull this out for a second here's what it was before we pull out some of the saturation I wanted some additional saturation pulled out but in an even way not biasing it towards a certain color so I pulled out a touch more saturation with this node and then right here at the end we used uh if you look in the highlights here we introduced some of this kind of yellowish green tone into the highlights so let me back it out and add it this was that color we talked uh in the beginning about that idea of adding that color of that you know prison or emotional prison we started fading this color into the highlights when we wanted to lean into that uh so I've only got about 50% of it um in at this moment in time but that kind of shows you what it does you might be able to see this effect even better in the wide shot so let me pull off the uh the Highlight adjustment so it's a very clean white almost a clinical white in there and let me bring back in some of that that yellowish green highlight and you got it this was largely inspired because uh certain daylight film stocks tend to have this reaction in the highlights so we thought what if we use this as a storytelling element and we can fade it in and out based on where it works you can also see how this plays out in this prison scene so let me take off the uh the the scene wide adjustments so basically what we have is we have the uh you're now looking at kind of the the camera log image uh this is with that Baseline this those timeline adjustments we talked about earlier uh being in place and then on the scene level uh we thought things needed to be a little bit brighter so we could see some detail in the face as well as pulling back the contrast a bit further uh just not making sure the image doesn't pop uh overall the scene balance uh we were feeling like we were getting a little too much green in the image so we uh just balanced out the green slightly uh fading in a good chunk of that midtone detail you'll especially see that in his hair right there and then we have this desaturation and that desaturation once again is letting a few more of the Blues through and that's at about 70% and then we bring in this uh this kind of prison highlight color uh you'll notice that especially in his hair right here so this is off and on if you look at his arm here we see it off and now it's on and that's how we were kind of building this scene wide look let me pull that all out out and all on that's giving us the look for this scene and keep in mind all of that is happening underneath some of these timeline nodes and those timeline nodes are really starting to help us get a consistent foundation for us to build upon so we're not trying to reinvent the wheel every scene we've set kind of a nice gentle Baseline for us to work off of and then we can use those story dials on a scene by scene basis we do get a number of scenes with flashbacks in this film and one of the ideas we experimented with was would it be possible for us to make the flashbacks oversaturated so that they can see that you know this was the character's past and it's very present in their minds due to that oversaturation so that when we jump to the present it shows that the characters are maybe like living in the past you know the present is not as vibrant as it should be we ended up experimenting with that and realized it didn't really work you know visually it didn't make sense so we ended up going a a more de saturated route for the flashbacks um one of the things that we we will notice is let me jump to a future shot here we wanted it to be almost black and white but we wanted to allow the police lights to shine through so it's not quite black and white it has a little bit of a a warm highlight to it but then the Hali kind of that red glow and Bloom that's happening is much more noticeable and still maintains its red saturation so that is happening after the desaturation it's a cool effect that I think served the story well here this is a scene where the uh the main character Jason goes through a bit of a a detox this also shows you how some of the story dials can be used so let me uh let me pull off any adjustments we made to this scene so right here you're looking at an image that is just with our kind of like gentlehands going on at the Timeline level and if you look at this it feels like a very nice and pleasant morning but we don't want it to look and feel that way so what did we do well we first looked at overall exposure we dropped the exposure a bit and pulled a little more contrast out of it so it wasn't feeling too full of life we uh we really cranked some good mid midtail detail tail in there and here let me toggle it on and off you can see how we're starting to really find the the edges and texture of the skin especially uh from there we used uh that that saturation pull out uh that that Hue shift and this is we used 100% of it in this scene and then we added that little bit of the uh the the prison highlights into the mix and so that's how we go from something really bright colorful and Lively like a warm morning to something very gritty and visceral this scene is a pretty good example of what happens when we turn those story dials up to like 10 we also had this scene a little later in the film with these very blue walls and let me let me pull off um uh any of our adjustments here just to show you how bright those walls were don't those walls just kind of like Slappy in the face when you look at them so we we knew that we didn't want the walls that potent coming through and we still wanted to maintain some of that gritty more desaturated uh look of the film uh so the way that we did that uh on this is we uh overall uh dropped the exposure slightly pulled out a bit of contrast the scene balance was feeling a little warm so we tried to neutralize some of those elements you can especially see that uh in his shirt there we cranked in the midtone detail uh then we applied some of that overall desaturation we only used about 30% of that uh saturation dial that we were talking about but once again uh this desaturation lets through Blues more than other colors we applied a very light bit of that emotional prison highlight color and then we took the walls and desaturated them as well as darkened them just a bit more uh and so that is how we went from an image that feels very bright and happy to that more subdued uh oppressive feel another element I talked about is how do we show the revelation of Truth when it comes to the characters in this film and there was a specific scene that we had some fun with uh this scene we have this uh another one of the leads named Griff having this conversation with this lady about some things that had happened in their past I don't want to say too much because I don't want to spoil the story if you haven't seen it yet but we start with a a very standard approach to this scene right so if I pull off the the scene adjustments here we have overall uh mostly a contrast drop more than anything a little bit of midtone detail in there as well as some uh light desaturation but what happens is as The Scene goes on uh this lady gives Griff some information that he didn't know about and it actually changes his perspective and what we did is we faded in a little more saturation very very slowly over the course of the scene so that if if we go to the uh if we go to the end of the revelation we have Griff looking like this so this is kind of the This is the End saturation Point let me click between those two and now let me jump to the beginning of the scene to show you for comparison he looks like this do you see that jump we're going from less saturation to more saturation over the course of that scene it almost ends up feeling like the uh the sun is coming out let me show you that from her perspective so this is her at the end of the scene and this is her at the beginning it's not much it's subtle but it does a really nice job a similar effect was used at the end of 1917 where the soldier kind of walks by the tree sits down we get this boost of saturation and warmth in that film uh here we we mostly just did saturation because the scene already lent itself to a nice warm look the last thing I'll mention here is uh towards the end of the film uh one of the last kind of big finale scenes we really wanted it to feel like the the world was just kind of burning down for Jason here and uh you'll see how incredibly warm some of these clips are and that warm push is actually something that we uh theorized in post production here if I pull off the adjustments for this scene you'll notice that it's actually a pretty neutral looking beginning now once again we do have those timeline level adjustments on but uh here's kind of what we did we uh overall pulled back a little bit of the contrast to give us a bit more detail we gave some of the Blues a touch more saturation uh cranked up that midtone detail and then we had what we kind of called the fire push and these there's kind of two steps that happen here we have the fire push which goes a lot but then immediately after that we have desaturation so let me kind of move those two together we have the uh saturation push and then desaturation after it right there those kind of were enabled at the same time and then a very light bit of that highlight yellowness coming in if I just pull it off and on it feels very jarring but what's interesting is as you watch the film we're fading this effect in on a kind of a scene by scene basis so it really isn't nearly as jarring as it might seem this also helps contrast the uh the final scene of the film and the final scene is much more towards that neutral look that we uh had been talking about kind of like that Hillside bit above and beyond the timeline adjustments basically this is made up of uh a slight adjustment for contrast and exposure an incredibly minor balance adjustment and then the tiniest Touch of desaturation and literally like 10% of that highlight adjustment just the smallest amount of that uh that kind of like yellow green highlight coming in as well as some additional midtone detail it allows us to create a really nice uh difference between the climax of the film and then the aftermath so there you go there is a behind the scenes look at this little case study at this feature film called uh searching for the elephant what questions do you have at this point uh make sure to leave them down in the comments also if you enjoyed this uh let me know hit that like button or subscribe if you want to stay up to date with some of the future content that's being produced all right I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Barrett Kaufman

Views: 4,002

Keywords: colour, colour grading, colour correction, movie, feature film, feature, color, color grading, color correction, colourist, colorist, behind the scenes, how to, how-to, movie color, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve studio, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve 17, color grading davinci resolve, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve free, davinci resolve studio 18.6, davinci resolve vs davinci resolve studio

Id: f5rX0F9VopY

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024