How to Create Color Contrast as a Cinematographer

[Music] contrast is one of the biggest ways to create interest in your project this is done through shaping light and establishing a shadow and light side but what if I told you there's another method of adding contrast to your images through the form of color in this video I'm going to show you exactly how you can do that by going over the fundamentals of color contrasts as well as showing you some practical examples have you ever set up a shot but felt like there was something missing from the image itself or have you returned from a day of shooting to see your footage doesn't feel that interesting even though you shot this on a good camera and lens combination or even a basic one the image just feels flat if this is the case it's more than likely that your image is lacking contrast so why is contrast so important in cinematography contrast in the simplest terms is difference it is the difference between two comparable quantities specifically in cinematography it is the difference between the lightest and darkest part of your image or in an area where it can be compared such as the light and Shadow side of a subject's face the other form of contrast that is commonly used in cinematography is in the form of color adding different color temperatures as well as light sources in your project can be a difficult process but I'm going to go over a few examples to show how easy it can be the first example I want to go over is how you can appear daylight balance fixtures daylight and bolor fixtures to appear more blue or warm than they are this is a perfect example of that and I got a lot of questions about this piece specifically and this scene specifically and how we achieve this so this all starts in terms of how you want this to feel we were shooting in one location and we wanted multiple rooms to feel like different places entirely and this is a lot due to the art department but you can do this with color contrast as well as asking the director what this is supposed to feel like this is supposed to be a detective late night he's Burning Midnight Oil in terms of getting whatever he needs to get solved so we want this to make it feel like night and you either do that through dark or applying blue into the Shadows this is usually Moonlight and everything like that now the problem is that we have a partition wall here and this is supposed to have all this daylight spilling here so daylight is rated at 5600 Kelvin and we wanted this to appear blue so off the bat this is where I started in terms of how do I make this appear blue so I set my camera white balance the 3200 Kelvin this pushed the temperature of that light really blue but we also push this a lot in post so that 3200 Kelvin allows my daylight sources and anything daylight to appear more blue and now we want to appear the the scene to actually be very warm and inviting and this is done through we use some bolor fixtures so we have some light that's painted on the wall we have light going on everywhere and we have a lot of contrast regardless so my main contrast is happening between my warm room and the blue daylight and this was achieved with a F22 and this was set to 2700 Kelvin and this is acting as my main key light and giving me kind of a harsh light here here highlighting the high parts of his face and then this blue that you see pushed into the shadows of his face is actually from the daylight spill coming from here and bouncing everywhere across the room and you can see that through the shadow that's created through the Hat as you can see that this is very warm here and then all your shadows because my camera's white balance is set so low and the ambient tone in the room is set so high relative to that it's going to appear more blue and that means whatever is pushed into the Shadows AKA daylight in this case is going to appear blue and give us that color contrast if we look at the color wheel and we look at opposite sides of the Spectrum in terms of color complimentary color of red is green complimentary color of yellow is purple there's this world of blue and red but in film that's kind of aggressive so we go into this orange and teal look and this is ex a primary example of that not necessarily orange but it's that warm and cool look that give us that contrast and everything that we're looking for and then in terms of the room tone we have some light sources here you can see that we have some Source you know painting this wall as well as painting the other side of the room and that's just a lamp with a b7c bulb in here and we'll see that in the next scene that we're going to be looking at and this is giving us our room tone and everything that we're going for so this was an interesting challenge that the director proposed to me in terms of making the scene feel blue and say hey we can't black out the whole house and you have to deal with the available daylight so white balance is one of the most important Tools in a cinemat photographer's toolkit when dealing with applying contrast especially color contrast this is the next shot in the sequence and this is just a POV shot this is not necessarily in terms of not going to talk about lighting here but I'm going to be talking about interesting shots and rigging I thought this was just something to cover nicely so what we do have here is our camera with a map box and everything on it rigged out and then on the rail system I just have a simple 50 mm Rod adapter and Magic arm and then the magnifying glass here that we looking at and this give us a really interesting effect because the magnifying glass was acting like a diopter and that's what they usually do and everything around the magnifying glass seemed very blurry and very real and this was playing with the distance between the actual magnifying glass and the camera's lens so always try to get interesting shots in your sequences in terms of making it feel different but the main shot that we're going to be looking at is this one here and there's is a lot of color contrast and things I did to develop that contrast in the first scene that we shot so this this was the first scene that we shot that sets the mood I feel I'm like I'm in a warm setting very contrasty it's very night driven heavy and I wanted to apply that without seeing that roof here and this is what we did in terms of just adding a bunch of light fixtures so we are going to start off with the practicals in the room we have a little desk lamp here that's just applying some interest especially on this phone and then we have a little lamp here that's just leaned up against the wall these were terrible lamps to work with because it's as soon as you put a heavy b7c bulb in there it just fell over and because I want everything to match here and this is a life source that I didn't really have able to control I had my gaffer set this b7c bulb to the exact temperature of this and then we set our aperture light to that as well which is our main key light hanging overhead so that is an aperture F22 and then that is matching the color temperature of this so I would say it's around 2700 Kelvin I don't remember the exact value and as always this is double diffused with the included diffusion as well with a grd on it but this was feeling a little too harsh so what I added was a 18x 36 in flag and that's just a silk It's usually the yellow ones that you see in the flag kits any really diffusion would work here you could tape Frost to it you could tape a shower curtain to it but I just had my gaffer arm out that on a stand and this gave us that really soft toplet look that was motivated from the lamp fixtures as well as the lamp fixture on the desk and then I biased it overhead on his is left side so camera right and this developed a lot of Shadow and contrast back into the room and we were dealing with a room that had a lot of Windows too so I had my gaffer and grip black those out as well and then now to add that blue light that we saw in the background in terms of the first shot I had my gaffer overhead a Titan tube any tube would work Titan tube was just easy because it was out controlled and we could set it to whatever we want and then I had him set this to almost even more than a daylight color cuz I really wanted to accentuate that blue so I would say that this was around 6600 Kelvin I could have used a daylight balance fixture here in terms of just putting this at a daylight color but I really wanted to accentuate that blue feeling so I had him set this to like a cyan color kind of similar to what you see in the back here and this just gave all that blue to even the wall the the obviously painting there that's white and then these plants here and it just gave us that interest and that blue feeling that we are in someone's desk at night what I really like here in terms of something that we tried is to build depth in terms of somebody's desk I love shooting on wide lenses but the focal length that we use this is a 29 mm and I really like this feeling in terms of I feel like I'm on the desk of the person and there's so many things of interest that I'm looking at but I am focused on who's in Focus here which is the talent and I'm not distracted by everything that's going on we kind of had the art department and our production designer set everything up so that we were looking at a mess in terms of what he's doing but we are attracted right to the center of the frame and this was a great feeling and a great look in terms of this not a 35 not a 24 but something in between cuz I feel like a 24 or 25 would feel a little wide here this one's from another film that I want to talk about in terms of having color contrast and this goes into that orange and teal look that we were going for before and this is with by color fixtures no color was really needed here and this is just hammering home I do this a lot in my work in terms of properly raing your cameras by balance I just don't walk into the scene use 5600 Kelvin call it a day or set my camera to Auto wi balance I'm very intentional with my camera's wipe balance so my camera here this is something I do a lot in my work is set to 4,400 Kelvin so that means any lights that is are daylight or anything like that will appear more blue and then the lights that are the overhead ones which are over here we have a row of Titan tubes flickering on and off and the reason why you use Titan tubes cuz they're app control and then we wanted this to be very dramatic in terms of the lights turning on and off these are all set to 6600 Kelvin you could use any variable number you could set this to 6,500 Kelvin or anything like that and this is just numbers that I have impr printed on my head I usually go 27 32 44 56 66 7200 Kelvin these are just numbers I have in my head and I like to use and this gives us that blue look look that we have on the corner of his shoulder and then we added a hairl light which is you guessed it the F22 and that's the C version but we just use the uh by color function that is double diffused with the grid so we're not spilling anywhere and this is set to 2700 Kelvin that is giving us that orange look here I see a lot of uh videographers and people starting their cinematography in terms of adding random colors into interviews and everything like that and I guilty of this before I would have had a hair like that was blue and key lighting with an orange fixture or something like that just to add a different color into it but I as I learned you can do this Tastefully with non-rgb lights it's very intense and very um I could say content feeling in terms of just adding a RGB light in the background and everything like that but I want to showcase that you can get these drastic looking looks with bolor fixtures as well as daylight balance fixtures you just have to know how to use white balance as a creative tool and not necessarily as a setting and once I kind of instilled that into my brain in terms of my camera's white balance is a creative tool I started looking at scenes in terms of how can we make this feel better and more intentional in terms of the direction and everything like that the last thing that I want to look at is from a music video that I shot a while ago and this is using RGB fixtures I was brought on as a DPS and I had was working with a new gaffer and everything like that and we had access to a full package truck so I just want to say that this was shot in a small room and it can be achieved with lowle even small lights like MC's or anything like that but what we did is we set our room tone first and this was heavily colored and post to shift that whole blue that we're looking at and we have a sky panel blasted up into the ceiling and this is set to a blue light and it was very different in terms of what the blue you actually see here and this was due to the color that was used in terms of the post- production process so I'm not going to use color temperatures here cuz we're actually using RGB fixtures and everything like that we have the blue light and this is giving us the room t tone and basically feel the entire room and then whenever you apply room tone to anything this is going to push color or whatever you want into the entire room as well as very important into the Shadows I always like to place room tone fixture I either use a very directional fixture so I can play with in terms of I want to apply a gradient to the background but if I'm just trying to fail the room I usually use a panel light just to blast up and lift up everything and it gives us a natural tone to everything so if I didn't have any other light fixtures or anything like that everything would appear blue soft and because it's bouncing off the ceiling it appears very soft so on the other side we have a Titan tube and this had a grid over it and this not necessarily a grid we just use GAF tape cuz we didn't have any grids and then we also have another Titan tube I'm going to color this in a blue color and this is naturally going for that split lighting so this was set to blue color and this one was set to an orange color and what I talk about split lighting is that we have a split right down the middle and we have a gradient going across and this gives you so much interest if you actually look at the skin and everything in between that is that we have this neutral zone like kind of here where the colors start to mix and give you that really interesting and very dramatic look and then even if you look into the shadows and everything you can see that blue color from the room as well as that other fixture that we're using to develop that contrast but this is the point that I want to really Hammer home in terms of your ambient fixture that you blast up into the ceiling or anything like that that's lifting the room is going to push that color into the Shadows she has some Shadows on her finger here in the back in terms of what the orange light is hitting and you can really see it here in terms of the Shadow that's casted from her brow this is a very important concept that I really want to teach you guys because once I learn this in terms of like I can really push color into my shadow parts of my image with ambient tone kind of really changed in everything in terms of how operate as a cinematographer if you found this video interesting in learning about the fundamentals of color contrast and want to learn about other fundamentals let us know in the comments below and if you're interested in seeing the common mistakes about setting white balance I have a video cute up here that you'll probably enjoy

Channel: Tenfold Production

Views: 25,284

Keywords: filmmaking, how to, beginner, tutorial, edit, editing, fitness, fx3, production, filmmaking tips, filmmaking for beginners, filmmaking techniques, tenfold production, cinematography tips, cinematography breakdowns, video production for beginners, fx6, fx9, red komodo, fx30, video production company, best camera for videography, videography, commercial filmmaking, commercial look, commercial films, how to shoot commercials, tenfold, tenfoldproduction, films, color contrast

Id: HPgI3YexZ1o

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024