Joker Cinematographer Explains The Impact of Color in Film | Vanity Fair

I spread a tweet yesterday in which the woman was like Todd Phillips Jimmy Kimmel and Michael Lawrence sure for disrespecting joaquin phoenix on that outtake i'm really like it's fake have you not read about it it is fake my mom thought it was really she's very embarrassed for me hi I'm Larry Sharon I'm a cinematographer today I'll be talking about color and film how cinematographers use color to help tell an effective story for example how does certain colors contrast on screen to create depth separation and mood you probably notice some changes just then right let's take it back a second so this flat D saturated image is a result of us shooting on a digital camera and something called log this camera shoots in s log three you can basically think of it as a raw digital negative before the color grading has happened shooting in log lets us retain a wide range of colors recorded by the sensor which an editor or colorist and post-production can grade any way they want much different huh we had a blue variance dimmed up the orange to complement the blues I know it's all technical trust me you don't have to think of it as technical stuff I was an economics major I don't know any of this stuff color and film is comprised three main elements the color hue itself the saturation or intensity of that and the brightness sometimes referred to as value or tone saturation is probably the most subjective part of modern filmmaking values of color refer to shades or brightness levels one way to create depth in an image is to use complementary colors or colors opposite each other on the color wheel blues go with oranges reds with greens yellows with purples and so on you can play around to create different color schemes so how does the cinematographer choose what colors to use in a movie it's hard to talk about color in motion picture photography and without thinking of the legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro seriously after this is over go watch the conformist less emperor apocalypse now he uses color as imaginative Li as anybody in film history he actually had a whole color theory and would assign colors to different mood in the movie the emotions the characters we all have associations with color memories how we think about color it's subjective for example green is a color in nature a vote of tension or envy or greed or it may represent power of transition for a character whereas warm yellows and oranges may evoke emotion like comfort and home love tranquility or not I don't know may make you want to go to the bathroom good sorry so color has a meaning in film but it's an aesthetic choice and some masterful filmmakers choose not to use color in the same way as perhaps door or Oh or even myself and I use a limited color palette or desaturation to tell their stories I've always appreciated how colors contrast within the same image and how they can be used in movies to help evoke certain emotions and tell the story let's look at some examples in Garden State the movie opens with him literally in a colorless world he lives in a tiny apartment with all white walls and white furniture we're trying to limit the color space cuz his life is a bit colorless at this stage in the movie he opens up his mirror very little color only the pills are the only color that breaks up the scene he drives to work in a fairly desaturated busy highway so then the next contrasting color when he goes here is an example of contrasting colors against themselves and seeing the scene not just within a scene if you are willing to embrace color as a director like zach is you're gonna look for opportunities to show color from scene to scene or certainly within the scenes fun fact when we shot this I said has anyone actually done this is so unrealistic like driven away with hosed on the car three weeks later I did it just saying it's clearly marked okay we are definitely not supposed to be so this is scene from The Hangover which was the first film I did with Todd Phillips who directed Joker and here we are shooting on a practical rooftop in Vegas in terms of lighting in here in the contrasting color of light some of it is not necessarily motivated by emotion but it's motivated by the desire to one be authentic to the environment but also to help separate the world via contrasting colors we had a practical concern which is we were shooting up there for real so this is an example of how production is on and cinematography you are like entwined as closely as they can be because here as the cinematographer I it was basically helping to design the set by having us put in those fluorescents because he needed to light them in an environment in which we could shoot them from far away you know surround them so they have this cyan light well on the rooftops that red lights there as a way for airplanes and other things to see the rooftops and to see the the boundaries so those two contrasting colors of cyan and red made for just a really wonderful way to separate out the actors from their environment [Music] what that we wait this is a movie I shot called Paul they arrived on the top of a mountain to basically meet the spaceship that's going to take Paul home so the moonlight is the dominant source of light here which is blue with a little bit of cyan just personal preference as to where I like would like to be they're supposed to see a spaceship coming and in fact it's a misdirect because it turns to be the baddie flying in a helicopter to come take Paul away I've always been really happy with the way this turned out in part because we decided to put these moving lights on the end of a helicopter when we talk about color and if we're talking about here the color contrast I love the way that yellow and that yellow is not a yellow you see really naturally mixes with the moonlight in this scene that that light that came through the trees could have been anything if we had kept it blue or white light I just think it doesn't have the same power and the same striking imagery that I was looking for another aspect of color in film is color temperature it has to do with how the color white light looks like on camera in a given temperature they're measured in Kelvin and you often hear about indoor temperatures like 3200 Kelvin and outdoor temperatures like sunlight 5500 Kelvin lower temperatures are considered warmer and can give an orangish tint to a white object on camera higher temperatures are considered cooler and provide a bluish look so for example at 3200 Kelvin if you introduce something at 2,000 degrees Kelvin it would be very warm and orange like firelight and at 5500 Kelvin if you introduced something at 10,000 degrees it would be really blue so this is from Hangover Part 2 here's a fire lit scene right so it's warm inviting it's the calm before the storm so the first image as they wake up is gonna be them waking up in a grimy room in the middle of Bangkok it's daylight but the lights are all off there's a tungsten bulb in there to show contrast there's uncorrect it's cyan fluorescence the warm light that's coming in there now is representing heat right because they're sweaty and hot one of the things that we talked about we talked about color temperature is the way it shows up in the form of like cool white or warm white but the other thing that really plays into lighting that we see in our natural world is the green spike or some lights may be very magenta but often with fluorescents they have a very high green spike so means in relation to the 3200 film stock when it shoots a none corrected florescent as I say it's also showing up with all that green spike in the form of green so you mix that cool color temperature with the green and you get cyan and that's that cyan that we saw in the room when they first woke up and black and white you can really see how death is created with shadows and contrast and told the ultimate contrast being the silhouette obviously that's one extreme but there are different values of exposure we can use to varying effects famous still photographer Ansel Adams made famous the zone system which was a way to think about exposure and tonality in a film image the lowest value 0 being toe black in the highest value 10 being white with very little information at all so you can think about an image and think of all the tonality x' between there in 10 steps of exposure it's a good way to think about the death you can create through shadow light darkness but another way to create that depth in a way I really appreciate is through color two things can be the exact same tonal range but if there are different colors they create depth within the same frame [Music] all right here's a clip from Joker he's suffering from severe insomnia at this point in the movie he's going through this real crisis you know because Joker in large part is a movie about opposite ends of the spectrum two sides of yourself the shadow and the light and so those contrasting colors is a lot like what's going on internally with Arthur and that colour difference makes a huge impact on the scene if we drain the colour out of this you can really see what we're talking about when we're saying values and tonality of light but suddenly if we bring all the colour back in we're now creating separation with the colour the dramatic difference between the sodium-vapor and the background and the uncorrect at fluorescent cyan blue one way to achieve natural colour contrast in a movie is to exploit that 15 to 20 minute window each day known as Magic Hour when the world is bathed in blue light and the balance of it mixes with all the natural light of the world streetlights storefronts fluorescents anything that's in there is contrasting with that beautiful ambient blue light this scene from Joker is a perfect example of Todd Nye shooting at dusk we contrasted the build of the storefront that Mark Friedberg the production designer did and added a bunch of color contrast and there are different colors to play off of the Blues you can get some real beautiful stuff if you're willing to shoot in this tiny window and if everyone is hyper focused funny thing happened though Joker another cheated us for some reason right as we began to shoot right after the second take they just started handing out tacos to the crowd I went a little crazy cuz I went wait a second we have 20 minutes to shoot this scene can we just wait on the tacos one of the fun things about Joker was creating Gotham in the 70s and early 80s and for me a large part of that was representing what the cities looked like back then well a big part of the cities back then were the street lights and the street lights were sodium-vapor you don't see sodium vapor as much anymore and they're really going away that green orange gross light that's what we saw back then that's how the city represented itself on film but also in our memories a little bit gross but for me quite beautiful it's an example of the blue light that bathes the city at this time of day and then us adding these warmer sodium vapor lights in those positions on the building we turn some lights on inside the building in the interest of the reality of the space in the world in which we live we're now adding another color this sort of warm white uncorrect affluent the yellow warm to his Lobby and then when he gets into his home that's the first time we're introduced to some warm comforting tungsten light its lamps it's warm its inviting and it's probably the warmest most gentle light that's in the whole movie who did you think in the car the fluorescents that existed back then they were just gross and ugly and they had a green spike and so in the interest of being authentic to the time but also loving the contrast of that cyan to the yellow downstairs and then to the red here this environment because we're backstage was a real opportunity to mix a lot of color but he's gonna go into an environment and which now he has to perform with all these red lights that have shades over them you can barely see the people the idea is focusing on Arthur's struggle so in terms of lighting and the tonality of the scene the people were meant to be a bit invisible this is really Arthur's moment almost for himself but this slightly dirty but little bit cooler spotlight was in the interest of putting him in a very harsh almost an interrogation light overexposed certainly not something that you can hide from and here he was exposing himself in a really human way let me pick a preface that I think is important everything I talk about is somewhat emotional and intuitive to me so I often talk about contrasting colors like yellow and blue because they're on opposite ends of the spectrum so all you people that know about color theory yeah it's complimentary I always say contrasting forgive me I don't know much I'm just a simple guy trying to make a movie thank you so much for watching this if there's two things you take away one all of this technical stuff don't worry about it just feel the scene feel the emotion of the lighting and try to express that as best you can in whatever you're doing the second I'm behind camera for a reason so I apologize for all the stumbling around this thing use this in whatever way you can and go make something cool take risks and remember no tacos at dusk come on people shoot a small window of opportunity here all right thank you

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 1,371,150

Keywords: vanity fair, joker movie, joker cinematographer, lawrence sher joker, lawrence sher cinematographer, cinematography, cinematography vanity fair, color in film, coloring film, color correction in film, filming the hangover, filming joker, cinematographer joker, joker vanity fair, how to color film, impact of color on film, met technique, in focus, in focus vanity fair, lawrence sher, joker 2019, meta technique vanity fair

Id: th9pG9Q6Kuo

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019