Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Fun in the Snow With Polaris' 2015 Lineup

In an honor of the "dumping" of snow received by the brave residents of Western New York last week, I thought I'd post a fun piece form this past year that I colored for clients "The Factory" and Polaris. Directed by Adam Brummond this piece features the new Polaris 2015 snowmobile lineup amidst some fantastic mountain backdrops captured with both the Phantom Flex and Red Epic cameras in some "oh-so smooth" slow motion photography. Western New Yorkers could've used a few of these bad boys last week battling the elements!

The grade for this was inspired by the product line of the snowmobiles themselves. Our color scheme: black, white, and red, with a hint of blue in the shadows to contrast with the saturated red tones of the snowmobiles. Simple in concept, this color scheme is always difficult to pull off well, as mother nature always give you a much broader palette to work with in location photography (ie greens in foliage, browns in the terrain, blues in the sky, etc). We controlled things with secondary keys and plenty of power windows to try and hold the palette for most of our shots. But occasionally we let some others shine through when they just looked to good to kill (hey, sometimes you gotta roll with the punches and let a concept or color scheme "evolve" a little bit to prevent monotony from taking hold). My favorite part about this look... notice how things aren't quite totally black and white with the bold reds? The slight shift towards a deep blue in the shadows and mids gives things some extra "color contrast" to play against the reds. This was an evolution of a similar concept that I used a few years ago for a Yokohama Tire Commercial I did with Bandito Brothers in Culver City.

But with that look, we left things mainly black and white. For the Polaris look, I wanted to push the color contrast a bit further and so I went with the blue/black/white look which contrasts the Reds of the snowmobile even further than just black and white (remember, look at the color wheel, black and white resides in the center with no chroma, while the color blue lies opposite red on the wheel, thereby creating a larger inherent color contrast for the viewer). I was really pleased with how this project came out. This is what can happen when a production executes on a concept soundly from pre-production all the way through post, and then has the guts to to push it even further when it comes down to finishing time. You'd be surprised at how many people "wimp out" at this point and go conservative with a look. Kudos to Adam and his team for going aggressive all the way to the finish line!

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Anatomy of a Grade - Episode 12 - Bringing Dimension to an Overcast Day

Shooting daytime exteriors is always a dicey game especially in the world of independent production where budgets are tight and extra crew and equipment are often hard to come by. When clouds start to suddenly roll into a scene and everything becomes gray and overcast, the cinematographer is presented with the unfortunate reality that production demands: "we gotta shoot now, but it can't look flat!" Luckily for the 21st century DP the colorist "has his back" in this particular situation and there's quite a bit we can do to an overcast scene to give it more dimension, color, and contrast.

This particular shot was done for a feature on an Arri Alexa camera and provided me with a broad dynamic range of detail to push and pull the image around and morph it into something completely different (and hopefully more visually interesting). This is not the most complicated of grades, but sometimes the best solutions aren't the most complicated. You'll see that a colorist can do quite a bit with a simple primary color correction and little help from the simple "vignette". Enjoy!