Limiting Your Palette.
Looking at low budget/indie film one of the most glaring problems is the lack of budget and/or time for production design, art direction, set dressing and locations - the very things that determine how your film looks. The most common result of this lack of resources can be very simply put: there are too many colors in the frame - too many hues, uncontrolled saturation, frequently poor control of values.
One thing that instantly distinguishes fully budgeted professionally made films is control over the visuals in the frame. Color is almost always used sparingly and carefully to create specific effects. Superfluous color just … isn’t there.
Children of Men:
Inside Llewen Davis:
The Force Awakens:
Without a defined palette to aim towards, without the time or money to make cinematic compositions conform to an ideal palette, the color range in most low budget/indie film is all over the map. Details jump out, major focal points get lost, distractions abound.
I don’t want to pick on anyone so no examples, but you know what I mean.
Can these problems be fixed in post? They can certainly be improved. Keep in mind that many of the features we’re comparing ourselves to had extensive work in post to narrow their palettes. When working in real world locations there simply isn’t any choice.
If they can do it, we can too.
If they can do it, we can too.
But what is a palette? There are a lot of sites online that break movies down to reveal their working palettes. Here are a few:
And even a few devoted to the palettes of specific Directors, like Wes Anderson.
They are well worth looking at. Keep in mind these are all derived from the final released product. We have no way of knowing how much of this discipline was imposed from the beginning of production and how much was altered in post. I think it’s fair to guess that in major pictures the initial production design was at least close.
Let’s make it clear, though - if you want your film to look like The Grand Budapest Hotel, most of that happens in pre-production. That work starts with the concept art, the production design, the locations, sets, wardrobe and props and is carried forward by the DP and finally given to the editor and colorist. You can’t shoot something in your best friends’ apartment next weekend and expect the same results.
But it can be very instructive to see how that process actually works and work backwards from there. Let’s have a good look at The Grand Budapest Hotel. Here’s the palette:
And here are some images from the film with the palette included:
What this demonstrates is that colorful does not necessarily mean lots of colors. It means color used well.
If you look closely at the stills above and compare them to the palette you’ll see that although all the colors in the frames conform to this palette (except for some occasional teal), the palette is not fully represented in any of the frames except the dinner scene (bottom). Nearly every scene is dominated by a subset of the palette - only a few colors.
Because the actual number of hues in the frame is very small, the saturation can be very intense, giving the feel of ‘colorful’ but with only a limited number of actual colors. I discuss the color theory behind this at greater length here.
Enough said.]
For another example of a very similar pictorial strategy, look at the Childe Hassam painting below. Even though it may initially appear to be very different from Anderson, the strategy is the same: by using only a few colors (basically 4) Hassam can use them nearly at full strength.
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We’ve all been in color situations where we know that green is just… too green. The obvious thing to do is fix it - add a little orange (or subtract some blue) to dull it, drop the saturation, change the value to make it darker, even alter nearby colors to change the context - any one of those tweaks might fix the immediate problem.
But the problem with fixing color problems on a shot by shot or scene by scene basis can lead us into much bigger problems of continuity or even conflict with the story. When we move beyond color correction to creating a look, we want to be thinking globally (the whole project) and not locally (shots or scenes).
How do you do that?
If you’re working for a client, they may have a clear (or very murky) idea of the overall look they want for the project. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best approach, though, and they might well be responsive to a better idea. It also doesn’t mean they can articulate their vision (that's much harder than it seems), so visual prompts can be very helpful in making sure everyone is on the same page.
If you’re working on your own project you may be a little lost in the trees and have a hard time seeing the project as a whole, how it flows from one scene to another and how to maintain continuity in your story.
Look at things. Look at your footage. Think about your story. Look at pictures. Look at magazines in the dentists office. Idly sit around looking at advertisements. You can use palette generators to derive palettes from images (there are lots of them), or you can use tools like the Adobe Color Wheel Tool to create something entirely your own. Find a palette that works with your story and your footage and aim your color grading in that direction. Show it to your client. Show it to your mom.
You may not be able to hit your palette perfectly but any overall scheme will help. Having a target in mind will help your grading immensely. Your decisions are no longer arbitrary or based on only a limited (local) perspective but are now moving the project towards a higher level of compositional unity. You’re doing the right thing.
Resolve - and all other color grading software - gives you many different tools for manipulating color, far too many to list here. My Resolve training classes are designed to help you make sense of the huge variety of tools and approaches so that you know the best ones to use in any given situation. But the most important thing you have to know is why, and what do I want it to look like?
Happy grading!
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