Colour Correction & Adjustments

I will be using Avid to edit my video together. I chose it because it is the editing software I am most comfortable using and using effects with.

Colour Curves

Waveform

I will be using mainly the colour curves to get the grade of colours that I want. These will mainly be blue and orangey colours to match Finchers films. The waveform will be used to make sure that the images are correctly exposed. It will show me when the images are under or over exposed in the graph above. Some images will be under expose a bit on purpose to get the very dark shadows I want to create.

Lighting

I want to create the same shadows on my characters face as most of the shadows that are on the characters within David Finchers films. I will do this by positioning my character in the correct places with correlation to the lights I will be using or move around the lights to get the same effect.

Panic Room

Se7en

As you can see, in both of these images there are shadows cast on the side of their faces. As my video will be shot mainly outside I will try and get some shots with heavy shadows and some softer to get a different range of shadows. 

Location Scouting

I have been looking through the films and found some areas within them which I would like to sort of match for my video.

This location from Fight Club is a very good example for the locations I will be looking for. I want to find somewhere that is quite deserted and looks like a junk yard to give it a grimy look. I will also add different places where I feel are grungy and would have the same effect like alley ways, subways and unused back lanes.

Whilst I was looking around filming my test shots before I found some locations that I liked for this. I found a bridge which had a walk way underneath which had graffiti on which looked good. I found a sort of area which looked like the image above in a industrial area with the metal fences around it.

Industrial Site

Bridge Underpass

Fight Club Ikea Scene

I am going to try and create the same camera movement and basic idea of this scene. The camera starts off on one side of the room and then pans almost 360degrees to show the Ikea items in the house. I won't be making it to show any sort of items in the house but just keep the camera movement and show a person walking through the room like Edward Norton does.

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http://www.vimeo.com/17056671

Test Lighting & Colour Correction

I went out to do some test shooting in the dark as most of the films (Fight Club, Social Network, Se7en & Panic Room) are mostly at night when outside and dark when inside. I took my friend with me to look for locations to shoot with reasonable lighting and quite dirty areas with graffiti or just generally dirty to give it a grimy effect. These shots were meant to just be for test of getting areas and finding light sources but they turned up to be quite good and I will use them in my video.

Here are some stills from my first shoot after being colour corrected to create different effects. Some of them have been edited too much and there is too much darkness. I did this to see what sort of images I could possibly get from the lighting conditions I shot them in.

For this shot I was playing around with the camera angle and just seeing what might look good. The composition I like and the lighting on the character is nice with the hard shadows on the side of his face. I found a nice spot where I could stand right under a lamp post because there was a wall next to it, I got my character to stand on it so that he would be closer to the light.

For this shot I was trying to get the same sort of lighting and colouring on my character as Brad Pitt in this scene above. When comparing them you can see that the shadow on my character is much more darker and covers a bigger area of his body than the Brad Pitt and also the yellow on my shot is too much and should be toned down a bit. 

I really like the composition of this shot as everything in it are straight lines and the character is in between two cracks in the wall which centre him into his own third of the shot. The shadows on this shot are too hard on the character which should be corrected.

This shot I made the character face into the light so that the exposure on his face was better. I like the look of this shot but I won't use this colour if I put it into my video as it doesn't have the same appeal as a David Fincher film, I will just need to adjust the colour correction to match one.

I tried to get the composition and lighting perfect for each shot and I feel that these do look quite good. I was testing for what kind of exposure and how much lighting I would need to make the effect that I feel would match the films. Some of these shots I feel work really well and match the colouring to some of David Finchers films.

Idea

I have decided to chose David Fincher films to aim towards for this project. Fight Club will be the main film focused on as it has been my favourite film for a while due to the lighting and colouring aspect of it as well as story of course. The colours often in David Finchers are the same being orange and light blue. I will try to create the same colours in my video.

Fight Club - Orange coloured scene

Social Network - Orange coloured scene

Fight Club - Blue coloured scene

Panic Room - Blue coloured scene

Se7en - Blue coloured scene

When comparing all of these images you can see that the colouring is pretty much exactly the same within different films. This is the sort of colouring I will be trying to replicate with my video. 

The basement fight scenes from Fight Club are my favourite as the lighting in the room is perfect to give it the grimy effect that it needs. Jeff Cronenweth was the cinematographer for this film so I will be looking into more of his films to get more ideas. Just like on the Social Network where he is cinematographer which also has the same director, David Fincher as Fight Club.

When looking at all of these photos and comparing them they are very similar in the colouring and the way they are lit. You can see two lamps in the background in all of the images to help light the scene. The use of these lamps hides the fact that it may also be lit with studio lighting behind the camera. So when the audience can see where the light source is coming from on screen it makes it feel more real. 

I will try to get some of these aspects into my shots where the only light in the scene is from the lights you can see in the image being lamps and other lights. Also many of my shots I will try to get the same dark and grimy colouring effects with heavy shadows like the scene in the basement on fight club.

Here is a video from youtube which shows clips from all of David Finchers films and demonstrates the basic techniques like camera shots, movements, lighting and colouring used in all of them. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovZGGWNUJs