I was watching Fight Club on HBO the other day, and noticed that it had a very unnatural look to it. I’ve seen this sort of thing a bit recently, especially in TV commercials, but Fight Club seems to be the most clear example. Specifically, the colors seem rather off. I was wondering how they do this, and what, exactly, is it that’s odd about it. I just can’t quite put a finger on it.
Any cinemetography experts out there familiar with this style of filming?
Here’s an interview with the cinematographer. Maybe it will answer your question?
http://www.Cinematographer.com/article/mainv/0,7220,103880,00.html
There are a number of things you can do to make colors look weird. The simplest is to shoot through a filter. Take a look at the movie Traffic. Every scene taking place in the US is shot through a blue filter and over-exposed, giving them a cold, washed out look. Everything in Mexico is shot through a warm filter.
You can also achieve color effects during the processing of the negative. Color film goes through several processing stages for each primary color. By tweaking these, you can make things look odd. In The Matrix, for example, the blue phase was very overdeveloped. Another example of mucking with processing is Three Kings.
One more thing I forgot to mention. A lot can be achieved through lighting. Filtering your fill lighting instead of the lens can give you a much more subtle look. Using focused lighting vs. flood lighting makes a dramatic difference as well.
Uh, partially, but much of the affect in Three Kings comes more from using a variable shutter on the camera. The shutter is closed somewhat, and it gives it that strobing affect. Combined with being washed out somewhat in processing (and overexposed a little in shooting), that gives it its look.
There are so many things that you can do with lighting, choice of film, the camera, and so many other things to change the look. However, the article SmackFu linked gives some things that most-likely account for the look you described:
-They apparently used 3200 degree Kelvin lights for most of the film. Now, color temperature basically says that the closer to about 1800 degrees K light is the redder it is, and the closer to 8000 degrees K it is, the greener it is. Now, because they used 3200 degrees throughout most of the film, it would be fairly white, but give the whole film one look (different locations have similar colour). Similarly they played with fluorescent lights, which have a very cool (closer to 8000 degrees K) look to them; they give off a greenish light. So the use of lighting in both ways gives the film a certain motif.
-A lot of the film was shot with practicals, and very little lighting set-up. That would mean that a lot of the light you see is whatever was around and thus the colour of the film would reflect that. Also, whereas a lot of films are very well lit, this was very dark (and they had a fairly fast film stock so you could see details in the black), do to using mostly practicals. Thus, the colours probably don’t appear as vibrant as they do in most films.
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*Originally posted by silent_rob *
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Sorry, I should have said “fairly white, though just a little bit warmer (redder)”.
Bah! Also, sorry about completely messing up the coding on that last post. Friedo didn’t say what I quoted him as saying in the post previous to this.
Yet another example is Payback.
Alot of times the color is edited in post-production, usually to add to the overall feeling (I can’t think of a good word here) of the film. A good example of this would be Saving Private Ryan. About 70% of the color was removed from the film. Just think what the movie would be like if it was well-lit with bright, vibrant colors.