Ryan, you know that movie is so old that it was way before digital color correction, right? They only had much simpler photochemical timing, which makes much broader adjustments on the entire image. No qualifiers, masks etc. There was no way TO separate the skin tones back then unless you hand colored it frame by frame or something.

You had to do it with the lighting in those days.

The "French Connection" is more realistic than the look that Ryan is going after.

Patrick’s analogy with audio is my favourite comment. If the original is poor a grade wont make it better. Surely it’s polish and feel, not an excuse for not being able to paint a wall. Big budget movies could have painted their sets properly, surely grading is supposed to be subtle or a special effect, not an excuse for a poor location.

Amateur productions always seem to put time and effort into the wrong areas. Surely the story and the actors are critical to success. Rotten Tomatos don’t base their opinions on a movies grade fir goodness sake. People don’t care about grading, and if they do notice it, it was done badly.

A competent art director will come up with a solution if you can't paint the original walls.

We should have copy/paste jar that Ryan needs to forfeit a quarter every time he references a movie he wants to copy despite not knowing how it was done or having the means to do it.

This topic looks to be a continuation of a thread he started May of 2019! Spoiler alert he wants to color the walls at locations won’t allow him to paint them.
https://www.dvinfo.net/forum/open-dv-discussion/536755-painting-location-walls-colored-light-when-not-allowed-paint.html?536755=#post1950529
Can you believe obsessing over the color of walls for two years!

at this point i can

Yes I know The French Connection came out at a time when you couldn't separate the skin tones, I was just using it as an example, of a movie with blu-ish color grading, without skin tone separation.

But as for coloring walls in locations, the tutorials show this being done as if it's normal to color the walls in post, if you can't during shooting. Is it not normal then?

No they don't! They show it can be done, they show you how to do it, but it is NOT normal. Normal is proper planning so9 you don't have to fix things - like was explained in the audio analogy.

If you want blue walls, it's part of the planning. Grading in the really detailed examples on Youtube often takes two or three views because it is subtle - it's artistic and it's totally transparent. You wish to use the technology to change fundamentals, and the more change you put in, the more chance of revealing it and of course your expertise really defines the limits.

Just because something is possible does not mean it is a standard procedure to use every time. Maybe you should tint all the lights towards your wanted colour and then repair the blue flesh tone - that could be simpler. It does occur to me that the cost of paint could be cheaper. Paint the room what colour you want, and promise to repaint it back at the end of the shoot - the location owner even gets a free makeover. A few tins of paint is probably cheaper in time and effort.

Do not watch things on Youtube and take them as fact. So much is distorted or somebody's own slightly skewed perspective of our industry. Sometimes, they are clever people but out of touch.

No they don't! They show it can be done, they show you how to do it, but it is NOT normal. Normal is proper planning so9 you don't have to fix things - like was explained in the audio analogy.

If you want blue walls, it's part of the planning. Grading in the really detailed examples on Youtube often takes two or three views because it is subtle - it's artistic and it's totally transparent. You wish to use the technology to change fundamentals, and the more change you put in, the more chance of revealing it and of course your expertise really defines the limits.

Just because something is possible does not mean it is a standard procedure to use every time. Maybe you should tint all the lights towards your wanted colour and then repair the blue flesh tone - that could be simpler. It does occur to me that the cost of paint could be cheaper. Paint the room what colour you want, and promise to repaint it back at the end of the shoot - the location owner even gets a free makeover. A few tins of paint is probably cheaper in time and effort.

Do not watch things on Youtube and take them as fact. So much is distorted or somebody's own slightly skewed perspective of our industry. Sometimes, they are clever people but out of touch.

Oh okay, but I did offer to pain locations before, and they said no. But in this tutorial, they show what the color looks like in Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, at 1:20 into the clip:

The Summer Blockbuster Colour Grading Tutorial - YouTube

Ghost Protocol was actually graded blue/teal, in post, with the skin tones separated. Not even they chose to have the actors wear blue clothes, or color the street they are walking on blue, during production. This was all done in post, so I thought it was normal, since a movie like that even does it in post, at least according to the tutorial.

What is "normal" (and it isn't, really) for a film with a $140 million budget and the best Hollywood crew that money can buy is of virtually no relevance to what you or I can accomplish working independently.

Focus, man. Know and respect your limits. Get the story right, work with the actors to make it feel sincere and convincing, and shoot it so you have enough coverage of each scene. Aim for realism but don't obsess over the colors of the walls or the tone of the flutes at this point. Keep special effects to a minimum.

Paint the room what colour you want, and promise to repaint it back at the end of the shoot - the location owner even gets a free makeover. A few tins of paint is probably cheaper in time and effort.
I'm not disputing it might be better if you could but this is an amateur production. Most people allowing free use of their office wouldn't want their walls painted. We're not talking about professionals who do a good job, they'd probably get paint everywhere, not properly cover back up the blue, and the smell of paint where you can't open the windows...

This is just another example of Ryan taking a technique and misusing it. All that is needed is a cooler grade of the scene. Grading isn't for painting walls.

Oh okay I see what you mean, but I don't like walls being just plain white. Is fixing it in post by using qualifers really so bad?

It is when you can't make it work. when I'm faced with doing something badly, or having to spend hours on something like this, I usually find another way of doing it. Tomorrow I am shooting something that really should have a green screen, but I took it down Friday and put up a white one - so tomorrow As the lighting rig is still up, I'm going to see if I can get away with throwing loads of colour on the white - I'm just lazy and interested to see what will happen.

Well since I wanted to use the 3 color method, I could still do it, by having the actors wear clothes are not of those three colors only, and no other colors. If the DP I get does not have a 10 bit 4:2:2 camera, than I can get one then, to separate the skin tones successfully then in post, if that's best for post grading?

You really seem to enjoy painting yourself into corners.

You really seem to enjoy painting yourself into corners.
LOL. Too easy.

You could say we're painting Ryan with a broad brush.

How am I painting myself into a corner?

I don't think we can explain this Ryan. I expect your wardrobe people might have issues here.

You're getting obsessed with doing something for which there's a number of possible methods of achieving the same mood.

You're also applying restrictions upon your wardrobe department, which may involve them having to select costumes that may be inappropriate for the characters.

You may find that the final effect doesn't work out in practice because your shots are limited by your desire to have the walls look like they're painted blue.

Oh okay thanks. I know what you mean but the locations cannot be painted though. Plus in these tutorials they show clips from movies where the walls or backgrounds were a different color originally, so isn't it normal to color walls in post, if they cannot paint them since other movies do it in post?

At this point I would say that the solution is to go back a step or three in the process, identify what limitations you're presented with and figure out what kind of movie you can make within those limits. If you're good at making movies, your movie will be good in spite of them. You might even impress people more by doing good work under constraints. Think El Mariachi.

If you continue to obsess over peripheral details, you will fail to put proper focus on the core attributes of a good movie. The most likely result is a bad movie with nice colors.

You're getting obsessed with doing something for which there's a number of possible methods of achieving the same mood.

You're also applying restrictions upon your wardrobe department, which may involve them having to select costumes that may be inappropriate for the characters.

You may find that the final effect doesn't work out in practice because your shots are limited by your desire to have the walls look like they're painted blue.

But I've noticed that movies that do the 3 color rule will do this though and wardrobe will work within those certain colors. So that seems normal. Plus in the past, I was forced to be my own wardrobe department anyway, so if this is going to be no different than it's still me who has to make that decision then.

At this point I would say that the solution is to go back a step or three in the process, identify what limitations you're presented with and figure out what kind of movie you can make within those limits. If you're good at making movies, your movie will be good in spite of them. You might even impress people more by doing good work under constraints. Think El Mariachi.

If you continue to obsess over peripheral details, you will fail to put proper focus on the core attributes of a good movie. The most likely result is a bad movie with nice colors.

Well I can't really get a feel of what the look of El Mariachi was supposed to be in it's color scheme though. In fact, I could be wrong here, but I don't think it was even shot with one in mind.

Well I can't really get a feel of what the look of El Mariachi was supposed to be in it's color scheme though. In fact, I could be wrong here, but I don't think it was even shot with one in mind.

Exactly my point.

Well I feel like I can at least try. I mean how hard is it to have actors wear certain colors in their clothes like other movies do. I don't think that would be hard. Even if I cannot color the backgrounds, at least I have control over the clothes during shooting.

The actors need wardrobe anyway, so would clothes that are certain colors not really cost any different much? I guess I just felt that clothes will still cost the same and not add much more to the budget if I operate within a certain color scheme.

You are becoming fixated on this rule following Ryan. I’ve been looking at the three Color rule, and come to the conclusion that it has no historic grounding at all, and is a rule developed once technology allowed modification of colour pallets. Once one movie swing to pushing orange, with the complimentary colour, everyone started doing it. It’s not a rule at all, it’s fashion, so suddenly we have tweaking to fit the feel of a movie, which is good, but why are people getting so obsessed by it as a tool to make people like a movie. If you make a movie on Mars, it will have a red tone. Underwater has blue, deserts are yellow or orange, Antarctica become steely blue, California beaches look like California beaches and England looks murky grey. I see your quest as misguided. You are putting frosting on a cake that doesn’t have good ingredients, and instead of sorting the recipe you are tweaking the frosting. You have no sense of priorities Ryan. You do not understand these rules you blindly follow. They are based on premises you have not understood. Your cinematography in production is enhanced by these colour shifts, but you have taken the least important component of the rule, and amplified it. Colourists are tinting subtly and you are using the rule to change the colour of a room, then fighting the artefacts it creates. It’s madness. Why can you not see you’ve just misunderstood the whole thing. You’ve totally rejected the art behind the rule in favour of the technology.

Oh okay. So basically the color grade in movies is a lighter sheen rather than trying to change the color of a background entirely then, you are saying?

You're not just changing the colour of the background, you're affecting everything in the scene. The effect influences more than the wall, so once you've done it in one location, you may have carry it through in some form other throughout the film for constancy.

You've also ignored the Lighting in these shot examples, which is very different to the flat lighting in your own test

Oh okay. Yes I know I would have to have a consistent look but is that a problem?

And yes the DP would light it differently for the grading, or so I thought. I guess I just feel confused because I was advised before not to copy the color scheme of other movies and come up with my own, so I come up with my own, and now I am told it's too complicated and to forget it. It seems that no matter what I come up with, it's not worth it.

Yes. Exactly.

The thing is that you are just copying other movies.

You're going through all this because a wall in "Seven" is painted blue, however, you seem to have ignored that the wall is in an old, well used police station in city like NY that looks like it hasn't be repainted since the 1950s or 60s.. That's art direction, not colour correction.

Which wall in Seven was painted blue. I don't recall such a scene. But I wasn't going by Seven. I was advised to come up with a color scheme of my own and that is what I have done. So why do you say I am copying other movies when I came up with my own I am trying to apply?

I think most here believe the color scheme you "came up with on your own" was heavily influenced/copied from scores of other films, i.e. you saw a cop movie with gritty blue everything and decided this was the way to go on your film.

The snag is that I think many of us see something and think - that's really nice, at some stage, that will be appropriate for me to use, with some modifications, in a production. We all do this, but I suspect that because our circumstances are different, we modify it. I usually get inspired by things I see. a few years back I saw a live music production in Holland - they had a grid of 100 moving head lights pointing vertically down on an orchestra - then the things they did with them made me go wow! I pinched the idea with 49 lights in a 7 x 7 grid. Not the same ones, because theirs were 6 grand each and the hire fee corrspondingly huge, but I had 30 slightly less spec'd ones, and got another 20 in, within my budget and it looked damn good - but not the same as the one I'd seen, and I don't know if it was the type, the height, the spread or my control that made it less good.

You see things in movies and want the result without understanding the blend and combination of separate features. You want, for some reason blue walls where there are none. why, we don't know, but you have told us this and showed your attempt. Not once have you ever explained why.

You ask us to say yes or no to your understanding that colour gading is about sheen? You are using words that make no sense - sheen is usually a term reserved for reflectance conversations - some materials have a sheen, like silk - colour grading is an art, and it's normally subtle to give a shift to the balance of colour, or it's radical for effect. Maybe it's to make the foliage look autumnal (not sure what the north american version for fall colours would be), or make it look more arid, or romantic, or scary, or ........ Your version is because you like blue, so you want things not blue, to be blue. Clearly you don;t understand this Ryan. You are so wrapped up in copying everything, as if replicating components guarantees success. You want the music, the sets the costumes to all be different from what they are naturally. You want to set conventions aside, you want to be innovative, but your solution is to steal things from totally different genre movies. If I did this the result, I know would be terrible. I want a purple wall, yellow clothing, pink leaves on trees, trumpets in love scenes, slow strings in the battle scenes and grey text on a dark grey background in the credits. I'd want every actor to have strings on them so I could pull them around out of camera view and I'd want a mega bright lighting setup run off AA batteries.

This is not serious Ryan - just in case you think it is, but it is similar to the ridiculous things you sometimes come up with - and please if you have to say "so you are saying.." stop and think, because we never are.

Everything you do is mimicry. All your good ideas are stolen. Every bad idea revealed, is dismissed or ignored, and good ideas ignored.

A few months back, you'd not even tried grading. Now you speak about it like an expert, but struggle with the basics. Months ago, I pleaded with you to do a skills audit. To sit with pen and paper and list all the things you can do, and how good you are at them. This is what we always did in college when students had ideas way above their current performance ability, and seeing it on paper really focussed their minds. They could see their strengths and they could see where they were weak, and work on it. You clearly never did it, because you have not progressed it seems. You are still blundering around, unable to make decisions based on what you really can do well, fixated on things totally outside your sphere of competence.

It also seems that your friends are also fed up with you not taking their advice - how many times have you said "I've been told" and fed total rubbish, or taken solid advice totally the wrong way. To be able to move forward, you must develop understanding, and clearly you have a long way to go. Once you appreciate your limits you can stretch them - but you believe you can do everything, and we are all wrong. I think everyone on this quest with you is trying so hard to make you understand, we're honest and in the main, patient - but you really stretch it so often.

Write the script, find the actors and shoot it. Stop messing around with the silly things. I spoke to a camerman friend. He works mainly in natural history. He says he never sees the grade until the audience do. Nothing to do with him. His job is to get the best pictures he can so people can work with them. He has lots of discussion about content, style, quality, technical requirements, but if the sky looks different, or the plumage more vivid, that's not his role. Invariably, he says, the colourist made his work look better, and he gets the credit - which is unfair, but how it is. He also said that if the audience ever spot the grading as unreal - everyone has failed, and he would also get the blame for that.

Actually I used to have a subscription to american cinematographer and it is not uncommon (or wasnt, back in the mid 2000s when I was reading it) for a dp to sit in with colorist for the sessions.

Ryan said he did the skills audit some ago and that it said he was good at planning, and Ryan didnt really know what to do with that info.

The DP being with the colourist during colour correction does vary, the lack of input by the DP has been a matter of concern in recent years for them. High end feature films, as covered in American Cinematographer with A list DPs, can be different to other sectors. The 2000s would be before this became more common, although in say the BBC the editor tended to be involved in the grading more than the camera people for many years..

Ryan said he did the skills audit some ago and that it said he was good at planning, and Ryan didnt really know what to do with that info.
The audit results explains why he spends almost all his time planning. Unfortunately these plans aren't backed up with the ability and experience to execute them, they're based on a patch work of ideas from feature films. It's like looking at beautifully iced cakes in a bakery window and concluding icing is the most part of baking. Making independent movies is an expensive hobby, sounds like all you can afford is sitting at home and planning out the perfect movie.

The DP being with the colourist during colour correction does vary, the lack of input by the DP has been a matter of concern in recent years for them. High end feature films, as covered in American Cinematographer with A list DPs, can be different to other sectors. The 2000s would be before this became more common, although in say the BBC the editor tended to be involved in the grading more than the camera people for many years..

That seems crazy to me since the cinematographer is hugely responsible for the look and it seems like part of that would be seeing it through the grade to complete his/her vision.

Let me ask this: back in the day they used to do all sorts of tests, for weeks, all the way through the post process, before shooting a single frame, right? So you'd test makeup, lighting, wardrobe etc., try out different film stocks and processing methods (probably camera profiles and grading styles these days), and you would basically know, before even shooting, what anything in front of the lens was going to look like when the movie was finalized ("that red robe won't work," "those shadows will be too dark"). Is that not done any more?

They will still do tests, but you should separate high end feature films from a lot of TV work, where the DP may be way off on another job. How much testing will depend on the budget and the nature of the production.

Well when you say everything I do is a mimicry and I've ignored good ideas which good ideas did I ignore?

I talked to one DP so far and he said since I'm on a low budget the best way to hide unwanted colors is to shoot in black and white. But does he have a point, because I thought black and white was not the way to go personally.

and you say the look I came up with is not original because I've combined different ideas. But hasn't every look been done before and there is no original looks anymore since every look for a movie is just a combination of ideas that have been done before?

It's interesting that you don't seem to be taking account of the characters' world and their psychology in all this, it's just various colour grading effects rather than it being part of the journey you're taking the audience. That's what I suspect people are getting at.

You're busy thinking about "original" colour effects etc, rather than taking everyone into the world of your story. .

Oh but I thought I was using the color to take people into the world of my story, or that was my intention.

That's a very vague statement. In what way? Justify your choice to us. Make it clear that all this blue means something other than "stuff is gritty."

Well it's difficult to put into words, but I picture the look that best suits the story in my head, but hard to put into words why I think that would be the best look.

I'm afraid the committee can't accept that. If you're going to spend multiple threads and months, and attempt to repaint locations and restrict wardrobe to fit this color scheme, you'd better have a good reason for it, that you can clearly articulate, otherwise it's probably not that important and is a huge waste of time, right?

You're attracted to the non human elements in film making and don't understand their connection to story telling. You want to mimic cinematic techniques like color grading that you think look good. You probably could get away with throwing these effects on but you neither have the ability, experience or budget to do it well.

You repeatedly present these "problems" to people and everyone is going to give you different advice. One person told you to do black and white, I said a mild grade, someone else said use color lighting...

You would be far better off doing one of the technical jobs on a movie that doesn't require you to make these sort of decisions that you struggle with.

That's the thing here isn't it Pete - we see the problems as challenges and can come up with all kinds of solutions, that Ryan seems unable to. This is where what we say here is fodder for Ryan - he can pick one comment and say "I've been told I should shoot in black and white", or "I've been told that I should only do a mild grade" or "I've been told I should use coloured light". All these were indeed said, but not meant to be definitive MUSTS, but simply suggestions. I don't know how to get Ryan to understand any of this now - he's just in overdrive and running at full speed, and we're still reading the map!

Oh okay, well as far as articulating it into words, how would one articulate it into words for other films. Let's take the movie Amelie for example, since it has a look that isn't going for what I am going for at all. The three main colors used in the movie are brown, green and red. Why did the filmmakers choose these colors do you think?

What most of us would do there is look an up interview with the DP, director, or colorist and try to find out from the horse's mouth why they chose those colors.

Oh okay, I can look for that. Well the reason why I chose brown, blue and red so far is because it gives a gritty tone, but is that not enough in explaination. If they want more than a gritty look and feel, are people perhaps overthinking it?

thats shallow reasoning. why do blue and brown equal gritty?

Oh okay, well as far as articulating it into words, how would one articulate it into words for other films. Let's take the movie Amelie for example, since it has a look that isn't going for what I am going for at all. The three main colors used in the movie are brown, green and red. Why did the filmmakers choose these colors do you think?
Amelie Color Analysis - Eda Aydin (http://aydineda.weebly.com/amelie-color-analysis.html)
You owe us another quarter, because you can't think for yourself, instead of answering a question, you pose another question about a feature film.