Color and lighting- Amelie

Most films that you watch try to replicate the "natural" look of the world you see with your eye. But other films purposely create an unrealistic color scheme sometimes to invoke and emotions other times to simulate something surreal or unnatural.

Different from the painter's color scheme, the primary colors of film are red, green, and blue. These three colors are known as additive colors. Also unlike the art world the base of all primary colors when mixed together is white instead of black.


Having said that there are also subtractive primaries: magenta, cyan, yellow. The subtractive primaries are the result when one additive primary it take away. For example the subtractive primary   magenta is created when green is subtracted from white(red+blue+green).

The color wheel is something like this

• red and blue= magenta
• blue and green=cyan
• red and green= yellow

When the eye perceives the color blue it is because the object has absorbed every other color except for blue, the blue rays are bouncing off the object and hitting your eyes. In a weird way a blue object is every other color except for blue. So that's a way to look at the subtractive colors.

Complementary colors are added to an additive primary to get white. If blue+green=cyan when you add cyan to red then you get white. White is not achieved by an even distribution of red, green, and blue (human eyes tend to have the best respond to green in the light spectrum).

If you have ever messed around with the color of your t.v. you see saturation and hue as options you can adjust.  The hue refers to the additive primaries. Saturation is about how dark or "pure" the color is, when there is less white in the color that means it is more saturated.

The previous post talked about the lights and how bulb gives off a particular amount of heat. That heat is important, it effects the color temperature. Ascher's The Filmmaker's Hand Book provides a table of color and light temperatures to help give you idea I'll list the first five light sources he provides:

Light source                                      Degrees Kelvin

Match flame                                         1700

Candle flame                                        1850-2000

Sunrise or sunset                                   2000

100- to 200-watt household bulbs        2900

Studio tungsten lights                           3200

The effect of color temperature is the warmth or coldness of the light. A fire has a warm glow which means that the color temperature is low and has a red hue. Blue tends to be a cold look and has a higher color temperature. Ashcher's example is of heating iron "first it becomes red in color. Heated to a higher temperature, the metal starts to become blue and then white." From the chart above these light sources would produce low temperature, warm, reddish colors.

The film Amelie plays around with the coloration.

The color temperature is warm, the reds in any shot are always most prominent. 

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And to me, everything looks like it's seen through a yellow filter. This was most likely done in post production, if you have any video editing software you will notice there are a lot of effects.  

This is the original version of a photo I took.

Using iPhoto I'm simply going to click on the "cooler" option. 

Experiment with different colors to see how they effect the mode of the scene.