Years ago I was at a job interview with a CEO of above-average thoughtfulness, and she told me something that I still think about on almost every job: Video is art, but not fine art.
I mostly agree with this, under most circumstances. To put a finer point on it, I like to think of my work as being that of someone who builds houses for a living, as opposed to a wood sculptor. Which is nothing against either. The world needs both fine art to feed our souls, and also sturdy houses to live in. But if someone is hiring me to color correct an interview, I’m willing to bet that the reason I got the job in the first place has more to do with my client needing to solve a problem than their investment in my own personal artistic expression.
I like the puzzle solving that goes into making a video work. I feel that I’m most engaged creatively when I have one hand tied behind my back – working within specific parameters, instead of just creating something for pure aesthetics. And there is a specific kind of left brain / right brain creativity one needs to have in order to do a mix, or write an expression, or up-rez a logo, or tell the right story.
So, not every shot I’ll ever work on needs to be something out of a Roger Deakins movie. This summer I’m doing some color work on a feature-length documentary, and I’ve seen a rough cut and it’s really good. One of my tasks was to color balance some of the talking heads. I know from personal experience that shooting locations are not always ideal, and that cinematographers often don’t get the set up time that they’d like. And that’s okay.
Here are some of my takeaways for how to color correct an interview.
Color Correcting an Interview is different than Color Grading
In short, color correcting is the process of balancing out the colors in the frame to get them to a good starting point. Color grading has more to do with the style and art of it all. So in a lot of ways, I think about color correction as the more mechanical task, and the grade as the more fine-art.
Things that I’m thinking about in color correction are the following. Are parts of the frame drastically more saturated than others? Are parts of the frame dramatically lighter or darker than they should be? How’s the focus? Where are the skin tones?
In the grade I’m usually considering the tone of the overall piece. Should it be dark and dramatic? Bright and pastel? Does it need a heavy “look” in the first place, or should everything I’m doing be more invisible? What is the broader goal?
Keep yourself Organized
Usually it’s best practice to keep your node tree as simple as possible, applying broad adjustments to the entire frame where you can, but sometimes it’s inevitable that you’ll need to do a combination of masking, tracking, and keying. This is the difference between a “primary” grade and what we often refer to as “secondaries.” The primary grade is what you’re doing first, how you’re treating the image as a whole, and the secondaries are when you zero in on specific tones, specific areas of the frame that need specific attention.
Everyone has their own system, and this will depend on the shot, but in the case of my example interview, I actually kind-of did my secondaries first. This could be construed as a backward thing, but it seemed to be the quickest and most effective way to color the shot before we went into the grade. Here, I used a parallel mixer node to stack all of my secondaries into the same step. So anything before that mixer was the color correction, and anything after that was the grade.
The other thing I personally like to do is separate my keying and my grading into two separate nodes. That way, if I ever go too far and want to just start one or the other from scratch, I can reset the problem node to default without undoing any of the work I did in the other.
If you Notice the Vignette, it’s too much
Here’s another little oversimplified kernel of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way. Unless you’re really really into fine-art territory (see every other post on my instagram), if you’ve applied a vignette and the viewer notices it, it’s too much.
In the case of our example interview shot, I did go rather heavy on the vignette. But that was because the intention of the grade was to somewhat relight the shot. Most documentary filmmaking is not going to feature a Matrix-green tint, or a Woody Allen-yellow, because the director wants you to pay attention to the content and the soundbites that they’ve gotten. And that was my goal for this shot. Highlight the subject (literally), and desaturate everything else just a bit. Get in and get out without making a huge statement.
So hopefully when people watch back my work on this shot, they’re not thinking about the vignette, and hopefully they don’t think about the color at all. Hopefully they just look and think (if anything) that the camera person had all the time they needed to light and frame their subject well.
If anyone on the project is the artist, it’s the director. I’m just trying to build a good house.
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