Lots of work on Jabberwocky today. I started by filming some synth playing outdoors. It was -2 degrees outside, so I had to be quick! I brought a tiny portable sound player with me so that I could play in time to the music (and rehearsed the right notes!)
Also recorded some scenes of a Queen of Hearts playing card, torn, destroyed. The elements I wanted were then complete.
The final change was/is the colour, which is often the key difference between 'cinematic' looking films, and digital-looking ones. Most contemporary films are very beautifully photographed and coloured. In the pre-digital era, it took filters and film stock and other techniques to colourise, but this is now done to a painterly degree digitally and with great ease. I say painterly because the key use of colour in film is to avoid white or black, as in painting - this, perhaps for the first time, truly distinguishes colour films from black and white films.
Colour massively changes mood and there are so many choices, all manipulations of contrast, chrominance (strength of colour), and the hues themselves. Here is the raw footage I shot of Deb, lit with yellow and cyan spotlights, with a good degree of ambient light too:
Most of the colour needs removing so that it can be bent towards a common range. Here it is when lightened and with less chrominance/saturation:
Then colourised, only very slightly, yet this tiny tweak drastically changes the mood and feeling.
The same goes for later on. Here is the plain footage of myself near the 'Tum Tum' tree. It looks like any old photo, like a polaroid perhaps...
Yet a few tiny tweaks to the colour transform it into something like a painting:
I used colour to broadly match the mood, with cyans and blues for the night, story-teller scenes, inspired by the overrated romance The Shape of Water (Guillaume del Toro, is he the new Tim Burton for being so instantly stylised, or the new Peter Jackson by managing to tell a 45-minute story in 3 hours?). I used insipid yellows and odd pinks for the 'brillig' outdoor scenes. And strong reds, and black and white scenes too.
Colour is best used like musical tones; just as Bergman used red, white, and black so boldly and brilliantly in Cries and Whispers. Generally it is rarely used as a story telling tool at all. Cyan with yellow/flesh tones are overwhelmingly used in all films; not only in The Shape of Water, those colours dominate the Marvel films, and the His Dark Materials TV series, for example.
So many changes to the video today. It nearly complete. I now need to watch it several times to finalise the timing of various aspects.
