However, if you don’t know what you’re doing, just experiment. Ignore the graphs and just look at what the result is on your footage. At the most basic level you can make your scenes have a consistency of color. Going further, you can stylise your film with a particular look. As well as being an artistic choice, highly stylised effects can help cover or disguise errors that may appear in the rushes and make previously unusable footage available to the edit. My first film ‘Hotel Motel’ was always intended to have a highly stylised look. From the start I always described the film as ‘brown’. (Abstract I know, but it was what I wanted.) Within that, we gave an individual color to each location. As the violence of the film increased towards the climax, we gradually filtered more red into the frames; the idea being that this would have a subconscious effect on an audience and their reaction to the film. As we couldn’t afford camera filters on the shoot, all this was done in post. This highly stylised look suited the project and also helped overcome a few issues encountered in the edit.
My second short ‘Tea and Physics’ would not have been suited to this kind of extreme treatment, however the color grading was still equally important. We essentially had two choices for the color look – a cool subtle blue, which did give the film a sharp and very professional look, or a warmer amber/red which although it meant a softer edge to the vision, suggested a more normal, suburban feel and provided a good contrast to the bizarre concept of finding a worm hole in your kitchen. In the end we went for the warmer look as it added a better emphasis to the story telling.
Note: For a great introduction into color grading concepts and how they affect a shot, there is an excellent ‘behind the scenes’ doc on the DVD extras in Peter Jackson’s ‘LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring – Collector’s Edition’. It demonstrates how they took amazing shots of New Zealand mountains and turned them into the phenomenal heightened reality of Middle Earth’s snow capped peaks.
Raw footage.
Graded footage.
Mask it
Video has a very deep depth of field (i.e. everything’s in focus), a feature that quickly identifies it as video to a viewing audience. While digital filmmaking has generally become the norm for micro-filmmaking, a filmic style is more pleasing to the eye. You can make many of your shots more ‘filmic’ through the judicious use of masks and gaussian blur.
Put down at least one extra layer of the shot on the time line, then mask out the background on the top layer. Apply some gaussian blur to the bottom layer and voila! Instantly reduce the depth of field. This is a common Photoshop technique, and while it can be fiddly if your foreground subjects are moving, as you’ll have to animate the masks, it is not overly difficult to do. As with color grading you may need several layers of your footage to produce the desired effect.
Masking is also an essential tool to help remove unwanted items such as light stands, boom poles or other extraneous visuals that may have crept into your shot. Zooming the image slightly can also help with edge of frame annoyances. You can generally enlarge a frame up to 110% without noticeable loss of image quality.
Unmasked shot.
(note the park bars to the left of frame).
Masked and Graded shot.
Credits
Having some professional looking credits is easy to do and can really dress up your film. Create ones that suit the style of your project. There are many ways to do this: most NLE systems have their own titling effects, Motion has an easy Live Text function that has some very cool animated titles, you can go absolutely nuts in After Effects and even Ulead and iMovie provide some interesting title options. I generally use Photoshop to design my own credits, import them into my NLE and play around from there.
But also consider ways to dress them up a little, from movement to underlying video to anything you can think of. Even if you do use templates, alter them slightly so they become your own.
In Hotel Motel, I created the opening credits in Photoshop, intercut them with security footage of a robbery in FCP, exported the whole thing to video then played it on an old TV and filmed it with a slow zoom into the screen. This was done in my study at home, well after principal photography.
Hotel Motel Opening credits.
Tea and Physics end credits.
Credits do not have to be fancy to look good. Good placement and relative size within the frame and the story is 90% of it. In ‘Tea and Physics’ I went with a simple static style of credit board, with a basic courier font.
In a short film, there is often not enough time to justify having extensive stand alone opening credits so finding a way to integrate them so they progress the story can be useful. The ‘Hotel Motel’ credits contained a stylistic reference (the dodgy television) and a key narrative point in the robbery.
