Everyone knows movies like The Crow, Traffic, Dark City, and The Matrix made amazing use of post-production color grading. (Incidentally, while most modern films use digital post-production color grading, two of the most stylistically graded films—The Crow and Traffic—actually used chemical processes to achieve their looks, not digital ones.) However, you can't achieve the look of films like this by just slapping on Magic Bullet Looks or NewBlue FX's Video Essentials. These are both great programs, but you need to light your film in such a way that it looks good when you add the effects in post. As such, go through some of our basic lighting articles and start playing with your lights. (If you have a lighting technician—or “gaffer”—make sure he or she helps you with this.) Shoot little snippets with different lighting positions, make notes, digitize the clips, and then add your post-production color grading. Once you've found the ones you like the most, export them out to DVD and watch them on a TV. Once you're satisfied with the look you can achieve, make sure you and your team light your scenes as uniformly as possible.
Obviously, there's a lot more to creating the ultimate action film than this article can cover. With that said, for additional help on making your action film, I highly recommend Stu Maschwitz's amazing book, The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap. If you want to do greenscreen in your film and want a book to teach you the basics, I recently co-wrote a book called GreenScreen Made Easy: Keying and Compositing Techniques for Indie Filmmakers, which is designed to teach you the basics easily and quickly. Finally, if you want to do CGI and more advanced greenscreen work in your film, Hollywood Camerawork's amazing DVD training series, Visual Effects for Directors, is an absolute must own. (It got a perfect 10 in our review of it in this issue and currently has a special 40% discount for MFM readers.)
Hopefully these ideas will inspire you to create your own action masterpiece. If they do, be sure and send them in for critique here at MFM so we can applaud your success and help you refine your techniques!
(If you're interested in reading the critiques of most of the films pictured in this article, Broken, Infamous, and Hotel Motel can be found in our Short Critiques section. I Am Not Matt Damon will be criitqued next month. Additionally, all of the software mentioned in this article can be found reviewed in our Software Reviews section)
