Week 8: The One Acts, Color Correction for Realism in Real Life, & Kelvin Temp and Color

This afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing the one acts that Erika designed. It was a really interesting mix of shows because The Boor (which I’m assuming is by Chekov) and A Little Box of Oblivion, were two different, yet similar plays. They were in different time periods, and very different places (a park versus inside an old house), and had very different approaches to comedy.

The Boor

I absolutely loved the (lavender? Color corrected?) house right fresnel (parnels?) angle wash. I think it added a softness, that was delicate and refined for the more somber moments, while creating a real feeling of light in the space. It really looked like light in a room, and the color was a great choice. The softness of the fernels also played well into the comedy.

The color of the other fernsels was a little confusing. At first I thought I knew where the source was coming from (the blue across the curtain and the window special), but the fersnel angle wash house left had a less tinty color than their house right counter parts.

I like the build from realism to abstract, though I think it was too fast of a transition. Allowing us to enter into the space of the play and the character’s world without over powering us with abstraction was very smart. I feel like the abstraction didn’t have enough of a build. I know the tango is obviously a huge disruption to the play (though I really liked it and thought it worked well), but the lighting rubber band broke for me.

I know Erika was worried about the down reds. I thought it worked really well. I think it added a lot of that passion they were experiencing without doing anything crazy with the composition. It also connected well into the tango.

I absolutely loved the window special. It was a really subtle gesture, but the halo around her was a really nice touch in addition to adding a sense of place. The color was also depressing, in an almost melodramatic way. Of course she’s mourning in the light of a grey dreary day through a huge window. It’s fantastic.

A Little Black Box of Oblivion

The top of the show was really nice. I really got the sense it was a nice day out in the park. It was simple, and created time, place, and season.

I liked the idea of giving each one of the characters a motif for when they went into their theories about what was in the box, but I think it was just a little too much for me. I think it was mainly because the cyc was initially there to set up time, place, and season, and then became an emotional tool as well.

Their facial clarity was really, really good. I feel like Erika was able to get what she wanted out of each composition without sacrificing face visibility. I’ve seen a lot of designers loose that in The Nixon (myself included), but for both shows people were really crisp and clear. Really well done.

We have this glass and wooden cabinet that has lights on the inside. For parties I like to color to these lights to a little ambiance. For my birthday party, I changed the green Christmas gels with lavender and blues ones. Unfortunately, my camera didn’t do a good job picking up the actual color. The first picture without the color correction is actually more similar to what it looks like. Without the gel, it was more yellow-y. I wasn’t sure exactly how the gel would look, but when I put it on I immediately thought of how it was more so just a color correction that could totally work for pizza man.

It’s interesting how color changes for the camera. I remember being told that the camera doesn’t have as many color receptors as our eyes (or something along those lines), which makes lighting for film a little different. My producing partner and I want to invest in lighting equipment for film. It’ll be interesting to start shopping around for a kit, and to see what gels it comes with.

Again for my part, I replaced the green gel with a lavender gel. While this mixture is actually really pretty, I didn’t expect it to be so girly. I expected it to be a little more lush. But then I realized two things: 1. I didn’t use a blue gel like I was going to for some reason and 2. the bulbs are LED lights, which have a more bluey/white light compared to the the more yellow-y lights around my house. I think the color of the light played a bigger part in the color than I thought it would have.

What’s also interesting is that now our foyer and stairs are a lot “dimmer” (for lack of a better word). The color mixing of the blue and red making yellow, added a lot more light to the area. It’s basically like our color theory class in action, which I thought was really cool.