Editing - Colour Correction

Colour Correction

Most film noir has a very high colour contrast within the black and white and I aimed to recreate that using colour correction in our footage. The high contrast creates a more shadowy effect which I think is very effective for the genre. 

I found that an easy way to achieve this was by altering the exposure of each of the clips. This had to be done individually as each of the clips had slightly different lighting so was quite time consuming. A good setup usually was to lower to exposure of the shadows and highlights while raising the exposure of the mid tones. This created a good contrast between the darker and lighter areas without getting rid of the details. The amount varied with each clip.

One place I felt this worked particularly well was on the shot of the feet walking in front of the fence as the shadows are very prominent. 

However, one place where this wasn't as effective was on the shot of the money in the briefcase. As the money was already quite overexposed, adding the 50s TV black and white effect made it so white that even bringing the exposure all the way back down could not bring back the detail on the paper. This might make it difficult for people to understand what the shot it meant to be showing.

The same problem also occurred with one shot of my dad's face as he's quite pale. To rectify this, we removed the 50s TV effect from that particular shot and instead lowered the saturation to give it a black and white effect. Although this made the shade of black and white slightly different to the rest of the film, there was no extreme difference. 

The one other problem with the exposure editing is that the face of the other man looks very dark in places. However, I'm not particularly concerned with this as I feel it makes him look like more of a villain and quite like the effect.

Overall, I'm pleased with the effect that the colour correction gives despite causing some problems with overexposure in some places. I don't think these issues cause a problem with the overall film, however.