Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Artefact 4 Evaluation

In my fourth artefact I looked at whether colour and lighting could effect the audience’s perception of genre in film. The artefact contained four clips from different films; The Departed (2007), Perfect Stranger (2007), Meet The Parents (2000), and Collateral (2004). All four clips begin by showing the original film footage and then changes to the version with edited colour and lighting, the effects in each were achieved using a program called Magic Bullet.

In my questionnaire I included questions to discover what genres the audience associated with different colours. My findings were that the following colours related to the following genres;

Red – Horror
Blue – Drama/Thriller
Green – Sci-Fi/Action
Yellow – Comedy/Romance
Black & White – All Genre’s/Film Noir

My findings from the artefact revealed that colour plays some part in shaping the audiences perceptions of film genre. I discovered that in some cases the audience would place an entire film in a different genre based on colour or lighting. The majority of results revealed that although colour has a vital role in shaping film it cannot override the content of the film, and so the core genre will remain the same regardless of any colour or lighting adjustments. As well as this the artefact showed that because the colour and lighting has an effect on the way the audience view film, it would in essence place the film into a different sub-genre.

In conclusion colour and lighting can change the audience’s perception of a genre but cannot change the whole genre and whilst certain colours may be associated with certain genres this is due to the cultural meanings of those colours.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Artefact 4 Research

My fourth artefact will be looking to discover how the audience perception of the genre of a film can be effected by the editing of lighting and colour on a scene.

Films that are worth mentioning and spring to mind imediatley are Sin City (2005) and 300 (2006) which were both Frank Miller comic books. Sin City uses a film noir style, but with elements of different colour used throughout such as the red in actor Clive Owens shoes and the blood which was made white in post production.

The reason that 300 was partly such an epic and diverse film was the fact that the visual effects done in post production were stunning and helped to give the film an unique stylised effect. Many effects that are the same or similar are reffered to by many people as 'the 300 effect'.On IMDB it says that "The unique look of the film was produced in post-production by using an effect nicknamed 'the crush'. As producer 'Jeffrey Silver' explains on the film's official website -- "you crush the black content of the image and enhance the color saturation to change the contrast ratio of the film." As well as this the "Post-production took almost a year. The film was edited on an Avid, with an HD cut also maintained in Final Cut Pro. The 3D was made using Maya, XSI and Lightwave. The 2D composites were made with Shake, Inferno, Fusion and Combustion. The filmmakers prefer Macintosh, but large portions of the movie were made under Linux. Asset management was handled by custom software written in the Panorama development environment, made by Provue. Color management was handled by Truelight software. The film was scanned on a Northlight scanner and was recorded on the Arrilaser."



As well as this, other films such as the Matrix (1999) use colour effects such as the green tint, know to some simply as 'neo'. This played a big part in all three of the films in the Matrix series and was attached to seens in which the character Neo is present. The colouring and lighting added to the film by making its own style, this was achieved in parts by taking out the colour blue from the exterior shot and thus convey the grimness of the world of the Matrix.

I will now look to manipulate footage to enable myself to find out what role colour and lighting play in shaping the apperance of genre.