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.