We can not stress the importance of color schemes enough! While the cinematography, camera, lens, lighting and more all plays a very important role in creating high quality visuals, using color schemes is an often over looked key element in taking the quality of your image to higher levels. Having the color and tones in your lighting, wardrobe and environment work together is crucial in creating a visually aesthetic image. Michael Bay is one of the more notorious directors for always using the blue and orange color schemes in his Hollywood Blockbusters such as Transformers. Not only does using color schemes create a more dynamic image but it greatly increases the mood and feelings your scene is trying to communicate to the audience.
We recently created a promo video for one of our clients new product launches, the premise of the video was to have him walk through various environments in Downtown Clearwater talking direct to the camera about his product. Blue is one of my favorite colors to base schemes of off, with that as a foundation we had our client bring a few different outfits and decided our general color scheme would be blues, yellows and browns. While walking through downtown scouting for locations, our eyes were set on interesting spots which had our set colors in the environment to match his wardrobe.
Since we were shooting in a very flat color profile called “V-log” with our Gh4 our color schemes were not rich enough and needed to pop more in Post Production. This is where you grade or use a lut on your footage that is designed to enhance or make your color scheme pop.
As seen below, first we have our flat V-log straight out of camera footage. Then lastly you can see the final grade applied, greatly bringing out our color scheme. The grade we used specifically targeted the blues and oranges, making any colors similar much richer and vibrant without effecting the color you don’t want.
Whether you are shooting a music video, commercial, promo video, wedding, documentary, interview or whatever else, give this a shot and see the difference it makes!
