We were inspired by various films such as 'Schindler's list' (1993), where the little girl wears a red coat and the rest of the scene is in black and white, and 'Pleasantville' (1998), where throughout the film certain things starts turning from black and white into colour.
I thought that this would be a really interesting idea and would emphasise the Ruby Ring being a key signifier within our film opening, as it is the wedding ring of the main female protagonist and the ex-husband. The colour red is associated with love, passion and desire. However, once emotions have formed between the couple within our film, a love, passion and desire to kill begins to emerge. So, on the other hand the colour red also represents blood, lust, sexuality and death. These are all key themes and conventions of what makes a film noir, therefore I thought that through using this technique, I could show my understanding of what the key elements of a film noir are.
Before we filmed the bedroom scene, I started to explore Adobe Premiere Pro CS5's colour isolation effect. It worked perfectly fine with many trials that I have done. Here is one of the trials that I did with the colour isolation. I have isolated 3 different colours using the same film clip:
However, when I uploaded the converted MXF to MOV files of the footage for our film opening onto Adobe Premiere, the red colour isolation did not work well. This is due to the colour red being largely present on the skin, therefore when I tried to do the red colour isolation for the ring, it picked up the skin colour as opposed to the rich red colour of the ring.
I have tried many different methods in order to make it work, however after spending a lot of time experimenting, researching, and having very little success, I have not found any way to fix it. I have looked at many tutorials on Google and YouTube to see if any other programmes can do the colour isolation effect. Final Cut Pro, which is a very commonly used programme, one which I have used previously for various projects which I have done, has the correct effects to do the colour isolation, however the real problem lies with the footage itself. The problem was that my group did not take into account the fact that in order for this to work, we had to counteract the colours of everything else in the shot with the colour red.
One way in which we could have achieved this effect is if we had painted the actress' hand in a pale green paint, this way the colour green would counteract with the red on the ring and would take away the natural colour of the hand, so that it didn't show up when isolating the colour of the ring. Another factor which prevented the colour isolation effect from working was the lighting. Because we were filming in a small bedroom, there was not enough room to bring in any big key lights or a big light to use for 'bounced light' (when a light is reflected or bounced off a light coloured surface. Usually used to softly light up a room or large area).
This has been a great learning experience for my group and I, as we have learnt to carefully think about what we have to do, as having imaginative and wild ideas is a great way to gain experience and skills but you need to think of all of the things that could affect what you want to achieve. By having such a unique idea, although it did not work in the end, I have learnt some really useful skills that I can use in the future towards other projects that I will do.
If I was to do the colour isolation effect again, I would definitely focus on isolating the colour on set so that nothing else in the frame is the same colour that I wish to isolate, and to make sure that the room is lit up brightly, so that the colours aren't dimmed down by poor lighting. This will make it easier to create this wonderful effect in post-production and will look great on the screen.
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