Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1952)

295 USING COLOR CREATIVELY Try the simple test plotted on this page to discover the delights of conscious color control JACK E. GIECK, ACL COLOR, the psychologists and physicists tell us, exists only in the mind. You would have, to be sure, a hard time convincing a neophyte filmer of this fact as he gazes in rapture at his first few rolls of chromatic triumph. Nevertheless, an inquiring expedition to the dictionary soon reveals the following definition: A psychophysical sensation evoked as a specific response to stimulation of the eye and its attached nervous mechanisms by radiant energy of certain wave lengths and intensities. All clear? Well, anyway, there is at least one aspect of our reactions to chromatic signals on which we will all agree. This is that our color perceptions, like most human faculties, are often fallible. Ever take off a pair of green sun glasses and notice how rosy the world looks? •Quite by accident, recently, I discovered how this same phenomenon can be exploited to enhance the beauty and richness of our color movies. It was a few months ago and I was projecting a 100 foot roll of Kodachrome which had just been returned from processing. The roll contained a number of shots I intended to use in a movie I was currently making. Among others, it contained the scene with which I intended to open the film: a fade-in on a church steeple against the sky; then a downward pan to reveal a group of people coming out of the church. The first time I saw this shot I was not particularly impressed. It was satisfactory — the sky was as blue as one normally expects to see it through the smoke and dust of industrial Detroit — but it certainly was nothing exceptional. After editing and titling the film, however, I noticed a startling change in the scene. The mediocre sky had somehow become a rich, cobalt blue! In fact, I have since received a gratifying number of compliments on the "beautiful sky" in this scene. The answer? Simply that the scene was now preceded by about thirty seconds of titles made on black and white film on which the emulsion had later been dyed red. After staring at these red titles for half a minute, the audience would have seen a blue-green after-image (an exactly complementary sensation from that of the rosy hue created by the green sun glasses) if they had looked at a perfectly blank screen. But when this after-image color (caused, I understand, by slight fatigue of one set of color-receptor cells in the retina) is the same as the major color (e.g., sky blue) in the scene following, the effect is to intensity the latter color greatly. That this effect is more than mere shock of contrast was known over a hundred years ago to a pioneer experimenter in the field of color vision. Michel Chevreul (1786-1889) stated his "principles of simultaneous contrast" in his classic book, De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs. Of the many qualitative principles he established, probably the most important is that "every colored object tends to modify the colors of neighboring objects in the direction of its own complementary color." To get a clearer idea of what he meant by this, we have reproduced below a plate copied from Chevreul's book. If you will take a set of colored crayons and shade in the center circles in the colors indicated, you will see these bull's eyes change color abruptly when the color in the surrounding ring is added. The two orange spots, for example, won't look as if they were made with the same crayon: the one in the red ring will appear lemonorange, while the orange spot surrounded by yellow will have taken on a reddish hue. What does all this mean to us? It suggests, first of all, that we can achieve dramatic color effects by preceding a scene containing a color area which we wish to accent by a title or scene composed primarily of the complementary, or opposite, color (as in my blue sky discovery). Secondly, we can set off an object in a scene, and deepen or change its apparent color, by surrounding it with objects or areas of appropriate color. For example, let us suppose that you plan a closeup of your heroine, your wife or your girl and (for either dramatic or esthetic reasons, or simply because she thinks they are) you want her to have blue eyes. (Actually, as you realize to your regret, her eyes are sort of dishwater-colored.) The trick is easy. Simply pose her against an orange background — such as a maple tree in autumn — and her eyes will turn as blue as alkaline litmus paper. Or, let us say that you wish to use an authentic property on your set — an antique Chinese vase, perhaps — but that the pale yellow jade looks a little drab after two thousand years. Arranging it against a background of purple velvet will deepen the yellow tone considerably. You can also call attention [Continued on page 305] BEG, BORROW OR STEAL a set of colored crayons from your favorite five-year-old to take this test in color contrasts. Your eyes will open at the revealing results.