A Colourist's POV : Feat. Blackmagic Design URSA

Our eyes can only tell so much from looking at an image. It tells us that there's something familiar in the frame - Objects, shapes and sounds that we've been wired to understand since birth. Movies, films or just videos we make online have taken the next step in pushing the boundaries of our imaginations and brought them to life. But has it ever occurred to us, why does a certain scene feel moodier than the other? Or how does this scene feel more tense? Or how this one makes you feel sad..

Aside from the obvious presentation of great storytelling and cinematography, there's one main factor that the average movie goer wouldn't even take notice of at the scale from what goes behind the scenes in post-production, specifically in the realm of Colour.

We had the chance to sit down with a professional colourist to go behind what makes a scene look the way it should, and grab a better understanding as to why our eyes are far more deceiving than we realised, or how colour has a bigger effect in the way it evokes emotion in every scene.

The best way to recognise colours is through understanding what each colour represents psychologically. It's always been known that red is correlated with anger, black with death, blue with sadness and so on. Factoring how those tones come into play during a shoot is a technique used by filmmakers on set and some use this technique in post production as well.

The tools we are given nowadays such as the likes of DaVinci Resolve and among other editing suites, have expanded the reach in how we express colour through colour grading. How adding a blue-ish tint on a cloudy day may cause an eerie mood, or how adding more warmth can suggest euphoria or happiness. Or to some extent, cameras capable of shooting in RAW formats with higher bit rates may even be able to manipulate a day scene to a night scene.

But the biggest takeaway from this interview is the subconscious mind has various ways in inducing the way we feel about colour and how that can be translated into the videos we make and sometimes how we tell our stories.

Whether it's seen on the big screen or just our mobile devices, it's certain that consuming the films and videos we've grown to love have a bigger impact on our overall creativity and especially what kind of personality we convey. Regardless of your nature to prefer wearing all-black or rainbow as your outfit of the day, the lengths as to how a colourist such as Chrysler in this interview understands how powerful colour can be in reaching your unique audience without even expressing them in words.

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Produced by Fitri Aiyub