Blue Isn't The Warmest Color

Today we worked on set design primarily. We had to transform Nicole's room-which we chose to film in out of convenience- into Jasmin's. This proved challenging given that Nicole's barren, turquoise walls completely clashed with the warm, lively vibe we wanted in Jasmin's room. It was important to establish this tone during this scene not only to establish character, but to make the contrast even more evident with the previous portion of the intro.

The first thing we had to resolve was Nicole's walls. We had to look for all the posters we could find to make this room feel like a geeky film enthusiast lived there. The actual content of the posters wasn't too relevant, given that we were shooting at a shallow focus, and most shots were close up anyway.  

Right away the fluorescent bulbs stood out, no matter how covered the walls were, that turquoise would always show through. We tried to compensate for all the blue by covering all the lights in her room(as well as some extra fill lights) with yellow and red cellophane paper. We even hung up trendy fairy lights to distract from the ugly blue.This looked okay to us, but the camera was still picking up the mopey-colored walls (Nicole if you're reading this don't take this personally. It's not you, it's your walls).

We were pretty bummed out (maybe it was the blue getting to us) BUT THEN,

I suddenly remembered this tricked I picked up from a video I watched a while back on white balance. Basically, If you manually set the camera to recognize a color as white, it will emphasize the colors opposite to it in the color wheel.Using this method, we could make the "white" a blue hue, and thus cancel out the turquoise in the room. We got a pretty interesting effect. Although we lost some contrast, I think we should be able to correct that in after effects. 

Another thing we worked on was the stop motion set. Before I got there, Nicole had pre-cut a cardboard box to use as a base. We then painted it a base color of orange to give it a warm, confident, and happy feel. The rest of the colors were just colors that would complement orange/yellow. Still, we made sure they didn't contradict the overall intended feel of the scene.  I think that's all I can really say about set design. I actually enjoyed laying everything out, and I'm pretty excited to work with color as a mechanism for storytelling. Who knew? maybe art direction is my thing Overall, we were successful in creating the atmosphere we wanted with our limited budget. 

P.S. I know it's hard to imagine without any stills, but I'll soon update after we export the footage from the camera.