Every era of movies has its dominant color palette and one of the key skills anyone involved in making movies needs is working out how to retro-engineer a zeitgeisty look.
Shortly after the release of films including Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix, forums full of camera crew all over the world were frequently visited by people asking the question how do I make it green?
We could just as well look at Grand Budapest Hotel (purple,) No Country for Old Men (er, a sort of browny-green color that a paint manufacturer might call swamp), the Vegas scenes from Blade Runner 2049 (orange), or even Traffic, which is more or less every color of the rainbow but mostly restricts itself to one at once (see?). The latest mainstream example was probably the teal and orange of Furiosa, until we cast our eye over this year’s Oscar contenders that is.
The point is that in the twenty years since The Matrix was the new hotness, the questions have moved from forums to Facebook, and the roster of films changes slowly – but people keep asking the same questions.
But no matter why a movie looks the way it looks, figuring out how it was done is one of the necessary skills for anyone with a camera. It’s a skill that remains essential no matter what we’re shooting on – and it’s usually not that hard to look at a picture and figure out where the light is coming from and roughly what color everything is.
Old hands tell us that questions about how to make things certain colors have been asked since the invention of Kodachrome. Of course, The Matrix was finished in 1999, at a point where digital intermediate did not quite exist. It’s difficult to be sure given the way photochemical elements fade, but it seems likely that the original release was not quite as green as more recent transfers make it look (and humans infamously can’t remember what colour something was for twenty seconds, let alone twenty years).
These questions mainly come from people new to camerawork, and let’s be clear: it’s a field in which there are no stupid questions. Anyone who’s ever shot anything for money will at some point have been given someone else’s work as reference. While it’s best to avoid admitting that we’re outright duplicating the cinematography of another production, there’s a lot of value in being able to figure out how something was done, and take inspiration from it.
(And also, sometimes it’s a really good idea to outright duplicate the cinematography of another production. It’s very hard for the person responsible for paying you to complain if the pictures look exactly as requested, but we’ll agree never to speak of it again because copying is wrong.)
So how do we make something green (or, equally, any other color)? We can use a green light, which is easier than ever in a world where full color mixing LEDs are relatively affordable. Green light in modern movies is often motivated by the assumption that fluorescent tubes and old-school mercury lights look a sort of cyan-green. That hasn’t really been true since we were shooting film (rare) under halophosphate fluorescent tubes (long since obsolete). The moon isn’t green either, much as steel green has replaced blue as the color of night.
Still, if we want green light we can get it. Gels, green-painted bounce boards and green shower curtains can be had for pocket money. Then we can bounce that light off a green subject, which means finding a green subject. That’s production design, which is often a bit less affordable, although it’s also a good reason for the cinematographer to take a keen interest in location scouting. Pick the wrong place, and the camera department will be reassigned to turd-polishing duties before they’ve even arrived. Finally, we can filter the camera to make things green, we can choose lenses that flare green, and then we can put a lookup table in the monitor.
The point is not that any of this is new or complicated. These are the tools of the trade. None of this should be news to a first-year cinematography student. So, the question is not so much how do I make it look green, but how would anyone make it look green. Anyone would point green lights at it, or paint it green, or filter it green, or grade it green, or some combination of those things.
The world’s film courses do teach this sort of reverse-engineering. At least, we assume they do. They certainly used to. Not everyone goes to film school, and quite understandably so given that film school is expensive and doesn’t guarantee much. Either way, the ability to look at a frame and figure out what’s in it is celebrated in things like ShotDeck’s recreations contest (look again next year – this year’s competition has happened).
Next week there’ll probably be another film with an interesting colour palette which will flood the internet with questions along the lines of how do I make it glaucous and gamboge after watching the behind-the-scenes interviews. Everyone will get very excited because that doesn’t sound like “teal and orange” while still recalling every Bayhem blockbuster. No matter what happens, though, the ability to look at a frame and figure out what’s in it is something that everyone needs, unless you’re one of those people who takes a very hard line on avoiding influences on your originality.