Colour

One of the main elements we needed to focus on within the Cinematography is Colour. It is known that there are three main C's within Cinematography that take purpose: Composition, Contrast and Colour. Even though Colour is an extremely helpful and powerful tool to use within film, it can sometimes be overlooked by beginners in the industry, as they focus on the other C's. 

'The use of analogous or complimentary colour tones to create contrasts between the elements in the frame and communicate emotional ideas to the audience' [1] 

Before studying Cinematography in greater detail, I never even thought about the importance of colour myself, rather to composition and exposure of a shot, however I've learnt through research that colour itself can be used to communicate information to an audience in a variety of ways, an example I found was Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, which takes place in three different locations, which is defined by the use of colour in each. The audience can understand where the characters are and which location they are viewing merely by the colour scheme. It's a clever yet obvious way to communicate the information and allow the audience to understand familiarise themselves with the location due to colour changes. 

As well as being able to use colour to changes to physical information, it's also a powerful tool when it comes to showing emotional information. It is known that there are certain cinematic conventions that have developed to aid this, for example, the idea of a warm lighting to convey safety and a cool lighting to suggest danger are about as standard today as shadows signifying mysteries and brightness purity and security. 

Here is a screenshot from the film 'Hero (英雄)', and I think the colour of blood is symbolic and stands out to the audience. The blood is a bright yet dark red, dripping off the blade. This implies a murder, death, all the dark emotions of red. It's a powerful use of red. And I think it's a simple way to get the information across to the audience. We know what's happened but that colour adds power and some emotion dependent on the audience's preference of character. 

From the same film & scene, a colour change occurs, as the autumn orange scheme of the film changes to blood red, to make the blood dripping from the sword. Once again it's a powerful change, and definitely links to the mood of the scene. The colours within this piece are clearly tied directly to the mood and power of the film, trends are visible throughout the film. 

Colour is such a powerful part of storytelling it would seem, and know appears clear that no cinematography or Director of Photography should neglect this key feature. And saying this, despite the power of modern colour correcting techniques and tools, we can never leave colour to chance or expect it to come up with a highly effective image in post-production. 

It's clear to see that not only colour, but all the C's within cinematography are important and need to be well thought through, with a lot of planning to use it properly. When it's plotted out correctly, you can create a massive amount of power within your storytelling.