Ye old Gothic editing part 1: color, tone and Setting
with one of the projects i am part of being based on Sweeny Todd The demon barber of Fleet Street (2007) I decided to look more into the colour and tone of the film the project is based on while also looking into various similar films and media to better help me understand what my director would want from the final edit.
From this clip you can notice that the colour scheme for the film is very desaturated With colour being used as a way to point out specific characters that the director wants you to pay attention to while the rest of the colours are more toned down and flat, to show in this scene that he is there to put on a show therefore he must stand out from the others so people can watch him, even though he isn't the main focus of the scene.
The Victorian era has usually been depicted as "dirty" "dank"
and "diseased" in different forms of media, whether it would be the dark and dingy streets of yharnham in Bloodborne (2015) or the industrial and smokey streets of Birmingham in Peaky Blinders (2013-) in which the tones of these streets and towns have a color tone of grey's and browns.
Svea who had originally pitched the project, had examples of what she would imagine the colour tone would be like if her project was picked and she gave me the The Duchess(2008) to look at.
The film has multiple tones the film goes through, giving each scene a different colour tone depending on the scene, such as the bedroom scene where it is dark blue to give the idea that the scene is very serious and has some serious weight to the story, while some scenes have a "dream-like" tone to them with A golden tone to these scenes, giving the audience a magical feeling to the scene while also looking realistic.
while the tones and colour of The Duchess (2008) can work for the project, its setting (while being set in victorian london) does not fit the project we are working on as the locations are mostly set on royal castles and mansions and does not fit the tone of a dark british town, like Peaky Blinders and Sweeny Todd(2007).However going away from colour i decided to find a film that used black and white in its opening to create a more different feeling to the project, that being Van Helsing (2004)
The films opening is all in black and white telling the audience that this scene has happened in the past while also being a homage to Universal films from the past. if i manage to tame the editing software davinci resolve i would like to manipulate the colour tone to be compleatly monochrome while also having small instances of colour.
my main influence for this idea was from the 1935 version of Phantom of the opera in which a majority of the film is in black and white while the phantom and other specific characters are in colour.
I look forward to editing a test shoot for this project as it should give me more time to mess around with the colour and tones of the project