the awesome/terrifying freedom

i'm editing a very cool little short for chad and celeste's acting reels. it's very much in the style of 'the shield,' and 'nypd blue.'

we shot the first scene on a gorgeous sunday. chad plays a detective, and celeste plays a chinese woman, frantic because her husband has been murdered in the garden.

there are so many little discoveries i'm having as i do more editing. probably these are things that they teach you in film school, but i'm happy to learn through the doing.

i love that viewers are sophisticated enough now that it's no longer taboo to cut to a different take within the same angle. soderberg and von trier do this a lot, and i love the unsettling effect.

a big thing i discovered on this piece, though, is how much color correction can affect the way the scene plays. it's very emotional work for celeste, and i realized that the bright colors were working against her performance. here's the colors as shot:



i turned down the saturation a little, tipped the mids to blue, and it completely changed the scene.



the thing to be careful of is that you don't use the technique in a way that makes the scene redundant. it would be interesting to try on a different piece, if a scene seems too heavy, to bump up the saturation and see what happens.