How Does Colour Grading Affect Video Mood?
When you watch a movie, you don’t initially identify what the colour palette is. Only those who know what video editing is, and how it defines a video, will notice this. Think about it this way, when you watch a Marvel film, do you notice how colourful and bright the pictures are? Do you notice the definitive colours in the scene? Or do you just watch the film and enjoy the ride? For the most part, audiences don’t notice, but the colour of the movie affects how audiences respond, and what emotions they need to feel at certain points in the film. Don’t worry, it can be a lot to digest, so we’ll help you. Here’s how colour grading can affect a video’s mood.
The Psychology of Colours
Before we can dive right into how colour affects a video’s mood, let’s look at why it can. First off, you’ll need to know the basics of Colour Psychology. Essentially, colour can influence our emotions and mental states. For example, if you look at a red coloured item, it can stimulate you and increase your body’s adrenaline. Usually, because red is associated with things like blood, this naturally makes our body respond, however minutely, to adopt a “fight, flight or freeze” response.
Not only that, but the colour red is associated with “warm” emotions or even hostile emotions. It is used to represent stimulating emotional responses, like love, passion, warmth and even anger, violence, and hate. Conversely, cool colours, like blue, are used to calm or “de-stress”, and are associated with emotions like calmness, relaxation and even sadness or depression. It is because of this that colour is so important in filmmaking and even marketing.
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The Different Colours Used In Film
The use of bright and vivid colours can help audiences to feel stimulated as if they’re part of the action, and they can associate different colours with different characters and scenes. For example, in Marvel’s Endgame (2019), each scene is vividly coloured. You get the inky blackness of space when Tony Stark is stuck on Peter Quill’s spaceship. You can identify Black Widow’s and Wanda’s bright red hair. You can easily pick out Gamora’s green and Nebula’s blue skins. The film itself is full of bright colours, and this stimulates the audience to feel like they’re part of the action.
In contrast, if you watch a film like Manchester By The Sea (2016), the colours are a lot more muted, and a lot of the standout colours are within the cooler spectrum, ranging from blue to green, with an undertone of yellows and browns. This emphasises the overall mood of the film. It highlights the sadness, depression, and guilt that the film is all about. There is very little colour, and it even encourages the audience to feel pity and empathy for these characters. It’s a far different story from the Marvel films, and this is all to do with the Psychology of Colours.
How Colour Affects A Video
As we’ve mentioned before, the brighter and more saturated the colour of a film is, the more engaged an audience is as well. This is how it affects a film. So, it depends on the colour palette a filmmaker decides to use, and what reaction the audience has. For example, if you’re making a wedding highlights video, it depends on the emotion you want to evoke, from its audience, and what colour the video should have.
So, if you want to make them feel the romance and joy of the wedding day, you might want to use pastel and gentle colours, like mauve, forest green, mustard and pink. These colours are mostly associated with springtime and romance. After all, mauve and pink can be associated with spring flowers, green is associated with life, and mustard, or yellow, is associated with joy. So, when you edit your video, you’ll need to highlight these colours, and mute the others.
Choose Your Colours Carefully
Of course, while it might be easy to pick out the colours you want to stand out, you also need to exercise some discretion. Too much colour grading and manipulation can make the video monotonous. Like the editing process itself, choosing the colour palette of your video needs to help tell the story. There might be faster moments in the film, where you’ll want to make all the colours vivid, and not just your main colour palette. Alternatively, if the video has slower moments, you’ll want to mute your colours, to the point where you only highlight one colour.
Whatever you do, you need to choose your colours carefully. Over-saturating colours can make your videos difficult to watch, and under-saturating them may make them boring. You’ll need to find the compromise between the two, and always change it up, depending on the video you’re making. So, watch out. When you’re editing a video, you need to remember you’re telling a story, and the colour is all about helping your audience associate the right emotions with that story.
Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff
Of course, all of this can be tedious and tiring to do. After all, colour grading does require some level of skill and knowledge. So, don’t worry about it and let our editors colour grade your videos for you. Just as with the main editing process, our video editors are highly skilled and experienced in colour grading your videos. So, instead of looking bland, with the raw footage simply pieced together, our video editors can flesh out the emotions you want to evoke in your videos; how stimulated you want your audience to be.
They’ll know how to ensure your videos send across the right messages and emotions, without compromising the video itself. So, let them colour grade your videos for you, so you don’t have to do the hard work. We can ensure that the colour of your video sets the right mood for those who watch them. And don’t worry, it’s not an extra charge, it’s all within the price packages for all our services. So, check out our website, if you’d like to know more information about them! We promise we can provide high-quality and correctly colour-graded videos for all your needs.
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