Vexercise 5 Drops: Colo(u)r/Colo(u)r Grading/Lightbuilding

[nu_breed]

Hey everyone, as I mentioned in my last post it's time to drop Vexercise 5!

This exercise is focused on colour/colour grading (or color if you are, unlike me, from the US!)

So the brief here is to make a one minute video where you let color guide the logic and flow, either by selection or special effects.

Highly recommended: download a LUT and try using it!

There are many many LUT resources out there. Here are a few links you could try:

The 70 Best Free LUTs Hand-picked By A Colorist For Your Films
73 free LUTs for Premiere Pro
Free LUTs for Da Vinci
30 FREE Cinematic Luts | Color Grading | How to apply Luts in Adobe Premiere Pro
How to Install LUTS in Davinci Resolve
How To Install LUTs in Premiere Pro 2020 on MacOS super EASY!
How to Properly Install Luts in Premiere Pro for Windows & Mac Users

I haven't listed any vid examples here because there are numerous examples of vids that use colour in either of these ways (on the colour grading side there are too many YT vids to count that meet this brief!) But do please make suggestions in the comments!!!

Advanced: Lightbuilding

Lim talks about this in Demystifying Vidding. Produce a one minute vid where your guiding logic is lightbuilding. Try letting the flow and build of light guide your editing choices throughout.

Example vid: Lim's Expo (MCU)

Also some of these examples from Vexercises 2.0 may be useful!

Any questions, please ask!

Comments

[extrapenguin]

I'm probably going to do the color grading thing (in kdenlive, since blender doesn't handle LUTs, oops), but do you have any other example vids for lightbuilding? It looks interesting but I don't think I quite got the concept.

[nu_breed]

Yeah it’s a bit of a tricky one to explain! Some of these examples from Vexercises 2.0 may be helpful to you:

https://vexercises.dreamwidth.org/15770.html#comments

[extrapenguin]

Having watched all those, I'm still as confused as ever. /o\ Unless it's about motion/shape matching for light/light sources, and then subverting matchy expectations? I suspect the reason this is so hard for me is that my brain just doesn't natively think about stuff in this manner.

[colls]

I first interpreted "light building" to be like going from dark to light, so chose my clips that way knowing there were dark clips and desert setting clips in both movies I'm using for vexercises - so a BFF showcase would work. (Also because while I read the links, I didn't really connect what was meant at first). And I went a little literal with the song choice. too!
I then tried a few moments of adding light effects, but made it more of a soft glow highlight blob thing and on the emotional beats vs. the musical beats.

Wow... sounds so wonderful, doesn't it? LOL

True Colors
Fandom: Rogue One | Solo
by colls

[nu_breed]

I really enjoyed this :D

[colls]

:) - thanks

This round of challenges has been fun, thank you for co-modding/hosting :)

[nu_breed]

You're welcome! I'm so glad you're enjoying them :)

[nu_breed]

Here's mine! MCTNA: a study of colour and light.

I chose to use both colour and the flow/play of light through fire, shadow and sunlight and accidentally completed a full-length vid, oops!

[extrapenguin]

The Ghost's Eulogy, another Star Wars: The Old Republic vid! This time using my Imperial Agent and stuff from one of the expansions – Knights of the Fallen Empire ch 2 has a very nice built-in vignette, and fit well with the dark and moody theme I was going for. I did some minor color grading to make stuff match better, but mostly here what I wanted to do was transitions. My happy place is sharp cuts, but here I intentionally only had a few of them and did fade-ins and fade-outs most of the time. Also some fades-through-white as a transition, which I'd seen a few times and really wanted to try out. I like to think it adds to the effect.

[nu_breed]

Some nice in-built light-building here! And the transitions were an interesting way to emphasise it too :)

[marah_sarie]

Here's mine!

[Vexercise 5] - Far, Near

Is it light building? I don't know! Did I have some fun learning how to do bloom/glow transitions and playing around with various light effects? I sure did! There's a fair amount of colour grading, too, to try and match the warmth and tone of different clips to each other.

[nu_breed]

I thought your choices were great!

[alba17]

Fare Thee Well
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
by alba17

I managed to put something together but I wasn't too ambitious. All I did was group clips by predominant color and string them together. I tried out applying a LUT also.

[nu_breed]

Nice! I find LUTs really addictive so well done for playing around with one :D

[the_wavesinger]

I made a vid!

The Lord of the Rings || Nor Bid The Stars Farewell

There isn't a theme or narrative as such, basically just lots of pretty and Tolkien vibes. I mostly leaned into using colour (and I didn't use a LUT but I did do some colour grading). I did try to play with light a bit--I think I was more successful with that in the first half of the vid than the second.

(also on AO3, with some added info!)

[nu_breed]

I loved this! The colour was gorgeous and the music choice was A+++