em dee zu
martin dupont
COLOR GRADING • EDITING • RETOUCHING
Color Grading Samples
Good editing, color and sound design move stories from the mind into the heart.
What convinces an audience to take the story's journey? What determines its impact?
Impact
“Without impact, innovation is just an idea with promise.” —Judith Rodin, educator
A door without a doorknob is hard to open. A door with two doorknobs is confusing. Correctly choosing which things to leave in and which to take out determines a story's impact.
Editing tends to be subtractive like chipping away at a piece of granite until a beautiful sculpture remains. Color-grading is more additive. Colors are added, changed, or enhanced to suit the emotion of the scene and story. The right music carries the art and story directly to the viewer's heart.
Heart
“Through careful manipulation and good storytelling you can get everybody to clap at the same time... laugh at the same time... to be afraid at the same time.” —Steven Spielberg
Emotions are said to be matters of the heart, but it is possible to make people feel a certain way. How?
Words by themselves are powerful, but their emotional impact is determined by when they are said and what is seen while they are said. Feelings are created by manipulating timing and proximity. Seeing a little girl in an amusement park feels different than seeing her in a hospital. And, if a scene of soldiers with tanks is shown immediately before or after the little girl appears, the proximity of the two scenes changes the feeling. The scenes are connected in our mind and heart.
Think
“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”—Brandon Sanderson, Writer
Where you have been impacts how you will go forward. That is especially true of editing. Some master the technical aspects of editing, but that is like knowing how a scalpel cuts. Who do you want cutting on your baby? Color-grading likewise has a very technical side, but today creativity is king. And everyone needs a king. Right?
If your project needs to make an impact, aim for the heart. Join with those who know what they are doing and do it well.
Martin DuPont, em dee zu: Color Grading, Editing, After Effects, Video and Photo Retouching.