Orange is for fruits - Navigating through Color Correction

I thought I would talk a little bit about what's been going on with the Diving Lessons portion of the film. I'm now in a part of production that's probably the least familiar to me - coloring film. When I worked on the short Las Perdidas, I had a very specific idea of what I wanted the color to represent in film - very saturated colors, bright candy tones on the characters all to play against the stark earth tones of the desert. When I talk about the essence of Diving Lessons, the words "pure" and "raw" are what I most connect with. Now what color tone is that? The first thing that comes to my mind is white. Some people suggested that we shoot in black and white, but I just think that doesn't lend itself well to a contemporary romance. Plus since I want to emphasis the complexities of love. black and white is too, well, black and white.

I have a generous friend who has offered to color the piece for me, and so we've been slowly working our way through the film, trying to figure how what this color tone is supposed to be. This is where a good pre-pro conversation would have come in handy. I think this film is the last one I'll ever do without thorough discussions with all the departments. Every film I learn something new. Clear story, check. Good actors, check. Color correction, oops! What happened in production is some of the shots have an orange tone to them, and some have a blue tone. And my guess is that's a setting on a camera that created it. ("Don't worry you can fix it in post!") Personally I like the blue tone look better and when I told the colorist that and sent along some photographs to demonstrate, she said, "Oh you want it to look like the seventies." Oh. No. Isn't that interesting that each decade not only has certain iconic fashion styles, they also have iconic color correction style? Back to the drawing board of concise communication and clear concept.

I've never been so indecisive as a director as I have been with the color for this film. It's actually embarrassing, if you want to know the truth. And perhaps that's because it shows to me how inexperienced I am with this part of the process. I do know what I hate about the color as it is now - there is too much orange in one of the actor's most important (and most used) shots in the pool scene when they're standing on the diving board. There's this big hot orange light hitting the actor's back and it makes me cringe because it looks so unnatural, and it's a totally different look than the other actor's shot. So I asked the colorist to take the orange out, and then it didn't have that raw, natural look I wanted. It was too desaturated (which I didn't like), because the walls of the pool have a brick colored tone to them, and that's got guess what? Orange tones. Now that I think about it, she could just spot color the actor and tone down that hot light, right? See? I'm totally clueless.

Do you think it means that we can't manipulate what's set in stone, aka "filmed", as much as I thought we could? If the one light is too harsh, then the one light is too harsh. Nothing you can do to help.

There's another section where we shot with two cameras and one camera's setting I assume was blue and the other's was orange, and so cutting back and forth you've got warm and cold tones. Not, not an artistic choice. Is that going to be able to be fixed? I could just use only the blue toned shots, but then that means I lose the excellent camera movement, and the best performance - not worth it.

At this point, we've decided to make a pass at the whole thing, and just "smooth it all out". I'm very curious to see what that means. My final direction? "Less orange." Maybe once I stop fixating on that we can move forward.