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Phases of Video - Story Color & Design

Okay, So Julio's last point and the question I asked him about story you're gonna You got a kind of a little bit of a glimpse into his mind. And the next probably 15 to 20 slides are going to show you exactly what that mind is capable of. Okay, this is a story chart. Ah, basic bones story chart where this basically gives you all of the all of the story beats that we have to achieve in the story. Now, this is super extreme, and I don't want you to be intimidated by this. I just want you to know I want to point out the parallels and what Julia was talking about and what I've been talking about in terms of layering story beyond just the written word visual and the and the color and shape all of these things. And then they all pile in together, but they all follow along the same line. You start to tell the story with all of those different elements, so you could see that in any given movie story or whatever you A lot of times you've started build, and then you drop off, and then you build ...

and then you drop off and then you build and then you hit rock bottom and then you come up and we find our ending right? So this is, in essence, where we kind of work now breaking it down, act by act. And this is how we sort of make sense of something that looks completely crazy. But then you break it down into these story beats, right? His family's in mourning. Marco is obsessed, the fire is being disruption, and there's an inciting incident. So, like we hit all our story beats in Act one, then we move on to act to, and this is now we're starting to build. And then what I was talking about? No, no. And Marco becoming friends, right? This is that. It's like a love sequence. So, like if this was a romance movie, it would follow the same general structure in terms off story beats. So Julio's talking about 10 things that every story has toe have right, and it doesn't matter what kind of story it is. There just needs to be what, and this is a big one want. What do your characters want that's important to emphasize in any narrative story is how you moving them forward. You're moving them forward by making them try to achieve something they want. Now, sometimes they know what they want. And sometimes the audience knows what they want. They don't know what they want, but the idea is you need this structure it that way. Then, of course, we talk about the low point, like hitting the bottom right where you are. You know, you know this innate Lee when you're watching a film and you're like, Oh, my God, I know something bad is gonna happen because that's the structure of film. Right? Is like we've built to this and it's going down. Oh, no. It's going to go down hard, right? And then we hit that bottom part. And then, of course, then we go from the low point and we build ourselves back up to our climax in the end of the film. Now, all of these story beats were things that we shared with our production team, so that when they were building out what they had to do, they could understand it. So then we get into the world of Julio's color. Okay, and here's that same chart. But now we have the Marco palette, the No no palette and the Ana palette, right? Of course, he put them to me. That not the literal colors. They're kind of literal, but not really. And then, in terms of how big is that color palette at each story? Point right, certain story points arm or of Marco story points and stump story points arm or no, no story points. But as we kind of understand, what do the characters want? The character wants the No no character wants to bring the Marco character into his world. So from a color palette perspective, we're gonna end here in known a world because then we start to see that the culmination of what the character's want and that reflected in the color palette of this story. So that is a big part of story in color design, so again broken down. So it kind of goes little at a time, and we end up going from were like where when they become friends, then they have this big kind of climax, and then they hit the bottom. We go back to Marco World, and then we go to find back to resolution. So depending on how you're tracking your characters in a narrative story, layering color scheme helps tell that story to your audience whether they're aware of it or not. So here's lighting now. We did a very similar thing in terms off what this lighting technique looked like. So when we worked with the DP we talked about okay, No, no has to have a particular color palette and a light palate, and so does Marco. So Marco's world was colder, right? Giulio talked about this and no knows world was brighter and richer. So obviously with color temperature as photographers, we completely understand this concept, right? If we're jelling lights or were shifting white balance now in food, we don't do it as much because we really want to stay in the daylight realm. But when we're working in other mediums, using color to an color temperature to express particular emotions or to express particular kind of moods, that it's really helpful and to understand where you want to be, So by sharing this with our gaffer and sharing this with our DP, they quite understand how we want this to progress. So every single scene has to have a clear story point mark with a color pallet mark and a lighting mark. And it seems crazy, complicated, but it's really not. It's the same chart over and over again, just getting people toe. Visualize what it is that they're going to do when they're lighting each scene, when their coloring, each scene, when they're picking out costumes when they're putting on makeup. All of it okay, So shape in terms off why we chose thes things. So, like he's a he's. His things have circles, right? So his object is the bocce ball. Marco is the IPad, so he's this angular character and an Isoda caught in the middle, so she's sort of a minor character in terms off this particular scheme. But she still had have some kind of scheme, so there's sort of the objects in their world that sort of represented the things that were important in their story. So, like when you see an opening shot of Marco's room and it's panning across his desk, there's robots and there's video games and is all of this electronica and it's it is a representation of the character in his light palate in his color palette, so we got shaped light and color right. Giulio hit all three of those marks when he talked about his particular style. Then we work this metaphor of big and little throughout so in the world that we exist in the no no characters, clearly big and the Marco characters clearly small. But in the game of Bochy, which is the general metaphor of the entire movie body balls a big but the Pelino is small, right? And there's this this metaphor that plays out throughout. So the idea of using shape and color and size and all of these different elements layer on the storytelling aspects of what we're doing. Um, and then, of course, this general overview of natural versus digital analog versus Digital. However you want to play it. But when we were looking at inspiration pictures so like when you get a mood board from a client as a photographer, they basically give you inspirational pictures of what it is that they want the air campaign toe look like right we do. The same thing in film is that you create these mood boards, and Giulio pulled all of these crazy pictures from old Italian films with all his bright, vibrant colors to represent no No World. And then he pulled all. It is like electronica and all these pictures of people in VR headsets and in those video game rooms with a competitive, competitive video gamers and get a sense of That's why we're using that color palette and light palate for Marco because that's the world he's in, right? So the idea of structuring your ideas visually is something you're really familiar with as a photographer. So this is just an extrapolation of that. So this is a production still of Marco World. So what do you see in there? You see Blue Squares, right? And the idea is that this is This is a part in the movie where he's trying to make friends, and he's trying to become mawr of what his grandfather wants him to be, which is connected to other people. But it's still happening in his world, right? So these visual metaphors play out and, of course, also the use of the the frame that we used. We talked about lens selection and those things in the earlier part, but the idea of using the widescreen format lends itself to a beautiful shot like this. And you envision that when you're setting yourself up and when you're talking to the cinematographer and he has a clear vision as to what you want, he's thinking this is gonna be way better than this or that. Okay, Casting we talked about this earlier is that these people have to look like they're the characters that you wrote, and they have to look like they fit together. So this is supposed to be an Italian American family from Staten Island, but and we cast Anastasia, who is our lead female in it, and we cast her based on her mannerism and the way she presented herself, Not necessarily her look, because we knew plenty of girls from Staten Island that looked like that. They didn't all have black hair, you know. They were a lot of girls who looked Mediterranean, but more not particularly dark. But she came into the room and she was. She's from Worcester, Massachusetts. Now, if you know anything about Worcester, Worcester in Staten Island are not that different in terms of the kind of neighborhood they are in terms of the cities they exist in right, and she came in and both Julia and I looked at each other and like she could definitely be. And we had one particular girl in mind like she could. He she could definitely be Alexis, you know, like that is the way it works sometimes, right? She she she hit all the right marks in in the presentation. So she was the right person for the character, even though we were thinking of more brand name actresses for that particular role. And then Lewis's Italian American Oh, in his Italian American Anthony is Greek, so and so she, by the way, they're both Greek so, like Mediterranean faces, but have an Americanized kind of feel to them. The idea of who these characters are really fit into. The idea of casting in terms of Louis is supposed to be a game designer. He's also supposed to be really handsome so that their their lines in the film to talk about how you know, she kind of thought it may not work, but she wanted it to work. So like there was all this sort of they were from different worlds in a way, and so that once we assembled these people together and put them in screen tests and put them in audition settings with each other to see if there's chemistry. So sometimes you put people together who look great. They feel good on their own. But then you put them with the other actors and you don't have a whole lot of chemistry there. So ah, lot of those things happen in a casting situation and obviously things like scheduling and well, you know, it's hard. I mean, this is a very gruelling process, both for the actors and for the production team, because putting the right people in place a lot of times you have first choice is there outside of your budget range or they're not available or something. Scheduling wise happens or whatever, but I think that we got super lucky with some of our casting. And then, obviously Owen has become a big star in the interim, so these things really worked out to our advantage and the outright When when the kids in $100 million movie and the next movie he's in is yours, that's a good one. Okay, this is sort of the way we talk about movies when you're pitching something to, Ah, movie executive or you're talking about it to investors and trying to raise money, you talk about the tone of the film, and it's always got to be in reference to films that people understand. So this was the initial one that we we put in our pitch deck when we were trying to raise money for the film. In terms off It's the sand Lot Means Meets Cinema Paradiso, and you could take any two films that you think you draw inspiration from and throw it into this type of a framework. But this when you're thinking in terms of what inspired you to write the story as a writer or as a director, you want to think in these terms because this is the communication that people understand in the film world is that you need to draw from inspiration that people already are familiar with, and that way. That's why this this art form in general is really about imitation, right? So the reality is that this these story points from Cinema Paradiso are the important are important story points for our movie, and those story points from the sand lot and then you merge them together and you end up with Team Marco. So that's sort of how you pitch it and talk about it. And it's also helpful when you're thinking in terms off that imitation factor in that there were certain points in certain movies that really spoke to you as an artist. And you say I really would like that. I want to do my interpretation of that. I want to do my version of that. You know, from a musician's perspective, it's my cover, my cover version of that song, you know, and that's sort of what all films are in a way. Okay, this is intentionally super confusing, and we're gonna call this back later. But this is a plot map for maybe the most. Sixtus was the most, um, one of the most complex scenes that we filmed or because we had several that were like this with this many characters. So let me explain to you what you're looking at. Any purple circle is a character. Any blue thing with this on top. It's where the camera is. So think about how many camera angles that is. We shot this with one camera most films are. So that means that every single time that camera moved, that was a set up to film this scene. So that camera was in what? I came and count how many different weight places the camera was in. But this was a super complex scene, and all of those things were all of the shots that we needed to achieve to make the one just this morning scene. So I wanted you to see that, understand that it's really complicated. But I also want you to understand that you're gonna understand this better when we finish. This. By comparison, is a much e easier thing to understand. This is a basic plot map blocking map for a scene that we're gonna recreate in here. I'm going to show you exactly what this looks like when you're filming it. So this is probably the simplest form of a basic master kind of set up, and we'll talk about this a little bit more. But some of the notes that you'll see in here is closer on Marco. If we have time closer on. No, no. If we have time, that's about coverage. Is that you know what? Your basics have to be to make the scene to make your day to make your time. But then you say to yourself, if we get through it really quick because the performances were great and everything went according to plan, then we're gonna add to that. But we're gonna probably add to that from this general plot map. Right. Okay, So that was all preproduction, who was a lot.