What is a Colorist in Film?

Colorists are those who are skilled with editing color tones of films. They work on the color of the final product before mass production.

Colorists in film-making use digital tools to edit hue, tone, contrast, and pallets. Their settings can completely change the look and story of a film.

The role of colorists in film-making may appear quite small, but they add the most value to a film. So what do colorists do and how do they add value to a film? We are going to discuss them in this article.

What does a Colorist do?

So what does a colorist do in filmmaking? Depending on the decision of the filmmaker/ director, a colorist can be involved in various levels of filmmaking.

Usually, the florists work on the raw footage that is being shot and work on them as per the director’s instruction. He/she changes, tunes, and modifies the balance of colors in the footage to match the theme of the story.

With advanced technology available on-set, the colorists can now work with the camera director and director on-set. He/ she can change various settings in the camera to let the director and cameraman see an approximate illustration of what the final product will look like after it has been color edited.

By working on these levels of filmmaking, a colorist uses the balance of colors to psychologically engage with the viewers.

You may have seen some Youtube videos where they demonstrate how color pallets can completely change the theme of the same footage. That is the psychological effect a colorist has on the film and its audience.

So what a colorist does is change the balance and mixture of color in the film footage to make it psychologically and visually more engaging for the audience.

Roles of a Colorist

So the basic role of a colorist is to change the mixture and balance of colors in the film footage to make it visually and psychologically match with the story. For achieving the final result, the colorists use various types of digital tools such as editing software.

The work of a colorist is not simple at all. It requires high skills and imagination. But we can divide their work into three basic steps. They are Color correction, Color grading, and Color Swapping. We have described these procedures in more detail below.

Color correction

The first task of a colorist is color correction. It is the very first thing every colorist does when they are given raw footage of the film.

Basically what they do in this step is to match the exposure and color of the shot to match with the story of that particular scene. They also use color correction to fix distracting objects in the background of the footage. The focus is kept in the foreground by making their colors attractive to the eye.

Also, there is some footage where the director uses natural light sources. Nature cannot be controlled, thus there are some unexpected changes in exposure in a scene. The colorist will have to work on fixing that. Besides exposure, hue, ambiance, and color temperature need to be controlled as well.

You may think that the use of a controlled lighting environment may reduce the work of a colorist, but no. The director can indeed achieve the best result with controlled lighting, but they too need to be edited by a colorist. Because sometimes the controlled lighting can bring unexpected changes in the color temperature.

That is one part of the equation. The other part comes from the camera used for shooting. There are different types of cameras used to shoot in one film. These cameras made by different manufacturers have different light sensors. And so the color produced by these cameras do not match exactly with each other.

So again, the colorist will have to work with all the footage from different cameras to make them match each other. The goal is to make sure all the shots in the film have the correct amount of exposure, hue, white balance, and ambiance.

So basically these are the work a colorist has to do in color correction. Next, we have color grading.

Color grading

The next work of a colorist is color grading. Okay, so what is color grading? It is the manipulation of color in a shot. The reason for such work could be to bring an artistic style to the footage or make it match the visual aesthetics of the story.

Color grading is not as simple as swapping the colors of a shoot. It requires a strong understanding of color theory. Because based on the color grading, the theme of the footage will respond with the psychological effect it has on audiences.

Color grading has a much larger area of use. Color grading can be used to completely change the shot. Turning day-shoot footage into night-shoot footage can be the perfect example.

Other examples include changing the psychological mood of footage. Color theory suggests that the mixture of color in a theory can make a happy scene look like a sad scene

You can see visual examples of this theory. Watch a film and you will see that the happy scenes have an orange color theme. Suspense scenes have a bluer tone with black. There is more to this color grading. It is perhaps the biggest work of a colorist. This whale process of color grading can take three or more weeks.

The colorist will have to match the color of every footage in the film and then shoot it to the director to match the aesthetics of the film with its visual representation.

Color Swapping

One interesting work of the colorist is to swap colors. For example, swapping red with blue, yellow, or black. It is not usually used. But sometimes they are necessary to remove distractive objects from the backgrounds.

Conclusion

So that was all about a Colorist in film. They are an important part of filmmaking. They add value in the film which is not possible to achieve with traditional means.

We hope that you have understood the role and work of a colorist. If you are more interested in the work of a colorist, we suggest you start with color theory.