Color grading of The Force Awakens

There are some bright, white flashes in this scene and they reveal that blue color comes from the on-set lighting, not color grading. The interior of this dropship, or whatever it is, is just illuminated blue. This isn't a deliberate edit to "modernize" the look.

Still a very interesting insight though.

 

I think the 'lens flare' and 'shaky cam' concerns were way overdone and way too picky to start with. Lens Flare: a naturally occurring phenomenon. So dude overdid it in Star Trek. I loved the film and didn't even notice til it was picked over to death. ("It was unwatchable and hurt my eyes boy" please exit stage left. Now.)

Shaky Cam: I get it. It's supposed to make you feel like you are there. More disconcerting would be if a camera was held perfectly in place on a turbulent flight, yeah? (If it ends up looking like "Blair Witch Project", come at me bro.)

If these two things are done right (flare on the Falcon in the air and shaky cam on a rocky stormtrooper flight) then we have a winner.

If we get crazy lens flare to mask the big 3's age..........well that's a problem.

 

I wholeheartedly agree. I only meant by my original offhand comment in the beginning of the thread that I was pleased not to see a Trek asthetic here (seemed that way in the concept art) with offscreen lens flares being something I automatically tie to that. I want to be thinking of Star Wars, not Trek.

About the camera, it's not nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I don't think it really is a true "war cam" type of shaky cam. Seems to me it is simply moving with the environment, which is totally different from handheld/documentary style. Gives it a sense of immediacy, I think.

Everything else seemed standard fare for Star Wars, the OT especially. I read a dozen comments with people complaining about the Falcon camera tracking. Come one, did people really not watch Empire or Jedi? Seems like they don't remember the asteroid chase/escape or the second Deathstar run.

 

Anything is better than teal and orange! I was hoping for a desaturated 70s look as well

 

I'll have to watch the trailer again but I think that the shaky cam from the storm trooper scene is actually only due to a camera being set inside an actual set designed to "bump." Which is very cool.

 

One of the first things i notiched from the trailer, was the color saturation.
Much looks really bright, but also a little unnaturel. Like the desert is too orange looking and indeed that ship interior too much blue.

 

The saturation looks good to me. If you want a good example of over saturation, look no further than the Hobbit series. That looks unnatural and watching back to back in the theater today sure makes that clear. Some people are saying TFA is too vibrant, but I'm not sure what they're comparing it to. The prequels are way more vibrant than this and in fact, most modern action films are far less tasteful when it comes to color correction than what we see here. If anything, some scenes are slightly desaturated like Oscar Issac in the X-Wing. Nothing so uniformly desaturated as a film like Saving Private Ryan, but the originals never looked that way to begin with.

Also, a last word about proper color viewing. Unless you saw it in a theater or your TV is properly calibrated, the default settings of most monitors and TVs tend to be too cold, vibrant, and bright than what the actual editor intended you to see. If I change my color settings to the default on my TV, the trailer looks way too vibrant, but my custom calibration makes it look just right. If you want a good idea of how it should look, stream it to your TV and set your picture mode to Movie or Cinema setting for a quick calibration. See how it looks after that, shouldn't be too vibrant or saturated at all.

 

Oddly I think people want it to look exactly like 1977.

Nothing looks like that anymore and it would be odd to see that.

The closest I think you could get is "Mad Men," which is basically naturally desaturated due to the choice in colors throughout the show.

 

I agree there could be a little too much blue in the Stormtrooper scene compared to the rest, but J.J. likes to mix it up. I can imagine Star Wars VII could be similar to Skyfall in the way it changes color grading throughout.

 

I hate it when theres too much color correction used, when you clearly see it.
But i think it will be not too heavy in this film.

And yes, those hobbit films look awfully unreal.

 

It's all down to the Red Epic/Dragon cameras I think, they actually had to paint the sets more red or blue in order for them to come out looking normal, so a lot of color correction was used to counter that and it went wrong. This is why I prayed the new Star Wars wouldn't be 3D.

 

I reckon those flickering edits are just for the benefit of the teaser, I imagine the shots will be longer in the finished scene, most likely intercut with something else...

 

It's not colouring. It's actually the lighting on the set. I noticed that right before the clip cuts to black, there is a flash of light in the scene from outside. I paused it on this moment and you can see that it is just the particular lighting they used in the cabin set is very blue.

 

Can't really know for sure, things change in post.

 

Its a bit off topic but I wonder why the Stormys are so clean. I expected them to be dirty. But well I think after their Mission of what ever they are going to do, they will be very dirty or dead.

 

They aren't actually blue...you guys know that right?

It's just the interior lighting.

 

Hey, you can never be too careful sometimes.

Star Wars fans have been known to get a little crazy sometimes

 

Btw. can it be that those Stormys are the James Bond crew?