Week Three: Observing Color Theatrical vs. Realistic

Almost the end of the sunset. You can see the color’s mixing

The more the sunsets the warm the warms become

I thought this picture was really interesting because it looked like a saturate I maybe wouldn’t want to use on stage because of the way it changes people’s skin tones, and yet this is a real moment of sunlight

Another example of a jaundice looking color I wouldn’t want to put on stage

After talking about color theory I was driving to my film acting class and saw the way the night sky and the day sky were blurring together to create the evening sky. The first picture is very similar to what I saw while driving. It made me think of a cyc. It also made me realize that not all realistic lighting is pretty. 

As the sun sets it can get some pretty crazy ambers in it. It reminds me of when I was designing a show last winter. I put a saturate orange in a window gobo. My mentor loved it, and thought it worked really well. My director thought it was too Halloweenish. I remember him asking me “so what do you think of that orange?” I picked it out so obviously I liked it, but in retrospect it’s interesting to think that there are these “Halloweenish” colors in nature. 

I also think it’s pretty interesting that the warmth of sun can change fairly drastically from one hour to the next.The second, third, and fourth picture were take with less than 2 hours in between each one. I didn’t realize how much the variation of color determines the time of day so much. 

Picking color is always a hard process. Just this weekend I experienced the situation where several of the colors I wanted were not in the space. Just moving up or down by 1 number in the gel swatch book can make such a  big different on your composition. 

Color.