Week 1: Diving into Color Grading

Hi everyone! This week I officially started working on my senior project. At the beginning of the week, I started talking with my on-site advisor Matt Sprouse, the President and Executive Producer at York and Wilder. As a producer, Matt has a lot of connections to people across the television production network. He put me in touch with his production coordinator, and his director of post production.With the assistance of both of these people, I will gain a great understanding of how colors are predicted during production, and how they end up looking in post-production. Additionally, we focused on planning and logistics for a TV series that York and Wilder are producing for A&E, and developed strategies for managing incoming footage from the field.

Outside of my placement, I started reading some of my course texts: “Exploring the Combined Impact of Color and Editing on Emotional Perception in Authentic Films: Insights from Behavioral and Neuroimaging Experiments,” by Zhengcaoand Cao, and “Color Grading in Film: How Complementary Colors Affect an Audience’s Perception of Mood,” by Audrey Everett. Cao conducted two different experiments: a behavioral experiment and a Neuroimaging experiment. The behavioral experiment included 117 participants viewing film sequences varying in color (colored vs. black-and-white) and editing styles (fearful, neutral, happy). They rated the emotional valence of neutral faces within these sequences. The results indicated a significant interaction between color and editing on these valence ratings. In the neuroimaging experiment, 67 participants watched similar sequences while undergoing fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans. The study identified specific activations in brain regions such as the insula, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and middle frontal gyrus. Specifically, the left ACC showed interaction effects on neural responses, highlighting its role in processing combined audiovisual emotional cues.

Everett investigated how different complementary color gradings influence viewers’ emotional responses. The study examined three color grading pairs—Teal and Orange, Red and Green, and Purple and Yellow—against an ungraded control to assess their impact on audience mood perception. Everett found that teal and orange grading elicited the most positive and robust emotional reactions from viewers, making it a popular choice in film production. During the red and green grading, viewers experienced slightly negative emotional responses. The purple and yellow grading gave the impression of a dated setting, affecting the perceived time period of the film. The research concludes that intentional color grading can significantly enhance an audience’s emotional engagement by increasing attentiveness and mental stimulation.

In the coming weeks, I’m very excited to be working with Matt on various projects. I hope to utilize some color grading for social media to play around with the ways in which the message could be interpreted. I’m excited to learn more about the emotional impacts of different color grades through different experiments and how they have been applied to different films. In the next week, I plan to review a few sci-fi movies from the past, and explore how the movie turned out vs. how the director wanted the movie to turn out. This could provide some answers as to how color grading could affect a movie’s message during post-production, which can be hard to vision during production.