How to display moods of happiness and sorrow with color correction in film?

[Sumeet Khurana]

what if I give a blue tint to my video when my character is sad and give a green tint to my video when my character is happy?

Please give advise?

[Todd Terry]

Well aesthetically, blue and green wouldn’t be my first two choices, as chromatically they are pretty similar, and on the same side of the proverbial color wheel.

Green tints on screen aren’t usually thought of as “happy” colors, especially with the way they affect skin tones. Green is a more sickly/scary/dramatic color, as opposed to happy.

Normally I think someone would want to choose colors that are opposite from each other to cue opposing emotions.

The traditional cliche would be to use warm tones (yellows) for happy, and cool tones (blues) for sad.

That’s not always true though. There’s a new show on NBC called “Awake” where the main character is living two realities, and he doesn’t know which is a dream. To keep them separate, they color grade one reality a bit warm, and the other a bit blue. They are not conveying emotion though (as sometimes the blue world is happy, and sometimes the warm world is sad), but just use it as a technique to differentiate between the two.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Richard Herd]

And you should be thinking about a color scheme, not just an overall hue. Generally, there are 3 tones: the darks, the mids, the highs.

Check out this web site:
2,000 color schemes for happy
https://kuler.adobe.com/#themes/search?term=happy

700 color schemes for sad
https://kuler.adobe.com/#themes/search?term=sad

[Mark Suszko]

Along with color grading, music really helps tell the emotional story here.

[Sumeet Khurana]

Thank you Todd Terry,Richard Herd & Mark Suszko for the timely help.Thanks a lot. It really helped me a lot. Now color grading and color correction tutorials on web make more sense to me.