COMMUNICATING COLOUR COLOUR COMMUNICA & COLLABORA WORDS NICOLA FOLEY
Aputure gathered a panel of experts at BSC Expo to discuss the current state of professional lighting colour control on-set. We explore the key takeaways A t this year’s BSC Expo, Aputure hosted a panel of experts to dive into how we communicate colour on-set – from director to DOP to that you first need to retrain your brain to understand that “lighting is light, and light is energy. When you discuss it with respect to your understanding of that energy, that’s where colour comes in. It’s a construct in your head, not a physical thing,” he described. The languages we use to describe
EXPO EXPERTS The four esteemed panellists, and moderator Ben Dynice from Aputure, up on stage at BSC Expo in February 2025
the technicians who bring it to life. Moderated by Aputure’s own Ben Dynice, director of product (UX/UI), the discussion featured DOP Ed Moore, BSC, gaffer Chris Stones, lighting programmer Callum Crisell and principal engineer of imaging applications at Aputure, Tim Kang. Kang opened the panel, setting the stage with a presentation on the evolving language of lighting colour control. “This all functions for visual storytelling, which means you have a very specific design choice you need to make,” he began. “So how do you clarify that visual design choice to an entire team of people without any confusion?” He pointed out that colour is a subset of psychophysics – the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and mental phenomena – explaining
show Hijack , described the sheer scale of their lighting set-up: “We had thousands of control channels and worked at an extremely fast pace. We live-graded the whole show in HDR and monitored everything in Rec. 2020.” With so many variables – different fixtures, changing environments and evolving workflows – communicating colour effectively becomes critical. Callum Crisell, who programmed the lighting for Hijack , emphasised the importance of pre-production. “A lot of my metering happens in prep. We were working with five-colour RGBWW pixel tape and that had to be matched precisely to the set lighting. “If one source is reading 6000K, any additional sources must align perfectly – otherwise the
colour – which you see in the different schemas of how we categorise it (white light variations, RGB ratios and so on) are mainly rooted in psychology. They can enable – but also limit – our creativity, as they ignore the physics at play. This foundational understanding of how colour is perceived versus how it’s technically created was central to the panel’s conversation. THE COMMUNICATION CHALLENGE The four panellists highlighted the complexities of achieving consistent colour accuracy throughout an entire production. Moore, DOP on the Apple TV+
60
DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook