Bringing New Life to an Old Project
Reimagining stills from the music video for bar101 from keni can fly’s garden of earthly delights.
An entry from Chris —
I decided to recolor some old music videos we shot on 16mm film so that I could look at my new videos in a different way. I started with bar101, which keni and I shot in Monterey in 2020 with Michael and Patrick.
I edited it and colored it to the best of my abilities in early 2021, but looking back on it, I didn’t really touch the actual color a lot. I just played with the exposure and really basic saturation stuff.
When you get the film negative back it is really bland and almost white. Especially with this camera, the Krasnagorsk 3 which is a Soviet 70s camera. It has problems in the loop formers because they’re connected by string. Often, half the time the film comes back super shaky which I use in my videos for effects. It’s in bar101 too. When I checked later on by opening it up, I found out that the string had just completely decayed.
Image of a Krasnagorsk 3
With the new color, I started with a basic LUT which increased the contrast in a way you can’t really touch with the normal knobs they have in Final Cut. Then, I added a ton of yellow orange purple and green which brought out the really nice forest depth in Monterey that was missing in the first cut. Also, the ocean became so blue. I’m not the best at coloring yet but it’s super fun to learn a new skill, and side-by-side, the new one is definitely better.
Little changes in color completely change how you are affected by a video. I don’t know the specifics and I’m sure color theory could give you a much more complicated answer as to why that is, but for me, when things are bluer it feels like early morning and much colder. Oranger more saturated colors make it feel hotter and more tropical. Going too far one way or the other can totally ruin the video—even if you have the best idea or footage ever—which is stressful but also a fun challenge. I feel like this recoloring is a good in-between.
Take a scroll through the rest:
