Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Dec 16: Paul Grimault - Le Petit Soldat [Updated]

Ok, seven screenshots are too many, besides I'm not sure if I would have been able to arrange them right myself. You're still able to guess, though.

Today, let's have a look at Paul Grimault's charming 1947 short Le Petit Soldat, the French version of Andersen's "Steadfast Tin Soldier".

In reality, snow is more or less white, so it can adopt almost any color depending on lighting and mood a film maker wants to achieve. In this case, the European color system in use could also have affected the resulting color.



What's the color of the snow in this picture?
In case you are new, THIS is how it works.



A                           B                            C                            D

Surprisingly, it is A:
The only other film I know that uses green for night-time scenes is Hitchcock's To Catch A Thief, but there it is more of an experiment to get rid of the blue day-for-night convention and there's no snow whatsoever. In case you know any other film that shows green snow at night, I'd be interested to know about it.



5 comments:

Aaron said...

D

Urwen said...

D

Soriah said...

It's C. It just gives me this "evening" town feel.

Anonymous said...

don't trust the colors you see on your DVD. they have been manipulated by some idiot color technician during the film transfer. if you take white as the absolute light source and use a color correction system based on white it gives you the correct color for this scene. and it definetely is not green. it is a grey/violet blue.

hans

Oswald Iten said...

Thanks for stopping by, Hans! I was almost sure this color wasn't intended to be green. But I usually stay away from color correcting dvd screenshots because more often than not they have already been tampered with already.
I just wondered if that color change appeared during the transfer or was already present on the original film prints (due to some technician's error or some inferior color process).