Sillhouette

A

Amerikan123

Well-known member
Hi, im trying to get a shot like this. A sillhouette of a man and then a lighter flicks on and when it does the lights turn on and you see the guy but i want only the lighter to be in color, everything else in black and white. Can anyone help me with that?
 
So, a silloutted man in a well-lit doorframe who uses a magic lighter that appears in color in the otherwise black-and-white scene.

I'd say you could shoot a guy against a wall that you've blown out with a shop light or something (hell, if you block the light reaching the man, you could use windowlight). Then, in aftereffects/combustion/whatever, I'd use a square-ish mask around the lighter, invert it, and then put a desaturate filter on the inversed mask.

The hardest part will be masking around the fingers on the lighter and/or tracking the mask if the lighter moves...

Just an idea.
 
Amerikan123 said:
Hi, im trying to get a shot like this. A sillhouette of a man and then a lighter flicks on and when it does the lights turn on and you see the guy but i want only the lighter to be in color, everything else in black and white. Can anyone help me with that?
Click to expand...

What NLE are you using. This is becoming a fairly common effect sometimes called the Pleasantville effect. It's pretty easy to do in FCP. I'll provide a link to the tutorial to do this. If you're using a different NLE you should be able to figure it out by doing something similar.

http://www.lafcpug.org/tutorials/basic_pleasantville_look.html
 
i'm really confused but i'll try my best: your saying you want a short scene in black and white but colored for example the sin city look where everything is black and white but has a brownish red tint, right? well if you want it like that just use color correction. well... it depends on the editing program you use. i use vegas 4, so all i need to do is put in the black and white effect and then throw in some color correction say red. it should work but i never tried it before.
 
Just shoot your footage. Bring into after effects, drop into a new comp, make a copy of that footage apply a desaturation filter on the bottom one. Create a mask on the top one and size it down to how much of the color version you want to see and feather the mask until you likey. If your lighter is moving then you will have to move the mask frame by frame to match where the lighter is.
 
I know what Amer is trying to pull here. He's trying to make that Sin City effect. You know where its all black and white and Only some things are in color. LOL i don't really know how to do the effect though. Just trying to give the other people a sense of whats going on since i saw some of you were confused replying to his cry.
 
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