Whitney Clay: Welcome to the West Valley College TEACH Center podcast.
Michelle Francis: TEACH stands for training educators advocating change.
Whitney Clay: I'm Whitney Clay, Instructional designer.
Michelle Francis And I'm Michelle Francis, Professional Development Coordinator and Instructor in Child Studies.
Whitney Clay: At the TEACH Center, we support faculty as they cultivate excellence in teaching and learning and welcome their students with engaging pedagogies.
Michelle Francis: In this podcast, we discuss hot topics in teaching and learning. We interview educators about what they are doing in their fields, and we talk to learners about what inspires them.
Whitney Clay: Today in the studio, I'd like to welcome Professor William Clay, Professor of film, and I've got a question for you.
William Clay: All right, I'm all ears.
Whitney Clay: And my question for you is, what do you do to help your students understand the use of color in film?
William Clay: It's it's important, and I think it's something we do take for granted. But like everything else in film, it's it's very, very intentional. You know, you're trying to craft this fictive world or reproduce reality in some way, shape or form. And everything you do is going to be towards this unified purpose of creating either something that's very gritty or something that's very beautiful, just something that affects the viewer, and color is an incredibly important weapon in that. So first of all, I let them know that every color has a reason and a purpose and meaning.
Whitney Clay: How do you get them to not take it for granted?
William Clay: Well, one thing is point certain things out to them. You know that they've already seen before that they can now reevaluate using that meaning that's inherent in it. The color red is always an easy thing to point out, and it's like, Well, you notice that guy has red boots. He has red boots for a reason. Do people normally wear red boots? They don't. This guy has very special red boots, and these red boots are tied to something else that is probably red.
Whitney Clay: What does red often mean?
William Clay: Red is excitement. It's a stimulation. In the French film the City of Lost Children, there's this constant repetition of red, white and green, and there's this Christmas theme to it. And then that's juxtaposed with green, which is the opposite color on the color wheel. And so red and green tend to vibrate against each other. Very often, people use red and green in opposition. If red is good and green is bad, or if red is bad and greed is good, that sort of thing. So very good opposite in that particular case.
Whitney Clay: I know that you teach both lecture classes where students watch films and you also teach production classes where they make films. How do you work with your production students differently from how you work with the students who are watching films?
William Clay: Well, with the students who are who are watching the films, we point out things and we analyze it and say This is what they're doing. This is the meaning that's being created and this is why you're receiving it that way. When I said my production students out, I give them a certain amount of preparation saying, This is what we want to do. This is what we want to accomplish. But very often it's when they bring those films back to you and you point out things like, So you're doing this, and this is very similar to the films that we're analyzing and the other class. Our minds work in a very specific way to kind of create order or create interest and things like that. And so when we go out and shoot stuff, we're doing a lot of the same things that these filmmakers are doing very intentionally. So the conscious and the subconscious tend to work together to try to create a compelling art form.
Whitney Clay: What about black and white films?
William Clay: Black and white films are interesting because of the fact that you don't have color. The tonality then becomes everything. We're just watching a black and white film in class the other day, and that's one thing that students noticed. Like, What do you notice about this film visually? It's in black and white. I guess you notice the black and white. And if you see a film today, a modern film that's in black and white, it's a very intentional act when you shoot black and white. It's a very different approach. The way you approach color with with color, you try to balance things out. You try to have kind of even tonality and then you may favor certain colors or things like that, whereas with the black and white, you're going to be going for something a lot more contrast. So the brights are going to be brighter, the darks are going to be darker and you can use colors like red and green are going to be affected much differently. When you're looking at something, they have no color, but you can change the way those things appear on the screen in black and white. And particularly with skin tones that can be a very conscious then sky as well. The sky is going to look a certain way. We take that for granted. But when you shoot in black and white very often, it's like you want to try to make that as dark as possible to really make it kind of punch. You've got white clouds in a very dark sky and very, very bright skin. The kind of contrast against that.
Whitney Clay: That's making me think of Day for Night. How does that work?
William Clay: Day for Night is something that hardly anybody does anymore because it looked fake as hell, but at the same time, it looked beautiful. And part of that was using a very specific filter on the camera, usually a red filter and a red filter. First of all, is going to make things much darker to begin with. To me, it's going to really clamp down on the amount of light you do. But anything that has red in it will appear to be brighter and anything that is the opposite of red. Your greens, your blues are going to appear very dark. So trees will be very dark. Sky will be very dark. And those are the things that are going to go dark whenever you know it's nighttime.
Whitney Clay: Whenever it's night, yeah. Dark in the night
William Clay: Dark in the night.
Whitney Clay: And then one last question I have for you. Is there a time historically that you liked the way color was used in films or a particular director?
William Clay: I'm a big fan of late 60s, early 70s color films, and that was really kind of the end of using dye colors in the film processes. So prior to that, Technicolor and Warner color, Eastman color, all those, it was kind of like Kodachrome, which was the type of film where for the yellows, for the reds, for the blues. They would have very specific dyes that were used in the film in order to make the color, and it had a very specific look to it. And as we get to the late 60s and the early 70s, that's kind of like that. And this ridiculously crazy, vibrant color where like the blood would be orange for some reason, but it is really beautiful. And then after that, it's like that dye disappeared and went out of it and everything that very earthy look in the 70s from the mid 70s onward became a very earthy look to everything. But right before that happened, you know, right at the end of the late 70s that that those dye pictures and also it would also fit in with kind of a renaissance of American filmmaking to kind of the American new wave of filmmaking. And so that vibrant, vibrant color plus vibrant acting, vibrant directing, you know, things like you look at Bonnie and Clyde, that's probably a perfect example of that. And point blank from like 1967, just ridiculously gorgeous films, the colors just totally off the charts. But they're also kind of dark and gritty at the same time.
Whitney Clay: I love hearing about the stuff that gets you excited about it and hearing your own perspective. And thank you, Professor Clay, for coming on the TEACH Center podcast today and letting us into your your world of color. And we appreciate having you here. So thanks so much.
William Clay: You are welcome. Anytime.