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Pixar in a Box
Course: Pixar in a Box > Unit 5
Lesson 1: Introduction to colorGetting to know Dominic Glynn
Getting to know more about Dominic Glynn!
Want to join the conversation?
- How come green is shown as a main color instead of yellow, since green is made up of yellow and blue? Green is a secondary color, and yellow is primary, so pixels should use red, blue and yellow, not green.(31 votes)
- There are differences when you mix pigments and when you mix light. In pigments you mix yellow and blue and you get green, or you mix all colors and you get black. In light you need to mix green and red to get yellow, and when you mix all colors you get white. Primary colors in pigments are red, yellow and blue, in screens and light red, green and blue, for printing cyan, magenta and yellow.(56 votes)
- This said it would take me an hour... it took me half of that.(7 votes)
- It took me longer than an hour because I enjoyed playing around with the color correction, hue, saturation, etc :)(15 votes)
- If Pixar is in the US why do they use British spellings?(7 votes)
- Perhaps they are British people in America.(8 votes)
- why are you studying color sience(6 votes)
- Because it is useful in animation and art, we use this kind of thing all the time(6 votes)
- What movies did Dominic Glynn make?(7 votes)
- why do some illnesses cause color-blindness?(5 votes)
- This is a really cool lesson and I am very interested in light learning!(5 votes)
- How do I know what color this is? Whether you used color correction or not?(5 votes)
- why do we have to do this?(0 votes)
- How do people become blind?(4 votes)
- People sometime have family of it and sometimes from putting things in your eyes. Bright light can also make you blind.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- So, when I was in elementary school, I mean, I studied math
like everybody else, the sorta basics that
we learned at school, and found that there's something about it which it was greater than I am. It wasn't that one person had decided that this is how it was gonna be, it was more that, collectively,
we'd kind of slowly come to a better understanding of something that has always been there. And so, I really appreciated and kind of was in awe of that idea. And at the same time, I
was playing a lot of music, I think, as a young kid, and fascinated in how our ear and our brain and our mind works, given all of this kinda
stimulus coming in. So, for me, it was kind
of a natural meeting of these two worlds. A little bit of math and a
little bit of perception, you smash 'em together, and you
kinda land in color science. Before I started working
in motion picture film, I did some challenging, some people would say some
silly things. (laughs) I used to engage in a
lot of mountaineering, high-altitude climbing. And on one of these
expeditions at high altitude, I suffered an injury to
the retina on my left eye. It's a retinal hemorrhage. So, basically, the retina was
bleeding and became damaged. And it wasn't painful,
but during the process, I was completely fascinated with what was happening
to my visual system. I was able to sort of see,
oh, well something's not right and this is different and new. And then I was able to compare, well, my left eye is
different to my right eye. And if I kinda move my head this way, I can see these weird things
I've never seen before. And so, it was a weird sense
of kind of objective analysis of what was going on,
despite the fact that it was, in some senses, a medical emergency. And we were far away from hospitals and those kinds of things. But that was probably
one of the turning points where I recognized that,
wow, I'm really interested in the human visual system
and what it can and can't do. And, hopefully, we're using that now in a way that's gonna help everybody. Computer systems engineering is the primary degree I studied. Engineering is less about
the specific knowledge and more about knowing
how to learn at speed. So, a good portion of the degree is stress testing your
ability to learn things you've never thought of before and then really put your
assumptions to the test in a hurry. So, I consider the engineering
kinda like a mixed bag of tools that can be applied to a lotta different circumstances. When I started with Pixar, 35-millimeter film was still very much the predominant
distribution format. You know, we used film projectors. You had a xenon lamp and it shown light through a transparency,
a color transparency, up onto a huge screen. The chemistry of the color of film was very much a black art. It was very sophisticated
and there were few players in the field sort of supplying
the materials that we needed. And so, for us to gain insight into how better to
control the color on film, it was a real challenge. So, we went back to first principles. We analyzed the film
at a really low level. I mean, we kind of stretched
and pushed and pulled in every possible exposure way possible and measured everything that we could find about the film until we came to, I guess, a state where we knew more
about how to influence the film than the people who were selling it to us. We were able to do things with it that they didn't even know were possible. I am communicating with the artists, the directors of photography,
the lighting leads and the folks who are
responsible for implementing the color decisions of the studio. And I'm working with
them to better understand what they're trying to achieve. Often, this is one, two, three years in advance of them doing the work. They have an idea in their head
of what they'd like to try. It might be something that
no one's ever seen before. My job then is to sort of
translate those requirements and turn them into a
pipeline or a platform or a set of steps and processes that we can gain confidence is gonna work when the clock's ticking and
we don't have a lot of time to sort of finish this work or to sorta iterate many
times on a creative idea. So, I kinda build the foundation
of the pieces necessary to allow those artists to
really express themselves in a way that's repeatable. Things that are happening in the world of motion picture film. So, on the exhibition
side, you go to the cinema and there's a digital projector today; that's how we experience
our films on the big screen. The next generation of digital projectors is using red, green, and blue lasers to illuminate the scene. So, all of a sudden, we can get these really, really saturated colors way out on the spectral locus. So, the most saturated things
that humans can perceive, we can now create some of those
with these laser projectors. And there's also new
opportunities, I think, for some of our filmmakers to
potentially show you colors that, quite literally,
you've never seen before. Everything that you have a passion for has a value in this world. And people are gonna continue to tell you that this is not cool
or this is not popular or, in my case, it was math and music. They still aren't necessarily
the most socially upheld kind of revered pursuits. But you can find a way easily where that makes a real
difference for somebody, that you can harness that passion
and turn it into something that really makes a
difference in the world.