Hollywood Film Effects: Creating a Black and White Film

The art of screening a film in black and white is one that is becoming popular again as a backlash against the over-saturated images permeating TV and film. There is also a misunderstanding of what it means for a film to be black and white versus a film that is monochrome. Monochrome generally refers to an image being one colour and white while black and white is actually the harsh contrast of black and white. Most early films were in fact monochrome, showing shades of grey. It was only in the late 1970s that films started being produced that were deliberately designed to be black and white.

Screening your film in black and white is a double edged sword, though, and film audiences will want to know that there is a good reason for the black and white usage. A common one is to make the footage appear to be from an earlier time in history. Another use is for a "not in the world of the film" style, a dream sequence, or a memory sequence. Finally, black and white is often used to simply cover up poor lighting design during a shoot, in which case the whole film will probably be screened in black and white for continuity.

Understanding how black and white can look can open up more opportunity for you to create a mood with your film that colour cannot achieve as well for the simple reason that colour can tend to overwhelm the viewer. Black and White, in this article will refer to the most extreme use of black and white with minimal grey in the image.

A soft black and white image is one that traditionally looks like an image with the colour removed. This is also known as "de-saturated" image to some editors. While this does present a "black and white" image, the contrast is not high and so the image appears "soft".

Creating a true black and white image, shooting in black and white film, is considered much more difficult than shooting in colour because of the way light will react to colour images does not translate as easily to rendering your image in black and white. Another factor is that bright sunlight on light skinned actors can appear fine while shooting and then show up to be over-exposed when converting to black and white. Compensating for this requires and editing suite that supports being able to adjust the colours on a per-colour basis, as even when an image is black and white, adjusting the levels of the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black channels will affect the look of the black and white image.

A way to augment your film when screening in black and white is to adjust the contrast level, to use the levels command, or to use the curves feature in your video editor to make the blacks more black without blowing out (overexposing) the white areas of your image. Most of the high end consumer non-linear video applications will be able to manage this, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, AVID, Final Cut Pro and Canopus Edius Pro

It is important when you begin adjusting your colour film to black and white that you don't attempt to lay down one setting for all your footage. Rather, look at each shot as an individual piece and adjust the black and white settings accordingly. This is, of course, because the lighting and background production design will be unique for each case. Simply making your film comply to a uniform black and white setting will cause areas of your film to not look as well as they could, for example, extremely dark areas.

In conclusion, consider black and white for your next film, let it add the mood and style that colour can't. Using black and white, and other video effects, will allow your film to be distanced from others at film festivals and screening simply because of the daring use of black and white.