Colour Powder Planning

By Matt Dickinson

For our colour fight scene we are aiming for it to portray a very energetic feel and atmosphere to suit the song. There will be many close ups of the actors faces to show emotions and reactions while the long shots of the actual action scenes. To give some examples of the footage we are trying to recreate i have put together this post to try and share the insight of what i had in mind.







Above and below are some photos taken from the "Color Run" website (Yes its american) which is a run in many cities across the US to help raise money for a charity of choice. However throughout the race and after the participants cover each other in colour powders for fun. This is the same powder that i have got called "Rangoli Powder" which can cover and stick to the skin but does not stain which means we can wear good quality clothes and not be worried about the powder staining these. This also saves us buying clothes just for this shot. However we are going to ask the actors to wear quite minimal and simple clothes so the powder stands out for the camera.

This is a video produced by a amateur film director called devin "supertramp" where he filmed the festival of holi in india also known as the festival of colour. This is also shown in my pitch post. However also below is the behind the scenes video of when he was filming and this is helpful to see how we can recreate something very similar to his work.





The pictures of the packets of powder we have is below. We made sure we got alot of bright and warm colours such as orange, yellows and pinks to connote happy upbeat and enjoyable atmosphere. We are going to make sure that each of the actors have there fair share and are covered in it to show their enthusiasm.





As you can see they come in small little packets which will allow us to split them easily and may even lead to us being able to throw them easier at each other instead of just throwing the powder itself. Either way there is no way to test this without wasting powder so we will have to leave it to when we actually want to film the scene.



Even though we are using coloured powder which is extremely unpredictable we are still going to be using the DSLR we have to film.

To protect these from the colour powder we are going to do a number of things. Firstly and most importantly is the lens which i have some clear cheap lens filters to cover and protect the lens from harms way. This will prevent any permanent damage to the lens and are easy to replace.



The second thing is the actual body of the lens. Colour powder could get into all the small holes and compartments of the camera completely destroying it and making it very dirty at the same time.

As we didn't have any money to buy housing to protect it from this sort of "environment" i thought it would be a good idea to cover the cameras in cling film. A cheap and easy option which is easy to cover the camera and still have access to nearly all the buttons quickly.

Then the cling film can just be chucked away after with no washing due to the low cost. We made sure we left the lens uncovered due to the lens filters and we still had access to watching the footage as the cling film is clear while being being thin enough to press all the buttons. The only slight issue was manually focussing and zooming which meant we went though a lot of cling film.