music video color effects in premiere pro (calvin harris)

Published on July 4, 2017

Adobe Premiere Pro Tutorials

Color effects, Lumetri, premiere pro

Since the beginning of time colors had a important role in the survival of mankind. Colors made clear what was dangerous or safe, for example with food or with predators. But color isn’t important anymore for our survival, except if fashion is life of course. These days color is a means of entertainment and statements, for example they use it in art such as painting and movies. Nonetheless, color is still important and creates feelings and atmospheres. So choosing the color of and in your scene can be very crucial for setting the right mood.

In this tutorial we explain how you can recreate the color effects from the new Calvin Harris hit, Feels ft. Pharrell Williams and Katty Perry. They use psychedelic color changes with overlays to create special hue effects and give it that more summery feeling. These effects can be subtle like only changing the grass around Katty or water around Pharell. Which you can achieve with the Lumetri secondary color selector. You can select a color and change the hue with the various settings. But the effects can also be very present and dominating. At sudden moments the footage is completly purple and green, combined with a chromatic aberration. These effects give the scene a very different feeling.

The power of inducing feelings is because of the psychological properties of colors. Every color has his mental and emotional effects on people. These theories can be subjective from person to person, but you also have more proven and accepted elements. The commonly noted psychological effects of color can relate to two main categories: warm and cool. Warm colors, such as red, yellow and orange, can spark a variety of emotions ranging from comfort and warmth to hostility and anger. Cool colors, such as green, blue and purple, often spark feelings of calmness as well as sadness. Just keep in mind that certain shades or tones may result in very different meanings and emotions. Also, the context around the color, and even surrounding colors, can have an effect.

Behind the Scenes

We payed much attention to bright, saturated colors when shooting the demos. Colors that stand out can be selected more easily. Everything was shot on the iFootage mini crane with the Panasonic GH5.

VideoBlocks

This video was supported by Videoblocks, an easy to use site full of stock footage, vector images, stock photos, music, sound effects and more.