Adding That Dark Feeling

A lot of the time people believe that in shooting any film, whether it be in a game or in real life, you can darken the lights and it has a dark feeling. Unfortunately, it isn't that easy. To insert any feeling into a film you need to first recognize the script, the actor's expressions, and the color.

To recognize the script, you need to review the scene and understand if it is intended to be dark or sinister, or if it's going to be somewhere in between. If you don't have a script, you're not out of luck. Review whatever is going in your head, and try to understand if your idea is going to be dark or sinister, or somewhere in between. This is usually the easiest step.

Next, you want to consider the actors. The actors can be human actors in a real life film, or game play characters like in Runescape, WoW, etc. Typically, if you have a game-film you will have voice overs, so speak with the voice over actors and direct very carefully how you want them to deliver a line. This will ensure that your acting for both the game-film and any real life films are clear and obvious to the audience. This step requires some directing skill, but is definitely the second easiest of the steps.

Lastly, think about the color correction. This step will ensure your film looks dark. When I'm color correcting anything that's dark I like to use blues and greens. These colors offer an incredibly effective way of inserting a feeling of darkness. Feel free to adjust anything you want to your liking here as well. The bottom settings are default and have not been changed.

The next step is to brighten the highlights, but darken everything else, especially the shadows. You will definitely need to tinker around with the settings, but don't veer too far away from that image, unless you're going for a completely different look.

If you're using a game video and you're chroma keying a character or object out, you can add a bump map to add an effect of three dimensionality, as well as a sense of darkness and shadows. Feel free to mess around the settings for these as well. This image just summarizes what it will look like, but make sure the intensity is not too high, but not too low either.

All in all, this is a very simple introduction to inserting that dark feeling in your video editing. I use this method for nearly every video I make when it comes to RuneScape and real life (aside from the bump mapping for real life filming). I hope this helps, feel free to comment if you need any more information, and thanks for reading.