Chromatic Storytelling: Exploring Color, Light and Story

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Color is not decoration. It is a narrative instrument as precise as dialogue, as expressive as performance, and as technically demanding as any craft in filmmaking. This course treats color and light as a unified system — one that begins the moment a lens points at a subject and ends only when a final graded frame reaches an audience's screen. Students move through the full arc of that journey: the physics and perception of light, the chemical and digital history of cinema's evolving palette, the craft of cinematography and lighting design, and the technical workflows of color grading and finishing. Weekly assignments draw from the full breadth of cinema history, while lab sessions give students hands-on time with industry-standard tools. Why does Amélie feel warm and whimsical while Parasite feels cold and suffocating? Why did the Coen Brothers drain all the color from No Country for Old Men? And what on earth is a LUT? This course answers all of these questions — and will ruin movies for you forever (in the best possible way).