SL-102 / Colour as Effect
Temperature Arc
Warm to cold across 30 seconds — caused by a light-source event, not a slider.
The brief
A scene’s colour temperature migrating across roughly thirty seconds, motivated by a physical light-source event — a sunset, screens waking, bulbs being switched off.
Why it's hard
A uniform global tint slides across the whole frame at once while every practical stays lit, so nothing in the world explains the change.
Name both colour temperatures and the event that causes the handover. The sources have to physically change.
Skill Tests
04 / 28Every challenge is scored against the same vocabulary, so you can compare them. Lit cells are what this one tests.
Starter prompt
Built with the CEMI MediaMax system for Google Veo 3.1. Prompts stay in English — that is the language these models take instructions in. Treat it as a starting point and start varying it.
A fishmonger breaks down ice and closes a market stall, in the style of Michael Mann with Dion Beebe's night-practical cinematography. TEMPERATURE ARC over 30 continuous seconds, motivated entirely by a light-source event: the stall's tungsten festoon bulbs are switched off one string at a time, so the frame migrates from 2700K amber to the 5600K blue-white of the display cabinet and the mercury-vapour aisle lamp that were there the whole time. Nothing is corrected; the shift happens because the warm sources leave. Expose for the cabinet and let the back of the stall fall to near-black. Dirty foreground: a hanging plastic strip curtain and a scale hook at frame left; 35mm at f/2 with visible focus breathing and cool halation on the wet steel. The operator tracks two steps and stops. Materials: crushed ice slush, fish scales on galvanised tray, sodden cardboard, brass tap verdigris.
Derived from the CEMI MediaMax production canon — cemi.media
Style reference: Michael Mann, with Dion Beebe's cinematography
A temperature migration is only storytelling when a source causes it — here the warm bulbs physically go out and the cold ones were always present, so the arc is an event rather than a grade slider. Naming both colour temperatures and the exposure reference stops the model splitting the difference into a flat teal. The strip curtain gives the shift a foreground surface to happen on.
A uniform global tint sliding across the whole frame at once while every practical bulb stays lit, so nothing in the world explains the change.
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