Color Me You | Feature Film

Director | Marco Bottiglieri

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Color Me You / feature film

is a feature-length independent drama directed by Marco Bottiglieri, shot across Waco and Dallas, Texas in 2016 and released the following year through Indie Rights. The story follows Kat Abernathy, a young woman pressured to uphold the family name through law school and the family practice, who quietly builds a second identity so she can chase her real passion as a painter. Kaley Caperton leads as Kat, with an ensemble that includes veteran screen actors Glenn Morshower (24, Transformers) and Buck Taylor (Gunsmoke, Tombstone).

The most remarkable thing about the film is the budget behind it. The entire feature was produced for under $100,000, an ultra-low figure for imagery shot at this level. I came onto the project for a friend and forfeited my own rate so every dollar could go where it counted, into crew and equipment. This was independent filmmaking at its most stripped down: a small grip and electric crew, a largely local Texas cast, and a different location every single day of the sixteen-day schedule, which meant loading in and loading back out somewhere new each morning.

Because the story belongs to a painter, I built the photography to feel like her canvas: compressed, painterly frames on longer lenses, with deep, saturated color running through every scene. We shot on an ARRI ALEXA Classic with Cooke S4 primes, a pairing prized for its warmth and gentle, filmic rendering, and lit the entire feature with a lean, tungsten-only package of 10K units to sculpt each space. Parker Jarvie at Company 3 finished the grade and brought the color to its full intensity. The result looks well beyond its means, the kind of rich, controlled imagery usually reserved for productions many times the size.

The constraints were real, and they sharpened the work rather than limiting it. The stills remain among my favorite frames I have ever captured, and Color Me You stands as proof that a clear visual idea and a committed crew can far outrun a budget.