
Yesterday I sat down with the very talented Joseph Bicknell to begin colour grading. For those who aren't familiar with the term this is where you start to really fine tune the look of the film by manipulating the colours of the picture.
It's an exciting part of the process for two reasons. One, it begins to look like an actual finished film and we get to make it look "noir". The original ideas that I had for the look and Sam's concept art only start to be fully realised now.
The second reason is that I have been editing the film, and thus watching it, as 360p proxies for the past month and a half. Basically, that means I made lo-res copies of all the raw footage so it doesn't crash my laptop every time I make a cut. You then relink it to all the full-res 4K files afterwards. So I've been watching the film on something most suitable for this...
It's an exciting part of the process for two reasons. One, it begins to look like an actual finished film and we get to make it look "noir". The original ideas that I had for the look and Sam's concept art only start to be fully realised now.
The second reason is that I have been editing the film, and thus watching it, as 360p proxies for the past month and a half. Basically, that means I made lo-res copies of all the raw footage so it doesn't crash my laptop every time I make a cut. You then relink it to all the full-res 4K files afterwards. So I've been watching the film on something most suitable for this...
When the final thing will be suitable for this...
Now Joseph doesn't even use the full-res files, he makes his own intermediates, but they're much bigger and boy, is there a difference! What was once just a mess of blueish pixels in the background are now highly defined blades of light.
So yesterday Joseph and I simply worked out a general look of the film and tone of the colour palette. We looked at a few other films for references and experimented with the different variations. We've now got that look pretty much defined so we'll continue later in the week with Michael, our DoP, to fine tune each shot. MT
So yesterday Joseph and I simply worked out a general look of the film and tone of the colour palette. We looked at a few other films for references and experimented with the different variations. We've now got that look pretty much defined so we'll continue later in the week with Michael, our DoP, to fine tune each shot. MT