Day 8 of 20 Color Grading

So I've spent the last few months working on color correction and then color grading. You might ask if you've already color corrected the footage then what's the purpose of color grading? Let me briefly explain the differences between the two. Color correction is the process of relighting, and white balancing the clips to remove any unwanted color tint the footage may have picked up. Commonly footage will come onto the computer with a yellowish or blueish tint. These colors must be neutralized paying special attention to the skin tones making sure that they are the right color to make the actors look good. Color correction also aims to make sure each clip flows nicely and looks the same as the clip preceding and following it. Color grading is then taking the corrected sequences and adding artistic tints, color effects, or changing the saturation to achieve 3 different purposes.
1. Give it a look.
Often times when you go into a movie you expect that particular movie to have a certain look. Sometimes this is achieved by over or under saturating the entire movie or sequences in the movie. Sometimes it involves adding a tint of one color or another to make it look like it came from an different period.
2. Give it a mood.
Colors often affect our moods. The subtle addition of blue for instance reminds us of cold or even a lonely feeling. Red puts us in a state of caution or anger. And yellow/gold warms and makes us happy. These colors are often used to create a specific mood that the colorist wants you to be in at a certain moment.
And lastly,
3. It tells a story.
Along with putting us in the right mood often times colors are used to tell the story and keep things clear for the audience. For instance in our movie the color of Thomas's shirt change from to scene to scene showing us the spiritual place of Thomas's heart. Going from medium colors down to black colors then once again returning to the lighter colors. In the same way many of the scenes colors will give you cues as to the metaphysical meanings of the scenes so that you can discover more than just the action or dialogue in that scene.

As you can see color grading is a very unique and powerful tool to help create better, more emotional, and clear storylines. And though you may not always notice it the colors can help navigate your subconscious to the right emotions and feelings.

Day 3 of 20 Post Production Lighting

   Here's something you may not know about the movie making industry.  Almost every shot that you see in a movie has been re-lit in post production.  When I'm working as a colorist (One of the many hats I wear) Almost always re-lighting a shot is the second thing I do.  The first being to balance the colors. Re-lighting consists of primarily 3 different forms.
   The first is simple exposure and lighting balance.  Taking each clip and adjusting the blacks, whites and mid-tones to their right levels.  The second form is adding power windows or masks.  These are typically areas of the scene that I want to direct the audiences attention to.  For instance someone's face.  So I add a window around that persons face so that I can lighten just the face making it ever so slightly stand out from everything else.  This is done in such a small way that it takes a very keen eye to spot the difference.  And yet subconsciously everyone notices.  The last type of correction I will use is the vignette.

The tried and true method for focusing ones eye on the area of the screen you want them to.  A vignette is basically like a frame with a soft gradient edge. Like the one to the left.
When placed over an image with a lower opacity the vignette is hardly visible but manipulates the image so that your eye is drawn to the focal point.

This shot combines both the primary re-lighting as well as the vignette.

Day 2 of 20 Compositing Continued

Having analyzed the motion of the original clip the day before, I was able to copy that information to the new layer so that it would track with the original. The next big step was to relight and correct the colors so that both layers blended together. But with much patience this task was accomplished. And the final touch was to add some video noise. With that complete I was able to export it. And here's how it turned out.

Let me know what you think about it in the comments.

Day 1 of 20 Color Correction and Compositing

Today I had the pleasure of touching up the images in a process known as color correction.  So the majority of the day was spent looking at scopes, adjusting colors for each and every clip in a sequence from the middle of the movie.  Although this set of clips was not extremely challenging, the set of clips took several hours to work through as the process is quite time consuming.  After working through a few scenes I started work on a composite.

Compositing for the particular shot I'm working on consists of replacing a cell phone screen with a new screen.  I got a late start and left it half done but I thought I'd share with you some of the steps to creating a composite shot like this one.

The first thing that I did was create the overlay screen.  To do this I set up a camera to record the new screen.  After I brought the new recording onto my computer I stabilized the footage so that it had no movement and saved that file.

Now that I had my new screen prepared I was ready to set up a project file for the new composite.  I brought in the clip with the screen I wanted to replace and had the computer track the movement of the cell phone.  This information will be used to tell the computer where to put the new screen so that it will move with the cell phone's movement.

And the last step I did before leaving work was to take the new screen and add it as a layer to my project.  Then I cropped out everything but the screen to leave me with the perfect image to have over the top of the cell phone.  Tomorrow I will finish this composite and hopefully show you the final results.