Colour grading was intense. I looked up a few tutorials online to learn the basics and to add the adjustment layers over the clips rather than adjusting the clips themselves. I was mainly using curves and utilising the highlights and shadows. The problem was trying to keep the skin tones of the actors the same and making sure that the grade didn’t add a grainy look to the shots. After speaking to James about figuring out the exposure and making it a little lighter for a cinema screening I mainly up’d the exposure about 1 or 2 stops for each shot which made it a lot easier to see. The actual colour grading became about figuring out the highlights  and shadows of each colour. Making sure that the rooms gave off a vibrance that matched each other and the story. I ended up keeping it quite “normal” for the beginning scenes then increasing the contrast for the second time he would enter the rooms so that it looks way more saturated and dream like.

The smoke was also an issue. Even though the smoke would change with the coloured lights, it became a little too fake so I had to make sure not to increase the colour too much around the smoky scenes or the figures were lost. I think the best example of me getting around that was the second dining room scene in which the smoke comes in and Thomas turns around then back to his family and they are covered in blood. I made the colour grade uniformed to the first scene until when he turns back then I increased the contrast on the shots of the family to make the blood more vivid.

The green scenes became difficult as the more I played around with it the darker it got. I started to see a grainy haze come over the shots and had to figure out a different approach to it which was to play with the highlight and shadows. The shadows I made darker, but not too dark considering the girls hair would blend into the background, and then just made sure the highlights were picking up the greens. I’m pretty proud of the way that I eliminated the sunlight that was coming through the windows and my attempt to tint them green went pretty well. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do that with the dining room since the whole room was supposed to be grey but even then I didn’t mind the look of it considering theres more cuts and action going on in that room so it will probably go unnoticed.

There are a lot of things about this film that I’m not happy with, but I keep being reminded by the others that most people won’t be picking those issues up and it’s only because I’ve been staring at it colour grading for two days so I’m just going to be checking with everyone at the screening to see if they notice the things that I hate about it. Lets see what happens.