Today, after watching Joker yesterday, I wanted to have a go at editing my own footage in the grading style of the Joker.
And by ‘my own footage’ I mean log footage found online, uploaded specifically for people to practice colour grading.
To do this I used stills from the movie, and used a split screen in DaVinci to compare my own footage to them.
In the bottom right corner of the screen there are scopes, which have a split down the middle showing how the grading in the screenshot looks compared to your own footage. This made editing the footage easier, as I could edit and adjust based off of what the scopes looked like.
Joker is known for its strong teal and orange colour scheme at points during the film, so I wanted to have a go recreating that in my own footage.
Editing Footage 1:
I thought I was screen recording my process but it didn’t work, so for the first video I edited below shows the before and after of the editing I did.
The scopes in the bottom right are a lot more aligned afterwards, showing that both my video and the screenshots I used for reference match up quite similarly.
Screenshot showing before and after grading.
Log video before editing.
Final video after editing.
I personally don’t like how this one turned out, I think the video I made was too dark, and although that is an accurate representation of Gotham, I don’t think it matched the video very well. There are also people in this clip, so all the grading I applied to the clip affected the peoples skin tones and clothes which isn’t what I wanted.
So I decided to try again with a different clip.
Footage 2:
I tried again with a different video, following the exact same process, and I think it turned out pretty well.
This video was easier to edit, as there were no people in shot, and it’s the same kind of angle as the reference image I used.
Time-lapse of editing process.
Video showing before and after.
In the video above it shows down how I broke down each node, and what the video looks like at each stage when editing the video.
Conclusion:
Overall, I think this experimentation was interesting and definitely fun to try out. There are so many other films with unique colour grades, so there are so many more options to try out if I ever wanted to try this again in the future (I definitely will).
Video References:
Playlist of log footage:
Amara, A (2021), YouTube, Colorgrading Practice Footage, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3FmF-b5bDOYlPiK2KrmJn5OfXYjkhjEQ (Accessed 16/4/22)
Separate video links:
Amara, A (2021), YouTube, Fujifilm GFX 100, 4k F-Log | Ungraded log footage Free Download link | Practice colorgrading, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V6n9i83wqk&list=PL3FmF-b5bDOYlPiK2KrmJn5OfXYjkhjEQ&index=5 (Accessed 16/4/22)
Amara, A (2021) YouTube, Sony A6600 4K S-Log 3 | Ungraded log footage Free Download link | Practice colorgrading, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLO7Wv732D0&list=PL3FmF-b5bDOYlPiK2KrmJn5OfXYjkhjEQ&index=43 (Accessed 16/4/22)
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