Today I worked on the grading and colour correction for my film.
This is the part I was most excited for, as I really enjoy doing this, changing the mood of the film just by altering which colours will stand out.
I wanted blue to be the main colour, maybe featured mostly in the shadows, and then in the scenes with the post-it notes, I wanted the colours of the post-it notes to stand out and the rest of the colours to be dialled down.
Before and after: the scenes after colour grading.
As I was editing the scenes, creating a blue tint to them, I thought it looked good, however I took a break and came back to my project and hated how it looked. This was really frustrating because I felt like I had wasted my whole day making something I didn’t like the look of, and I didn’t want to hand in my film looking like this.
Final Film Draft 1 (Colour grading stops 3/4 of the way through, as I didn’t like how it turned out)
So I needed to think about what else to do with he film, as I didn’t want to just leave the film with no colour editing at all.
I then thought about using both colour scenes and black and white scenes, like in Memento. Maybe using the moving scenes in black and white, and the still shots of the house in colour, or the other way round. This could help to show the two different scenes I have in my film, as if it’s two different narratives.
But then I had an idea to just have the post it notes as colour, by using masks to make the rest of the video black and white, and just have the post-it notes as colour.
This would exaggerate the importance of the post-it notes to my character, as the main focus is going to be drawn to them in every scene they’re in.
Screenshots of masks.
Most of the scenes with the post-it notes i had to use masks to create the effect i wanted, but with the bright yellow notes, i actually just desaturated every colour in the scene apart from the bright yellow, and this was really helpful when editing the scene where the post it not on the bottle, otherwise it would have taken a very long time to mask out every frame to make sure i got the effect i wanted.
Screenshot of desaturating colours that aren't the post-it note, on the hue vs sat panel.
With the pink and orange post-it notes it was a bit different because there were other things in the scenes that were orange and pink, so i couldn't just desaturate every colour apart from them. It was okay though, since i could just add masks to create the same effect.
Screen recording of masking out a post-it note frame by frame.
For a few scenes i had to edit the post-it note frame by frame as my camera wasn't on a tripod, and in one scene he opens the cupboard door. To do this i just moved through the frames and adjusted where the mask was depending on how much it moved throughout the scene.
I will upload my final film and thoughts in my next blog post.
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