BEHIND THE SCENES: Feature film color grade \\ They Don't Cast Shadows

[Music] in the last two years i've had a pretty radical shift in how i've thought and approached color grading when it comes to films and i want to walk you through that today now if you're anything like me when you first opened up maybe your your editing program and started messing around with color grading you started at the first shot and tried to make it look good and you kept going through the project shop by shot doing your best to make it look as good as possible now the problem with this approach is although you can make each shot look good when you watch it as a whole usually it looks inconsistent on a shot-to-shot basis there's no through line of color and my world was really flipped around one day when i was listening to walter valprado who i did the last jedi dunkirk among a bunch of other films he was talking about why are we starting on a shot-to-shot basis when it comes to films zoom back and say what do we want to be true over the course of this film start developing those building blocks then say underneath that what are the nuances that each scene will have and then there treat each shot individually i want to show you how this works itself out practically so let's jump into the film so let's talk about how we developed these core building blocks for this feature now up here we have the final building blocks but i want to show you kind of how they were developed so the first thing that we looked at was the overall contrast curve so i'm just say uh the curve of the piece here now what we did is we started off by taking the saturation down to zero so we could just look at a black and white image and from there we started experimenting so we started taking the uh the lift here you'll see we bring the lift down and i'm gonna go a little too much for the moment but we'll see we'll bring that back and then we'll take the gain here and we'll crank it up um increasing our linear contrast probably something about there and now i start doing is looking at different shots from different scenes and say how does this feel does this contrast feel right does it need any tweaking as i'm looking at it i'm thinking it's good but uh some of the the black elements they might need to be raised slightly another way we could visualize this is with a ramp all right so you can see all these different steps if you look at the the scopes down here so you can see what our curve currently looks like now i think what i'm going to want to do to this is to help preserve some of those shadows i'm going to add a nice little toe here and then also a nice little highlight roll off here probably right about there let's see how that's looking in our images all right pretty decent contrast on the darkest elements we still have detail we're not losing detail back it off slightly as i click through different moments from the film uh contrast is looking good and uh looks like we're not losing any detail so now we can get rid of the black and white node and see what our curve looks like now let me uh let me just go to the curve we ended up using for the project um it's it's very similar just a little more refined uh the the color doesn't seem to be very saturated and that's simply because we're still in red's uh wide color space so we fixed that is by doing a color space transform from the red wide gamut into rec 709 and boom there we go all of a sudden we have footage that is looking more correct you might say footage that is looking more what you anticipate it to be now when it comes to adding a little bit of a look another one of those building blocks we wanted to add was a bit of a kodak film stock look specifically when it comes to cooling off the shadows so this third building block is starting to cool off some of the the mid and shadow tones it's probably easier if i show you here on this little step chart you'll see as i enable and disable you'll see the cooling is happening especially in this lower third of the visual range so it's not really we're not tinting black and middle gray is staying very close but it's these things just below middle gray and it doesn't really affect our black point the final building block here is not something that you'll see on most clips but there are a couple scenes in the film where we get a really really potent strong red in the scene and one of the problems that we find with digital sensors is often when we get a red color it starts to lean a little magenta so this right here as you'll see is i'll enable it it's starting to bring the red towards a more primary red or maybe a little bit more of an orangey red if you look on the vector scope here you'll see without it it kind of skews towards magenta but with it it lands rock solid on that red line so there we have our four core building blocks we have our curve we have our color space adjustment we have a bit of a codec film emulation and then a tweak for highly saturated reds so let's take a look at the scene at the school lockers now although these are two separate clips they are grouped together so if we go to our group post clip we can apply a cy adjustment that will equally apply itself across the scene so one of the things we knew we wanted in this scene is a touch more contrast and also to cool it off a little so let me enable this for you so you see how we're doing that we're adding a touch more contrast and cooling it off a bit and because it's in the group post clip it applies to both sides do you see that we are getting that grade applied consistently between the two now what's totally crazy is at this point we still have not yet touched any individual clips and yet we have a really good looking image this is the power of starting from strong building blocks then moving to each individual scene and then tweaking clips so let's look at our individual tweaks for this shot now although there are a lot of nodes here this is just a standard node tree i'm really not using very many of them really what we're doing is we're just focusing the light you see how we're kind of bringing down the left side of the frame slightly increasing contrast interface this is a shot specific adjustment but very little is actually happening on this individual shot that is the beauty of looking at a film horizontally like we're talking about so here's a scene on the sidewalk here now you'll notice that our four building blocks are already enabled and they're getting us into a really good spot but the question is what is unique about this scene well i wanted a little more warmth to it and a slight tweak of exactly how much contrast we're looking for but that is our scene-wide tweak and then on this individual shot we're doing things like you know uh bringing down the sides of the frame increasing the contrast on the face and just helping finesse this shot individually and here's the cool thing i can skip between different scenes in the film and yet they still feel aesthetically consistent because we concentrated on building good core building blocks well there you go a behind the scenes of they don't cast shadows if you like this video feel free to hit the like button and i'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below also if you don't want to miss future videos subscribe button notification bell and you will get them all right bye friend [Music] you

Channel: Barrett Kaufman

Views: 1,501

Keywords: colour, correction, grading, film, filmmaking, bts, BTS, color, colorist, colourist, davinci resolve, feature film, how-to

Id: PXLvsNipfD4

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022