TO BE A COLOURIST

PART 1: What is colour grading?


Colour grading is storytelling in a forward motion.

In otherwords, it is something that is considered in sequence.

It is not about creating singular images of beauty, that is what Photoshop is for, it is about creating sequences that visually support and ideally enhance the story.

There are some key points to bear in mind for a colourist and they can be listed in order of importance.

- Skin tones must be flesh coloured. In otherwords, they must look healthy. Very often this means they must look more healthy than the subject does in real life. We are extremely sensitive to flesh tones, and they are the number one factor in how we percieve the mood of a scene.

- Colour of the shadows. Vital to being an effective colourist is to be able to identify and manipulate the colour of the shadows. This is the second most important factor in how we percieve the mood of an image.

- Contrast / white balance / colour temperature. As a general rule, paper is white, the sky is blue, grass is green.

- Noise. The more nodes you have, the more likely you are to introduce noise. Noise is bad.

Before considering aesthetics, there are some rights and wrongs. You are aiming for an image that is the cleanest, most natural looking image with the most visible detail.

Continuity across the sequence is essential. A break in any of the factors above and you distract the audience, and worse still, you'll be too ashamed to include such shoddy work on your showreel.

So where does one start?

First look at a wide shot. Establish a primary grade that you are happy with.

Next go to a close up - the closer the better - and apply the grade from the wide shot. Tweak it until the fleshtones are perfect.

Apply that grade to the entire scene.

Go through the scene, and set the black levels for each shot on the darkest frame of the shot, while setting the white level on the brightest frame.

Again, go through the scene, and balance out the continuity. At this point you will most likely want to use secondaries to correct certain areas of some shots - maybe a burnt out light, or an obnoxious coloured object. It is quite common that you will want to ungroup some shots to adjust them separately, to make them appear more continuous in the sequence.

You might want to set a mood by colouring the shadows, adjusting the contast or colour temperature or add an effect at this point. Make sure you so this in a seperate node, as you will be tweaking it later on.

Move onto the next sequence and repeat the steps above.

When all the sequences in a particular scene (and by scene, I mean a narrative scene - not a shots in a particular location) are complete, play through the whole scene, and discover to your horror that it is filled with disturbing jumps that you will need to adjust. Viewing the scene in context is the only way to see this: remember - colour grading is performed on films, and films tell stories. Colour grading is part of the story telling process.

When you have done all this and are happy with the result, you can have real fun, and apply an overall look to the footage. For example, you may want to isolate and sharpen the highlights resulting in a tense look, or maybe a glow, softening the scene. If you have done all the previous steps properly, you'll be able apply such a look without it appearing unnatural.

Ok, that's an introduciton to the what why and how of the colour grading process.

So.... until next time, I'll be sitting in dark room playing with my balls

And in case you'd like greater insight into the life of a colourist, including techniques, diet and exercise tips...  click on the image below






PART 2 : A FART IN THE DARK 

So what does it mean to be a colourist?

Among other things, it means you get to watch a mulitcoloured spinning wheel and fart through an expensive chair in a dark room for 8 hours a day.

While submerged in the darkness, your eyeballs steadily being burnt away, you might set about the often impossible task of matching footage shot on multiple cameras set to arbitrary settings, completing a 400 shot program within about 6 hours -  or perhaps you'll spend those 6 hours meticulously obsessing over a 12 shot sequence designed to make people want to buy a certain brand of washing up liquid.

So as not to make your life overly dull, you'll also spend time fixing various editing and graphics problems that editors and graphics people for some reason decided not to.

So why would anyone want to do this job?

The job generally tends to attract those with a mental illness commonly referred to as 'A love of film'. This is particularly dangerous, and unless properly supervised, individuals that suffer from this condition can remain in the grading suite for more than 72 consecutive hours until they are forcibly removed, sometimes with their eyeballs actually on fire.

Software and hardware have developed tremenduosly over the past decade, but this has had no impact on how long it takes for jobs to be completed, or the quality of the delivered work.

Indeed, as more and more turn to programs such as DaVinci Resovle, Vimeo is aflood with images that have no purpose other than being beautiful shots in their own right - and perhaps worse still: all looking the same.

What's the problem? These people all mastered iPhoto and hipstamatic - how hard can it be, right?

It seems the humble Look up table has been caught up in this.

Look up tables are tools to allow you to view your graded material to roughly simulate your final output. For example, if you are grading on a broadcast monitor but the film is destined for a DCP, you will use a LUT to emulate, on your display, the the look of the DCP (which not only has a different colourspace to the monitor, but also has the issue that the light is shining ON TO the screen, whereas with a monitor, light is shining OUT OF the screen, burning through you retinas and imprinting itself onto you soul).

That is the point of a Look up table. The clue is in the name. It's a conversion. A friend told me of the recent craze of hunting for the 'perfect LUT' that will convert flat RAW footage to something more normal, and using the LUT on export so it is essentialy a Track-level grade. It's basically slapping a filter on your footage.

LUTs are generally variations on S shaped curves. So let's just come out and say it: If you're the kind of person who'll be satisfied with anything that looks half pretty with no thought involved, then you'll probably be happy with a S LUT.

Maybe I'm being overly harsh. Such an approach can be a great starting point for your grade. But it will mean that the child of your (brief) labours will look like a thousand others who have all dragged that same slut into their darkened suites...

Oh yeah - and your film still won't be graded.

Why not save yourself a lot of time and use a camera that records normal images to start with? You don't have to fart in the dark, people like me are paid to do that.




















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