#colourgrade

Beating by Tirzah

Where Currents Meet Colour Grading from Reds to Blues to Going Crazy

Colour grading is not my forte, to say the least. I had very little idea of what I was doing and I had little practice and awareness of how to do it. I usually go into it kind of figuring it out as I go and this was no different. I found this much less enjoyable than the actual filming and went quite crazy. I went for many different looks and approaches to the film over the days that I graded it, each grade had a very different feel to it and felt like a different film almost.

Bethany and I had previously talked about blue tones for the film and when I tried it in the grade I found that this was too sad for a film about romance so I went through the entire film adding a warm reddish glow to every scene. I thought it looked great, but wanted to see what Bethany thought. Bethany came in and we went back to the previous grade and went into that. She asked me to try blue and I tried this throughout and we agreed it did not work either so in the end we found a kind of medium which lay in the correct part of the graphs indicating how much of the image you are keeping whilst still going for looks that Bethany liked and that I had become happier with in time.

I found the initial scene hard to grade because the opening shot I had chosen I leaned into all of the reflections of all of my waterproof gear, because otherwise it would not have worked. But in doing this Iris looked almost like a ghost so I tried to bring her more into reality and make Kallie's single more dreamy.

I really struggled with continuity throughout but especially in scene 2 on the beach where Kallie comes out of the water and flirts with Iris. Kallie and Iris were always lit differently due to their positioning in relation to the sun and the water. But I tried my best to make them as similar as possible. Here in the photo above I think Iris is a little too saturated and slightly cold, but this was in order to fix the sand to match Kallie's sand in her image and I think this was achieved.

The following bus scene I felt graded relatively well except for one shot of Kallie that I could not seem to desaturate in the way that I wanted to.

Following this I found this image above turned out too saturated and contrasted as well, but it seemed the best way to get it away from the reddish tones that I dived into all too deeply.

In the following scene where Iris trips, I feel the two shots are different to the singles and offer a slightly paler palette that I did not quite match.

I was very happy with the river scene as I felt Iris really glowed in that scene.

This is a shot I really like and am happy about how the grade turned out. I feel at the bridge everything had a lighter wash than in other parts of the film but I felt it matched a dreamy tone that this scene has.

The bedroom scene as I previously mentioned was a bit of a nightmare on set, but I feel it was really saved in the grade.

In what is now the final scene, as the original final scene was cut, where the girls are sitting on the shore I am overall very happy with the grade here but I feel it again does not match the rest of the film.

I do feel that my biggest mistake in the grade is the inconsistency in style. I feel every scene is almost completely different in style of grade and I hope that this won't take viewers out of the experience.

I'm not very happy with the grade overall but I am happy enough and I know I tried very hard. This is because I think I could have done better or it could be better, but with my limited knowledge I tried my best and that was all I could do. I found myself very burnt out in the grade from all the shoots and the sound design from Saint Catherines and I think this also affected what I could deliver.

I feel even more out of touch.