Colour correcting a film can be a long, arduous task, but the results are always great. If done right it can make your film look 100% better than what you captured on the day. That said, it’s been the bane of my life for the past month!
For those unfamiliar with colour correction it tends to look like this:
If your shot is too bright or dark, colour correct. Too vibrant? Colour correct. Doesn’t match the mood? Colour correct. Doesn’t match your other shots? Colour correct. With three colour wheels (for the whites, mids and blacks of the spectrum), brightness, and saturation, you can create a visual style for each individual scene and the film as a whole. For ‘TIME AND PLACE’ we’ve decided to go for a visual style which is hard to attribute to any period in time, by making some of the images appear as if they have aged themselves (we also avoided showing any era specific technology – to the best of our ability).
Below are a few examples of before and after:
Now that the colour correction is complete (after a painstakingly dull month working on it) I’ve got stuck back in to the ‘proper’ editing. And my motivation has returned. The scenes during the first third of the film, and the occasional montage were fun to colour correct as continuity of effect wasn’t necessary. For dialogue scenes of up to 10 minutes, it was a different story (ugh, I’m bored just thinking about it). The film itself was running 15 minutes longer than I wanted, and had a noticeable lag during the middle third. So I’ve spent the past couple of days brutally cutting out anything unnecessary (so far I’m down 10 minutes and being hypercritical about what needs to be there, with the intention of removing at least another 2 minutes, without effecting the pace of each individual scene). Still lots more work to do, but I’m adamant I’m going to get it all ready for you to see this October!
