The colour grade for both projects is something I've really wanted to get involved with. Obviously being the cinematographer for both Daniel's Kite and Under the Sun, I want it to have the best results possible in terms of visual style for each film. I sat down with both editors to give my approach and opinions to the grades and here is what our outcome is for both projects.
Daniel's Kite:
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| Classroom Scene |
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| Sport's Hall Scene |
From this screen grab, we have gone from a colour temperature orange style to a colour temperature blue for the sport's hall scene. This is because we want Daniel to feel depressed and intimidated by his surroundings. This will show and describe how cold the scene is and Daniel's struggle.
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Wide Shot Sport's Hall
Here is another screen grab of the sport's hall scene. As you can see the blue tint really helps to make this a cold scene. Helping to show that Daniel is very intimidated by his sport's teacher. It also goes well with the props (clothing and cricket covers at the back), which are already blue to help emphasise the sport's hall being a gritty and intimidating place for Daniel.
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| Avid Colour Grading Tool |
Here is a screen grab showing the progression of colour grading Daniel's Kite.
Daniel's Bedroom Scene
For the bedroom scene, we have brought the yellows out to show the happiness and enjoyment Daniel has for being at home daydreaming. The bedroom represents Daniel's safe haven from everything else in life that he doesn't want to experience.
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Head Master Scene
Here is a screen grab showing the grade for the headmaster's scene.
Looking back at my research materials of Daniel's Kite, the group and myself have decided to follow the colour grade style of 'The Fall' by Tarsem Singh and 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' by Wes Anderson. The Fall showing yellow tint throughout the film and the Grand Budapest hotel showing a red/pink tint throughout. However for Daniel's Kite, yellow signifies happiness for Daniel, whereas the blue/green tints represent Daniel's boredom and being scared of school figures. I am confident that Nathan has done an excellent job of portraying how the group wanted the film to look in terms of visual style.
Under The Sun:
For Under the Sun's colour grade, I gave my advice to editor Tom Cunningham on what I feel would look effective within the grade. The main style I thought would be appropriate for the grade was a cinematic style. This would be vital as the group want to enter the film into multiple festivals, so therefore we need the grade to look as high quality as possible. After giving Tom my opinions, he then worked with Brock, where Tom would then get given other advice. Tom has worked well to take each member of the group's advice and then use his own ideas to complete the colour grade.
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Before
This screenshot shows Tom's first major scene, where he wanted to change the grade considerably. For this he changed changed the main black and white values using the Avid colour correction tool to get rid of the greyed out visual style from the camera footage. By doing this the finished grade (shown in the screenshot below) is more focused on the character's and everything else within the background stands out a lot better. This style combined with the extreme benefits of using the Sony F5 helps to create the cinematic look that we have wanted to attain.
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| After |
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| Before |
The exposure for most of the quarry scenes are quite different, therefore when Tom came to grading the film, he had to adjust a lot of the exposures to make them match with each other. This is partly due to filming the quarry scene on the same day. It meant we didn't have a lot of time and I had to be quicker with setting up the camera for each shot. Therefore the lighting would have changed over the day and this would of changed the exposure of the scenes. I also kept on re-white balancing a lot, so this could of caused this issue. Tom has used a yellow tint on the boy's faces in the screenshot below to make them stand out. He has also reduced the blue and red values using the Avid colour correction tool to make the yellow tint appear slightly.
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| After |
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| Before |
Within this shot, Tom has undertaken a similar approach when grading. The only difference this time is he has increased the value of the blacks by a higher value. This has helped solve the issue we had with the Sony F5 over exposing the shots due to it's high ISO value of 800, which is it's standard ISO value.
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Before
Within this scene of the film it shows Jim's sadness, as his best friend has a crush on Eve. Rhy leaves Jim on his own for this girl he has only known for a few days. This put Jim in a bad state of mind, so it was vital we show this within the edit. Tom has been able to show this through the colour grade by increasing the grade values for the blue's and the black's. This gives this scene a cold style feeling to the film, it also shows Jim being in a bad state of mind. Tom has also increased the black master value within this shot for focus on Jim. This mixed with changing the white master value has helped fix the exposure issue. This has resulted in creating a strong depth of field and sharpness on Jim, to make the visual style stand out strongly within the film.
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| After |
