Behind The Curtain – Refining and Enhancing ‘Bread’

Part Three: Grading the Short Film ‘Bread’

In this Insight, we are going to take a look at the final pass of the grade on the bread short film that I recently graded for a friend.

The Final Pass

In this final pass through the film, we refine the matching even further.

Whenever possible I love to take a break between the main matching pass and the final two or three passes.

This gives our eyes a chance to forget the work already completed and be subjective again.

I also learned a lot from Walter Volpatto at Fotokem at the BMD Conference in LA this year.

He mentioned that we are trying to help achieve the director and dop’s vision. Since thinking about that I’ve stopped doing windows until the very final pass.

It’s obviously a lot easier on a feature film where it’s been carefully lit to not shape the image as much but I’ve been trying to follow suit and only window as necessary.

It’s actually quite difficult coming from a commercial background not to fiddle with every aspect of the image after spending years and years of grading 30 second spots.

In this Insight, we take a look at :

• Revisiting The Matching Two Or Three More Times
• Checking Black Levels
• Checking White Levels
• Tweaking Grain
• Sharpening / Softening