Behind The Curtain – Not So Near-Set Grading

Day 14: 25 Insights in 25 Days 2019 New Year Marathon!

How Modern Technology Allowed Me To Be “On-Set”

This Insight is a little light-hearted look at grading an almost near-set grade I did recently. I’d just like to say in advance this is not a 100% “correct” way of working all the time.

It just worked well in this situation where I could help some of my friends out after not being able to make it on set and they had a DIT on location doing the heavy lifting.

I have a video Insight below that shows how it worked practically so I’ll give you a little backstory before we jump over to it.

Jamie Harding the DOP is a great friend of mine and this film is quite a big job for him. It features award-winning actors and the director is used to directing A-List actors that you see in movies every year.

I was hoping to make it to set for this film as there was a one-day pre-light and three days shot around the same location.

Due to life as a colorist, I couldn’t make it down as bookings slipped and I got stuck grading back at my office.

Luckily I could be “almost-near-set”

The Internet!

The simple fact is that everyone on set is connected these days either via iPhone, tethered internet to their laptop or even some locations have regular Wi-Fi.

Thanks to this fact the guys on set could email me some ungraded stills with no LUT etc…

I could then sit back here in my grading suite and set up some looks that we had discussed previously.

This helped as a confidence check that we could make it look as we wanted to

Going One Step Further

One extra value add was that I could build them a LUT from my suite that they could monitor in their on set FSI to make sure that what they were Lighting with would work well with the style of grade we wanted to go for.

This is all far better explained in my video Insight so let’s jump over to it now!

-Dan