Color Correction Breakdown – Solving Problems

Color Grading Breakdown: The Outer Darkness Part 2

Solving Problems By Finding Opportunity

On low budget projects, time is the biggest enemy. There’s never enough of it and it seems to slip away much too quickly. And that’s why so many low budget productions hand us footage that has problems… they’re moving too quickly, are too understaffed and not always keeping their eyes wide open – looking for mistakes that can be quickly fixed. In this continuation of the short series on color correcting The Outer Darkness, we’ll examine one of those mistakes.

This Insight shows one big mistake—plus, an opportunity

The big mistake had to do with the creature’s prosthetic mask and how it was lit. If this mistake had happened on human skin tones, I would have had to take a completely different approach to fix the problem. Instead, I was able to break one of my biggest rules when making big contrast adjustments… and the result worked better than I ever expected.

The one thing I don’t show in this Insight? The few dozen shots where I had to apply this fix, once I had it figured out.

And that Opportunity? It became a problem of my own making

There comes a moment in The Outer Darkness when there’s an emotional change along with a very obvious physical representation of that emotional change. I was looking for ways to heighten this visually – but kept getting it wrong. My opportunity had morphed in me solving problems, this time of my own design.

Watch the video to see how I completely abandoned my approach—and then came back to it, this time with a much more gentle approach that won the approval of my clients.

Enjoy!

-pat