From The Grading Room – Are We Sterilizing Images?

Important Collaborators or Slaves To Clients Desires?

I’m asking the question: With the ability to change every aspect of the image in the grade are we sterilizing Images by giving into clients demands?

We live in the days of instagram, snapseed and photoshop. People know that almost anything is technically possible in post production and the grading process.

Due this knowledge clients are becoming more demanding than ever.

I’m regularly told to lift faces, push products to within an inch of maximum brightness and sharpness and generally making quite dull images.

In this Insight I’d like to share a story of a recent grade and to find out if this is something that only some of us are experiencing or is it a industry wide change.

Music Video Case Study

I recently graded a music video with the wonderful Rob Brandon. You can check out his work here.

To give you an idea of how the grade went I’ll post a screenshot from his Facebook from shortly after the grade.

The band and management got so heavily involved with this grade that we ended up rendering out 9 work in progress H.264s for them to check out.

I think Rob captures my feelings on this situation above.

In a world where everyone has Instagram, they feel like they are an expert on how something should look.

In my insight below I’ll give you the step by step breakdown of how this job worked out and my thoughts along the way.