From The Grading Suite: From Short Form To Reality

Going From Grading 30 Seconds To 57 Minutes

I always strive to be as honest as possible here on Mixing Light. Especially as we live in times where everything is filtered to just show off our best moments, I know I’m guilty of that just by looking at my Instagram page!

This weeks insight is a pretty sore subject for me personally but by writing this insight and sharing it with you all some good can come from my screw up!

I recently gave up the life of being a staff colourist to spend more time travelling and working on Mixing Light.

I also moved to a totally new city in the west of England called Bristol.

It’s home to some of the best factual work on TV like the BBCs Blue Planet series. That’s graded down the road from my house at Films @ 59.

With the area having an amazing reputation for its factual excellence and documentary style visuals, I had to jump into a totally new world of grading.

After 10 years of spending a whole day on 30 second amazingly shot commercials.

My first job was a 57-minute regional family cooking challenge show. 6 cameras of all makes and compression type. The main cameras were Canon 305s right down to GoPros inside fridges set to full auto.

What a shock to the system!

I’ll jump into the full story below to explan each step but to put it simply. I screwed up…I screwed up badly.

That was last Wednsday and I’m on the train back to that post house right now (Monday morning) to do a total regrade for free.

Why for free? I feel like I didn’t live up to the standard I expected of myself and if I’m not happy how can I ever expect a client to be happy!

I’d rather offer one day of my time for free to clear my reputation rather than hiding away and never getting a call from those clients again.