Tales From The Grading Suite – Lighting The Looks

Fanastic insight! I actually love the “contrasty” grade for the music video, but simply personal preference. I only wish I I could pass this knowledge to DPs and others before I have to advise I cant relight the entire shot to match an reference that has been carefully lit on set. What strategies do you use to “break the news” to a DP /Director that the footage is as it is, and you can only do so much (impossible relight digitally to match the music video for example). I find a lot of clients have unrealistic expectations of what we can do and how long it takes. Thanks Dan!

I agree overall with Patrick, except that I think the lighting is 75% of the look. If they don’t give us enough fill, if they don’t provide an eyelight, and/or if they don’t provide a backlight, we’re screwed. Way too often, low-budget projects come in underexposed, and then the clients have inflated expectations as to how much can be changed in post. It’s particularly rough when you get an actor’s face in half-shadow and the client says, “can we lose the shadow?” I often warn them “darker is easy — brighter is hard.”

Totally agree about low-budgets and lack of fill-light. A recent job I did, I almost wished they’d not used any key light and just exposed with ambient light rather than having too much key and no fill.

Great One!
I would like to see more stuff like this, because I’m working in both worlds. As a Gaffer and as a Colorist and I constanly switching between the two worlds. And as I’m working on that way, I see how much sense a “job-combination” like mine makes, because I realize problems that I run to on set, which influence the colorgrading later and can make confident decisions to solve the problem before the footage comes in to postproduction.

Speaking of the technical issue, the one that you need to do a lot of keying to make color balance between the scene switchover, I simply wonder if you can cut the shot somewhere between the transition so your job is easier?