Grading

We used a range of tools to grade our film opening. The software includes Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects.

We had 3 different styles of grading that we needed for our narrative:

1. The night/early morning dark shots.
2. The light late morning shots.
3. The corridor shot.

For the early shots we planned to create a sad and depressed atmosphere using the Pro-camp video effects on Adobe Premiere Pro and Color Finesse 3 in Adobe After Effects. This was our first time grading shots to look like it is the night/early morning and as such none of us quite knew exactly what the standard way for grading to look dark is. To overcome this we did in-depth research into different films that also have shots indoors when light is supposed to be minimal.

Grading for the Light Late Morning shots was extremely difficult for us as a group as we were unable to come to a uniformed decision about what kind of mood we wanted for these shots. Eventually we came to the conclusion that we wanted to have a slightly unkempt feel to it, we didn't make it easy for ourselves when we were shooting however. The room we were using had very strong purple walls, with purple and white bed sheets and pillows; due to us not having the correct filter for our lighting we ended out using as purple filter which only intensified the purple tinge on most of the footage. Even some of the whites of the bed sheets ended out looking purple due to the lighting.






To get over this trouble, this is how we chose to grade our shots:

As you can see we increased the saturation and contrast to try and combat this very purple tinge to our shots, as well as lowering the brightness to really bring out the different colours in costume between Jess and Alex.


Grading for the night Shots

Before Dark Grading

After Dark Grading

We took reference from David Mullen's work:

As you can see, they chose to grade their shots by adding a blue tint to everything. We felt that this was a very effective way of creating the convention that blue means darkness to the audience. As well as creating this convention, it allows the audience to get a sense of time of day (night time, so very dark) while still being able to perfectly see everything that is happening within the film. We used Adobe After Effects to give our dark scenes this effect, within After Effects there is a preset names SA Color Finesse 3 which allowed us to do much more intricate work than would have been possible on Premiere Pro alone.