Introduction

Welcome to my A2 media Blog, I'm Josh Stevenson (0796) and I'm in Group 2 with Harry Kettenis (0390), Matthew Romo (1660) and Ysabel Hudson-Searle (0331). Use the labels on the right to navigate through my blog, with the A2 labels relevant to my current course. You can access the main music video blog aswell using the link.

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Wednesday 10 December 2014

Grading

After finalising the order of our shots and seeing the resulting product, we're happy with the progression of the music video. We then moved onto grading the shots in our music video. Below is an overview of the grading throughout the entire video. The left hand side has the grading, while the right hand side is ungraded to show a before vs. after comparison.




Grading for "Wet performance" shot:


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)
Something which we noticed when grading this shot, is that the colours are quite dull, making Yssy look grey and lifeless. It was simple to rectify this, increasing both brightness and contrast and using three-way colour corrector to restore the colour to Yssy's skin and hair. The overall look is one that is very much stripped back, showing Roza in her most vulnerable state.
                     
ProCamp & Colour Corrector                                







Grading for "Fire performance" shot:


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)

The Fire performance shots are meant to smack the audience right in the face, showing Roza as she fights back against the emotions and frees herself from the chains of relationships.

Our footage has the vibrant colours we want, but it is extremely dark, this mainly being due to the constraints of us opting to use a projector to light the shot. The issue we faced, was trying to maintain the colouring of the shot. while increasing the brightness. However, every time we increased the brightness to a level we were happy with, the shot would get whited out to a great extent. We managed to find a medium between the two using Luma corrector, ProCamp and Three-way Colour corrector that we were all happy with, that looks very good.

ProCamp, Luma Corrector & Colour Corrector


    
Graded (left), Ungraded (right)
The grading for the close-ups were that much more difficult because of how close Yssy had to be to the projector, meaning that these shots were much brighter than other compositions. The main issue, is that by decreasing the brightness you lose the intensity of the flames; which dampens the meaning behind the shot.

To counteract this, you can see what we used Luma corrector, as can be seen below:



Luma Corrector

Grading "Silhouette Performance" shots:

Graded (left), Ungraded (right)

The best way for us to grade these shots, was to use Color Finesse on adobe after effects, because of the variation of shades of black, white and grey. Color Finesse allowed us to be precise in our editing of the colours and make slight. but noticeable adjustments:







Color Finesse

Grading for "Rose performance" shots:

Graded (left), Ungraded (right)


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)
Very little needed to be done to this footage, with the only element us not being totally pleased with is the colouring to Yssy's skin and jacket. They are much brighter than what we wanted. The rose performance shots are much more aggressive than the other performance shot; so while we don't the shots to look totally dead, we also do not want the colours to convey a cheery and joyful atmosphere.



Turning the brightness down was the first obvious step, while then adjusting the saturation to counteract the inevitable graying of  of Yssy's skin tone. After this, we were all happy with the colouring of the footage and decided to leave it there.

           
ProCamp        
   










Grading for Narrative shots:


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)



For the Narrative shots in the house, near enough no grading was needed. We wanted the shots to look as natural as possible and the best way to do that is to leave the footage as is in terms of colouring; there were no major flaws in the footage that we absolutely had to fix, so we left the footage as is. 

We wanted it to be clear to audiences that the narrative shots are memories, without losing the natural tones of the footage. We thought that the best way to do this, would be to put a vignette over the clip, which gives that slightly faded effect over and around it.


Adding Vignettes to footage


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)

The narrative shots in Trafalgar square required us to take the footage into Adobe After Effects in order to remove the vast majority of the grain.

Removing grain in After Effects

Other than that and placing a vignette over the clip to show it is a memory, only slight colour correction was needed because of where the footage was shot.
ProCamp & Colour Corrector

Grading for Club Shots:


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)
Although very slight, we did make some adjustments to the colouring of these shots. Mainly using Procamp to make the shot less blue and more purple-ish to give it the look of club lighting, rather than it just being dark.
                               
ProCamp & Colour Corrector                                        
                              








Grading for Dance shot:


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)



We only used Procamp when grading the dance shots, because from the start we decided that these clips would be in black and white to work in tandem with the Wet performance shots.

We quite liked the idea of trying to keep in some of the dancer's features, to make her seem like a person, rather than just a dancing figure. The fact that the dancer is a female gives the impression that it's a reflection of Roza, which is why we wanted to keep some life in the shot.

We turned the saturation down almost as far as we could; while increasing the brightness to make the background completely blank and increased the contrast high enough, so that the glint from the light hitting her skin is still present.

ProCamp


Grading for Other Concept shots:


Graded (left), Ungraded (right)
This show was simple to grade, using the "black and white" preset in Premiere Pro to remove the colour from the shot. Having the shot in black and white was a decision made as a group to objectify person as a canvas to show the progression of Roza's relationship.








The next 2 shots were left ungraded, as we were all extremely happy with the look of the footage. We were pleased with the effects the lighting used in the shoot gave and felt that adjusting the colours or look of the shots would in fact detract from them.
Drumming Shot
Hair flick Shot


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