COLOURING - INTERIOR

The film is near completion after I have spent the last couple of days polishing off the colour of interior footage. The process was more complex than the exterior scenes were, as the lighting and (footage) grain was more intense. Examples of this are displayed below:

The two pictures above are the best examples that display the poor levels of lighting in our film. It came to my understanding that only deco lights were used, lights that I believe create a 'spotlight' effect (seen above) unless handled professionally. The lighting cast harsh shadows of the characters on the walls, shadows which I may have been able to get rid of however I didn't have time to research into getting rid of/reducing shadows within post-production. In hindsight this is highly unfortunate as these shots had to be included in the edit, due to the problems associated with other shots in the piece. To try and combat the extremeness of the lighting in these shots, I darkened the whites and mids in '3 Point Colour Corrector' and used the colour wheels to tint the shots brown- a look myself and Jordan found effective as it related to the family's traditional values and way of life.

If you look closely, there is a large amount of film grain on these two shots. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do to reduce the amount of grain on-screen as it came off the raw camera footage. I experimented with the levels of saturation, brightness levels, blacks/whites etc however by attempting to reduce how much the grain stood out, meant it only hindered something else. For example by reducing the blacks on the shot shown above (right), meant the blacks were not as sharp and the features were not as visible (his strands of hair), however the levels of grain were slightly less impactful. I concluded that it was best to ignore the grainy footage and carry on colouring as I would, but to make sure I didn't alter the saturation levels too much as this only increased the grain on some occasions.

Grain is only an issue on the interior shots, as the exterior shots appear to be fine.