Edit & Colour Correction – After Arcadia

I joined Joe in the edit suite throughout the whole editing process as I thought that I not only could help with the edit of the footage but it would also help me put myself into the world that we had created in camera and find a better understanding of how the footage needed to be colour corrected.

By the end of Thursday we were ready to go ahead and start colour correcting the edit, I started by looking at a wide-angle shot that I had used for the montage scene because it supplied me with a range of colours and textures to work off.

First I decided to heavily reduce the saturation and then started tweaking with levels on the Blacks, Mids and Whites until I found the right stylistic image I had in my mind.

I finally found that with the saturation reduced by just over 50% and slighting reducing the Blacks & Whites levels and ever so slightly increasing the Mids just a tad I found the style that I was looking for and one that I was really happy with.

This was a very good starting point and thought that it might be a good idea to copy this colour correction setting and paste it onto the rest of the scenes in the time line, and for the most part this worked very well and each scene fitted together really well and only needed very slight adjustments to match up with the montage shot that I originally colour corrected.

Though there were some scenes that needed more adjustments to match up with the rest of the footage; example – the establishing shot

This scene in particular, actually needed slight increase on the saturation, with the Mids staying the same from the raw footage and the blacks and the Whites levels needed to be adjusted to fit in with the rest of the footage.

I really have a positive reaction to the colour correction process and am really happy with how the footage looks now, I think that this one scene below really shows how from what the raw footage that was captured to the colour corrected image has changed; I think that the raw image itself shows that some of the life has been drained from the image, but then I've exploited this effect even further with the colour correction adjustments in post. I feel that you have that feeling of life being drained away with that gritty dull beige/light brown colour palette prominent in the scene.

Before Colour Correction.

After Colour Correction

During these last two days in the edit suite, both me and Joe have been on board throughout the whole process, actually having the director in the room whilst correcting the colour turned out to be very helpful as it was always a second pair of eyes looking at how the footage linked up together in terms of light levels and making sure that the colour correction all matched up. After the edit and colour correction was finished we got some feedback from some peers; Rob Cooper actually mentioned what we already had thought in our minds, which was the footage really just looked like a homeless man walking around. Before we exported the footage we got Bob in to give us a second opinion of the final article and taking into account all the troubles we encounter we as a group felt that the test footage was a success.

Though me haven’t manage to create a believable post apocalyptic world I think that the final edit of the test for the opening scene and montage sequence does actually look really good from a cinematic point of view and feel confident that when this film goes into production in the near future we as a group can realistically create that post apocalyptic world.