Alex de Campi: We'll have a poodle, a Baby Grand, and roses every day

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10.6.08 What A Difference A Grade Makes

I've decided not to blog the progress of The Big Video, as it would mostly involve me swearing about people not being available and/or not wanting to give me £8,000 worth of stuff for £250. I will, however, try to write a bit more about the process of video creation so you can understand why I look so hassled all the time. So, today's process lesson: grading.

Even with the best DP (Director of Photography, him or her that runs the camera department) in the world, your raw footage will not be as pretty as you want it to be. This is for a lot of reasons, including saving money via cheap telecines (transfer of film to tape and then hard drive) or generally being the type of director who isn't interested in "the natural look".

So you do something called a grade. This is basically colour correction. It can be done by very specialised, talented and wonderful people called graders on hyper-expensive equipment, or (o hai budget filmmakers!) you do it yourself on Final Cut. The graders? Worth every penny. But sometimes you don't have the pennies. Anyhow, an example from "I Loved London":

The original footage, shot on Arri SR3 Super16 on an overcast day around 4pm, straw and jade filters, (from memory) 12mm Arri ultraprime lens, Fuji 500 daylight stock, shot at 6fps then unattended telecine at Todd's. Motion blur filter added.

Same frame, as graded by an apprentice grader. Note improved saturation/contrast, and general pull back from the straw and jade to something a bit more magenta.

Now I take over. In this frame, I matted in the angel considerably brighter than the surrounding area and feathered the matte so it blended in. Result: angel way more noticeable, but you wouldn't know why. Makes it look like we had a 10k in the window of Lillywhites.

And last, I pop on a gradient filter (from the Joe's Filters) to give us a nice right-at-twilight, end of magic hour look.

Up to my neck in animated videos at the moment and loving it, I've gotten a little burned out on film-film as the last two shoots were such beasts. Upcoming animated videos for Flipron (their new Rat Scabies/Damned produced album is amazing) and others; stay tuned. Note I'll also be in London next week if anyone wants to meet up.