MM: Colour Grading

I did the colour grading for the opening. This was left till the end, due to us finalising the sound mix and still adding in visual effects. Grading would slow down anything else we did after that. I discussed with Taran the kind of look we wanted the lesson prior, showing some test graded shots.

I wanted to mainly emphasize the two different colour palettes of the two coinciding scenes. So the house scenes were a dim yellow/brown tone, while the party scenes were a contrasty multicoloured tone, strengthening the glow stick worn by everybody.

Another feature that I wanted to use to colour grade was selectively enhancing important parts of the frame, to draw the views eyes to the correct part of the image. I did this mainly with the actors faces, making them more contrasted and sharp, especially when they were in dark environments. Another enhancement was the picture frame near the beginning. For some of the establishing environment shots, I darkened the brighter outer parts of the image, and so making the important parts more prevalent by comparison, to make sure that the focus was either in the centre or to a specific area.

The look of various David Fincher films, and so the work of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth was the main influence for the look of our opening. But we made an effort to make the lighting as close as we'd like to the final image in camera, such as turning off and on certain lights in the house. This meant that nothing drastic was required in grading to get the desired look that we wanted. At an audience screening, we got feedback that commended the colour grading, while the footage shown had not been graded yet and was the raw footage.