I’m partly colourblind and I’m using that as an excuse for why I’m so bad at colour correction. So, enjoy!

There’re only about three or four different set-ups that made it into the final cut of the film.

Original

Attempted to make the skin tones more natural using RGB curves

Attempted to make it seem more balanced using brightness/contrast

Tried to fix the discrepancies brightness/contrast caused using RGB curves

Back to brightness/contrast

Scene 2 – Before

Scene 2 – After

Scene 3 – Before

Scene 3 – After

Scene 4 – Original

Scene 4 – Attempt to normalise skin tones (RGB curves)

Tried to make it brighter but increase colour using Fast Colour Correction, with tweaking of RGB curves to compensate.

Tiny saturation changes from Luma Corrector

I get the process, but I’m not very good at doing it. I don’t know, I just kinda… forget what skin looks like. It’s a frustrating process and I get overwhelmed and I’m gonna go cry (not really?).

Though I’m very happy with how Scene 3 came out, since I was pretty sure I wasn’t gonna be able to get rid of that blue tint. But it went away quite easily. So… that’s a win.

Honestly colour correction is not my biggest weakness, but I don’t really enjoy the process of making everything look right. My favourite effect to use is clearly RGB curves, I just feel like there’s a hell of a lot more control over the colours over the highlight-midtone-shadow spectrum, and it’s also all in one interface and for some reason so much more easy to grasp. The three-way colour corrector is what I learnt on originally, I can still use it, I’ve just grown accustomed to curves instead, even though you can specify what equates to a highlight or a shadow or whatever, so really there’s nearly the same amount of freedom with that. Not so much, actually, since you can have about pretty much as many different points on the curve as you want. And curves is so much better and retaining amounts of colour in other sections of the frame while removing the shades you want to remove in the parts you want to remove them in. No masks needed, which is uber-amazing because I hate masks.

I need to really practice doing it properly, but at the same time the 6D doesn’t really pick up on colour very well. I’ve colour corrected a black magic before and that was so beautiful to play with, there was so much vibrancy stored in data beneath an initially greyed out image and it felt really cool to bring that out.

Now I want a black magic camera. Oh, well. When I have lots of money I’ll get one.

Sigh.

It’s been a really long semester and I better start this off by saying I let everything fall to the side.

I missed at least one Analysis/Reflection, I pretty much wafted through the production of the documentary with little-to-no creative input (not to say that I didn’t like where it went) and I don’t remember a single second from my 1+3 presentation.

However, I did enjoy this subject. Honestly, I didn’t learn much. The information I got about producing documentary I’d heard from the producers that I bother on a daily basis. The equipment had all been gone over either in Film/TV 1, Broadcast Media, Writing Media Texts, though my work with RMITV or on TV commercials and the like. I did enjoy it though, trust me, and I did get valuable experience.

I didn’t expect to have such a fun experience while filming. It was relaxed, cheerful and I ate SO MUCH FOOD. I love food. While I knew all the info about documentary filmmaking on paper it was great to really get into it and see all that theory in action. Nothing went wrong, the editing process has been smooth – barring a few audio issues, but six tracks of nearly identical audio has been very useful – and I’m actually keen to see this on the big screen, while last time I dreaded it.

My desire to have creative input didn’t come to fruition, which is my own fault. I wasn’t really paying attention during the development and conceptualisation stages of production, and by the time I was back into it and eager to get going the idea, the method and the subject were pretty much set in stone. I think the only things I got a say in were on the technical side. ‘It’d be best to use a lavalier microphone’, ‘A 6D is great and will look good but the audio will be dodgy’, that kinda deal. Actually, I suggested filming and using a lot of the reflexive stuff, i.e. the shot of Theano doing the clapper that opens the documentary. I also campaigned for the whole thing to remain in Greek.

The shocker of the semester was really how much I enjoyed making this. Obviously this was an idyllic situation: a comfortable environment, a lot of time, catering provided, enthusiastic and charismatic participants, a beautiful story to capture on film. It was, dare I say it, easy. And there really is something rewarding about being involved in this, as compared to Cursed which I honestly considered dropping my name from. Yeah, it turned out fine, I just did not like making it at all.

Maybe this is all attributed to Ella and Tiana, who really did everything they could to make it work well and look good, while I was the yes-man who stood in the back and nodded and ate spanakopita.

I think it was spanakopita.

I’m not blaming myself for the lack of input so much, I feel like I helped to the best of my ability. I just… I don’t know. I loved making this film, and I’ve decided I definitely want to make more. For some reason, beyond my mental grasp right now, I feel like I didn’t put in as much as I took out.