Filmmakers look for a camera that has a high dynamic range, and also shoot their footage in a flat profile. This allows them to have a lot of room to work with in post production, particularly with colour grading. It allows them to go into their image and really tweak the image and the colour to go along with a certain look they are after. When it comes to scenic videos, it’s all about boosting the saturation and making everything look beautiful and colourful, while retaining a cinematic quality. Philip Bloom’s work is quite vibrant, but retains an old-school retro look in the way he’s done his colour correction.

I took a shot I got from a rooftop and used that as my shot for this sketch. I shot this with Sony a7S which has a high dynamic range, and thus the initial image was quite flat. I’m not an expert at colour correction so this was a challenge for me. To grade my image I used magic bullet looks as it is very user friendly. Essentially I wanted to push my saturation up but to also add a bit of a filmic look to the shot, so I added a bit of diffusion to the image to bloom the highlights.

Colour correction is something I don’t think I a lot of people notice when they watch a film, but it is so important to the image. Thus, it’s something I hope to improve on and to explore more as we delve deeper into this genre.