Bits of Colouring I’m actually kind of proud of.

So to continue on the colouring, this post may feel similar to what I was speaking of in the previous ‘Colour Correction’ post, but to be honest I had more pictures screen capped and I feel the need to use them. To begin with, there was one scene I was particularly happy with, as it was one of the more effective uses of the masking effect, being the initial ‘lights turning on’ scene, which initially was not noticeable, but was able to be enhanced through the use of colour grading.

(1) While the light turning on is supposed to be a shock to the audience, the scene’s lighting was too dark to really look effective, (2) so I went through the initial colour grading, which involved making the characters appear warmer and more visible, but it didn’t affect the other room’s light in the way I thought it would. (3) I then added a mask layer which did nothing except for increasing the exposure to the maximum amount Premiere would physically let me, so we ended up with (4), which I believe to increase a lot of the scenes effectiveness, as most of the scene up to this point has been rather dark, so the sudden exposure to a massive light source is able to justify the characters reaction to become startled and run away.

I like how this kind of points out that in something like editing/ colour grading, just figuring out how to use one tool can improve the quality of the work by a lot.

To close out I would like to share the colour grading of the film’s final shot, which I’ve been using for the header image on these posts, but would like to go over the process (I really like it). The original image seems like an overcast day, which is slightly troubling considering it was close to sunset on a clear day, but moving on, so to really bring out the colours I lowered the temperature to enhance the blue in the ocean on one layer, and with the other layer I used two masks with an increased temperature to increase the sunset, and also add warmth to the island the characters rest on, having finally turned back on to the same page to end the film.
I like how the image I ended up with both feels natural and unnatural at the same time, while it simulates a full sunset, there is a sort of otherworldly quality in how the colours work next to each other. I’m having trouble describing what I really want to say about the colour in this final shot, but I’ll just go with I like how it works, I guess that is what ‘Screen & Sensation’ means, yeah?