Select Stills
Look Breakdown
The Daytime Look
I had the pleasure of shooting this period piece short for director Jake Weismer in early 2022. From the moment I signed on to this project I knew the kind of look I wanted to emulate. I wanted tp split my look between the time of the day to play into the mood of the story. For the day light scenes I wanted to create a low contrast and low saturated image. To achieve this in the grade my focus was on my shadows and keeping them fairly lifted without having them appear washed out. Furthermore, in the coloring process I focused extensively on the greens of my image. The grass needed to feel arid to me but not dead; therefore I gave my greens a deep tone and kept it fairly desaturated in my hue vs saturation curve. I also wanted to give the sun an overbearing presence and a sense of stark heat in the daytime scenes, so I gave all my highlights a kiss of warmth to match a color temperature more in line with 4800K rather than 5600K.
The Nighttime Look
For the nighttime scenes I approached the look with the goal of keeping my mid tones fairly saturated and allowing my blacks to be crushed and engulf the image with infinite darkness interrupted only by the highlights hitting the subject (the fire). I intentionally crushed my blacks so that information would be lost in the darkest parts of the image. In the mid tones I focused on the skin in particular to achieve the saturated look I was aiming for.
Noise Removal
The challenge in achieving this look was truly just the grain introduced in the image from venturing outside of the native iso's; I did this with the knowledge that I could easily remove the grain in my noise removal process, but I wanted to make sure grain was obsolete in the blacks. I wanted an infinite clean darkness and the noise removal aspect of this was instrumental in making that look possible.
Gen 5/B-RAW
Colored
Gen 5/B-RAW
Colored