Irfan Post 18b - Correcting the Colours in the night...

(Note - I know a lot of these photos look pretty much the same, and for all you know I could be bulls**tting all of the corrections - but blame jpegs - a nasty codec that strips all humanity and soul from my blog posts...but take a look at the first and the last photos in the post and you will see the greatest difference of before and after)

This blog will look at the colour correcting of Irfan during night scenes, something very different from the last blog post which looked at an outdoor daylight scene.

Here, the grading is a lot more subtle. The whole point of a night scene is that it is dark. There are going to be few problems with digital fade which is often seen during daylight hours where the picture looks washed out. At night, it is the lighting on the set that matter - and thankfully the lighting was good during the shooting of Irfan.

This is the original footage from the prayer scene.



It is actually a beautiful shot, and something I will probably use in the publicity stills (later on). But there were a few additions I added to this shot. Firstly, I tinted the whole picture blue, in fact the whole scene is tinted blue. I wante to give that cold feeling to the audience, a chill, a sense of death. This may sound waffly, but I am a director, waffle is my bread and butter...or my syrup coated waffles...anyways, as part of the mechanics of the plot, this scene is meant to resemble death, and the blue tint across the whole of this segment of the movie for me gives a sense of cold.



Lastly, I put some subtle colours in at the Secondary correction stage. While not clear in this pic, earlier in the clip, when Irfan's face and mosque cap is in shot, I tinted both those features to give a crisper looking Mosque cap and a more vibrant face so we can see the charater's emotions.



You know what, let me back up a few frames in the clip, so you can see the effect the secondary corrections have on the picture quality. This is a shot from the same clip, with the blue tint (primary corrections) only.



And here is that same shot with the secondary corrections now in place. Note the Mosque cap is a lot cleaner while you can see a little more of Irfan's features.



Colour correcting with regards to dark conditions is more subtle. In fact, it is easier. In the daylight, I have to account for the changes in weather, the angle of the sun etc. Night time correction is easiest of all. As it is dark, I am not trying to brighten up (or dull down) the whole picture - hey, it is dark. So the corrections I am making are more focused on subtle points to enhance the story telling aspect. It is more creative, yeah, fun, and less technical as the tech stuff has been done by the lighting crew during the filming.

More fun from the crayon room coming soon...

Irfan Post 18a - Correcting the colours in the day...

Right, this is three days in a row of colour correction news, as to fit all of this onto one blog post would boggle the reader (as well as screw my head off). I will be blunt before I head into this. Colour Correction is dull. While editing and even sound editing has a creative edge to it that constructs the story, colour correction is actually quite dull, when doing the task in the strictest possible way. In other words, when you are just correcting colours. I had more fun doing colour correction for Caution Wet Paint, as I was actually manipulating the colours to make a story. But then CWP was a very different beast from Irfan - it was designed to look like a comic book, while Irfan is a serious piece, and so the colour correction process for this film is purely functional.

What I will show today is the colour correction of a normal scene shot in the daytime with great lighting. In other words, a scene that does not need a lot of work done to it. And I have chosen Irfan's longest scene, the initial conflict between the two main characters, Irfan and Vasile.



This is how the original sots of Irfan look like when the character of Irfan is at the front door of Vasile's house. It is beautiful, but the colours are a bit dull and flat. This was shot on digital film, and unfortunately no matter how good the camera is, you always have to do a little bit of correction to bounce up the picture. Of course the alternative is to shoot in black and white. A note to self when I do my next film, grade it so everything is B&W and you save yourself a lot of heartache during post!

But here is the picture of Sippy who plays the title role - Irfan with the colours now corrected:



As you can see, the picture looks instantly a hell of a lot better. More vibrant, especially when it comes to people. While last week I was talking about the colour of the car, the really tricky bit comes to people. Objects have uniform colours, smooth contours, and are often static. Even when objects are moving, the light usually acts in a predictable way on them.

Not for people. But my films are about people and so while for objects, you can usually copy and paste the settings from one shot to the next, for people, it is very different. Each shot requires the patience of a saint.

And for completion, let us take a look at the character of Vasile, played by Cristian. Different skin tones and an almost 180 spin in the angle means that the light is going to play completely new tricks on him, even though we are shooting in the same location. Here is Cristian before:



and after:



As you can see, the principles between the shots of Irfan and Vasile are the same. Bounce up the sin colour, improve the general light ambiance of the scene. But her, I also fiddled a bit with the background. While Sippy is in the shot, we get a blurry view of some bushes and the sky in the background, and so it was just a case of taking little bit of the brightness out of the sky so the image does not completely white-out. However, when Cristian is in frame, the background is a door, and is fairly detailed. I like the look of it, and so enhanced the image just a tad, making the door's colour a little richer, and refining a few of the details on the door. Well, trust me, I did. Subtle changes, but I liked them...

Next Irfan post, what happens when you colour correct in the dark...

Irfan Post 17 - Colouring the Picture!

The good news is that if I am colour correcting, it means that the editing of Irfan is done. Really, it is complete. At 17mins and 54secs (not including credits) it is the longest film I have done in a fair old while. But thankfully, it is not technically the most complex. That honour goes to my last short film, Caution Wet Paint. The difference this time with Irfan has been the length, which has meant it has taken a lot longer to finish. Plus the fact that I basically had the whole of August written off, as I was at the film festivals on the continent.

One thing I have to add is that during the Sound Editing, I was always tweaking Irfan. Taking bits and pieces off the edges. When I sent the first draft to Nick for musical inspiration, the film was 22 minutes long. So you can see that in the meantime, it has been whittled down a considerable amount. While my main concentration has been the sound, you cannot help but fiddle with the lengths. However, a seventh of the film is much more than a fiddle. Yes, unfortunately I have dropped the feather scene (the cast and crew will know exactly what I am talking about) and a hell of a lot of lines are gone. There are really only two bits in the film where I have any real dialogue between the characters. The rest is purely visual.

And before I delve into the sticky and sweet world of colour correction, let me say that there were also a couple of moment shots that I also removed from the film. What felt moving in my mind was tedious on the screen. Interestingly, a couple of the ad-libs off the set have made it into the movie. The thinking on your feet, on-the-day stuff turned out to be damn useful!

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All right, as colour correction is actually a really dull exercise, I will show you some fun things that I do while sitting at my computer.

(My life at this moment in time is utterly sad. You will see below.)

This is an original sot from the movie, uncorrected.



And this is the shot when I have finished with it!



Look, the car is now green! isn't that amazing! Wow, I like, sooo love computers and all! Mummy, can you make your car turn green?!?!?!

All right, I am only mucking about, this is the shot, wuth the blue colour of the car bumped up, so looking a lot more vibrant than in the original (first pic):



(You can see why I have no life. I am excited at turning something blue into something green. Ugh...I despise colour correction!)

More next week on the process! I will be doing a lot of this, not just on the inanimate objects, but also bumping up people's skin tones, clothing and even eye colour. Do not underestimate the detail ;)