Editing: Grading + reflections

Once we had received a positive response from the teachers about our sequence, we focused on grading the music video.

Having had little experience with grading, I found this part of post-production fairly difficult, as beyond ProcAmp and Three-Way Colour Corrector, I did not know what to do with the shot beyond these. Juliette was able to take the grading further, as she was more proficient than the rest of us at grading, so she showed us how to use Change Colour in order to improve the shot.

Grading Audrey's guitar shot, using ProcAmp, Three-Way Colour Corrector, and Change Colour. Previously, the shot had been quite yellow, and also dark and lacking contrast. We graded it so that it looked less yellow, with Audrey's skin tone looking more natural now, and also so that the black and white on the guitar contrasted more.

Grading the band shots was quite straight forward, as it was mainly either increasing or decreasing brightness, while increasing contrast. Most of the time we included a slight colour change with Three-Way-Colour corrector, but increasing the contrast enhanced the white background and made the shots look more aesthetically pleasing, causing the band members to stand out more.

An example of where increasing the contrast made the background look whiter and the band members stand out more. On this shot in particular, it was slightly harder to get right, as the back of the set is more brightly lit than the side in this shot, so while making changes we had to ensure that it did not look unnatural in both areas.

However, we did have issues with the 80s shots though, as there was a colour difference between the two takes that were being used in the 80s sequence, which we tried to fix through Adobe Premiere Pro, but were unable to. This meant that we had to grade this part of the sequence in Adobe After Effects, which Chris showed Juliette. This allowed us to make the colour difference less visible, while also making their skin tones less orange, which had been caused by the lighting on the day.

Grading the 80s sequence in Adobe After Effects

In hindsight, it would have been easier for us if we'd re-shot the mid-shot of Jacob and Juliette during the shuffle, but we managed to find a way around the issue.