Colour Grade

I was inspired by this video on Vimeo.

I think the video above is so ethereal and professionally done it must have taken a long time to get it to that high standard of perfection.

I wanted to create a shot that felt like it was in the same forest with the same sort of colour grading – dark and mysterious.

For some of my show reel i filmed some clips in Lodmoor Country Park. I got a nice shot of some foliage on a tree and decided to colour grade it to make it more of a ‘forest at winter’ look with shades of green and blue in it.  For this I used, Adobe After Effects CS 6.

I also felt that the clip was quite ‘grainy’ for some reason, i think it was to do with the ISO setting I had on my camera at the time of filming. I used the ‘remove grain’ effect control to take some of this out. For the colour grading I used the Curves, Levels and Colour Balance effect controls.

Below are some screenshots of the effect controls i used.

I am very happy with the overall clip of the colour grading as i feel it conveys the ideas that i originally set out to do. I would have liked to film and edit the clip again as i feel the graininess is too visible for my liking. I would need more guidance on how to film this clip with more lighting and more attention to the ISO in the future to make it less grainy. I also feel that a macro lens would be a good investment for these types of shots, especially if i were to do a video like the inspiration for the said clip above.

The video below is a final breakdown of the colour grading i did for the clip.

Sahara

For our current assignment we are to make 5 clips which include our own visual effect content for our future showreels. We are to include : Greenscreen, set extension, 3D modeling, 2D and 3D camera tracking, compositing, and colour grading.

I was researching green screen techniques and found that the film ‘The Great Gatbsy’ had some great scenes where green screen was used by the visual effects company Rising Sun Pictures, i was inspired simpy the scene of Mr Gatsby raising a glass with fireworks going off behind him. It inspired me to make a scene where someone would be infront of a different background. This is where my idea came from to make Dan look like he was in Sahara Dessert with the wind flowing through his hair.

I have linked the video and screenshotted the scene i am referring to below :

(Video Here)

For my first clip I am using the techniques of green screen and set extension. The clip consists of my classmate Dan walking on sand dunes in the Sahara. The clip was filmed in the TV studio with a greenscreen background and an assistant to ‘flap’ a piece of cardboard as if the wind was hitting his hair. For this clip I used Adobe After Effects CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6.  Before I chroma keyed the footage I had to Photoshop the background to get rid of some people in the background otherwise you would be able to see errors with proportions of them to Dan.

Here is an image of the original and the people in the background gone.

The screenshot above shows what the image & video clip of Dan looked like once it was chromakeyed onto the background. I then found there was part of the video clip which looked odd around his top and discovered it was because there is some green on his t-shirt.

To get rid of the funny parts around his t-shirt I had to mask it for each movement in the video clip to make it so the chromakey does not affect the colours in his t-shirt.  Once I had finished the chroma keying and masking, I needed to colour correct the scene to make it as though Dan was definitely in the Sahara, for this I used curves, brightness and contrast, colour balance, levels and i also added grain. I then added a vignette effect around the edges to make the clip slightly more ‘older’ looking. The video below is a breakdown of the clip i made.

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/111724923″>Sahara Breakdown</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user5630482″>Christina Vincent</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>