A while back I was approached by a friend. She asked me if I was interested in grading one of her projects. She was working on a music video that would be shot in the Panama desert. Of course, I was immediately excited! You don't come across a setting like this very often. It was a big contrast between the case films we normally work on. A few weeks later I got my hands on the material. It immediately became clear that this project was going to be a lot more challenging than I had envisioned. Sure, the locations were great, but there were certain aspects that made the grade tricky, to say the least. The lighting was all over the place due to the constantly changing weather conditions. It was not uncommon for a shot to be 2.5 stops overexposed. This, in combination with the used Samyang lenses and pro-mist filters, meant that the images contained much less information than I was used to. Nonetheless, I was still excited about the project and eagerly started working on the first pass.
I found myself very much counteracting the look. The use of heavy pro-mist filters in combination with the uncontrolled light caused the images to be so inconsistent that I created a new problem with each adjustment. I realized that maybe it wasn’t the footage, but my approach that wasn’t working.
How do I stay as close as possible to the photographic intent? How do I build a look without changing the contrast? The answer to these questions was to use only the offset tool. Also known as “printer lights”. This tool allows you to make the most global adjustments to an image, without changing the ratio between light and dark too much. It allowed me to let the look be determined by exposure and color tone alone.
On a shot level, this felt underwhelming at times, but the moment I took a step back and looked at the images in the lightbox, I realized the power of this simple approach. The look was coherent and powerful. By only using the offset tool I noticed that I was much more aware of the choices I made. Where the project first felt overwhelming, it now seemed manageable. I found my strength again. This sounds very exaggerated, but I think every colorist regularly struggles with the idea of incompetence. It's something I come across quite often and apparently, it's part of our profession. But this project made me realize that sometimes it's only as complicated as you make it yourself. By critically examining, and changing my workflow, I was able to improve myself and add value to the project.
At the time of writing, the director has not yet seen the grade, so I can't comment on that. But what I do know is that I can justify what I did and why. That is ultimately just as important to me, if not more important.