Grading in all it’s multifaceted complexity is a process that has come to the forefront of picture post-production in the last ten to twenty years.
With the advent of new digital technologies, the capability of what can be achieved has grown, making it a key component of modern film and broadcast workflows. At the same time, the accessibility of hardware and software, along with the democratisation of content dissemination via platforms like YouTube, means that techniques like grading have migrated from the isolation of high-end post suites and into wider awareness.
However, as with many descriptions in the film industry, a single term can cover a multitude of interconnecting elements. So here’s a quick run down:
As a visually dominant species, colour is what allows us to make sense of the world around us. As Carl Jung (1875-1961) famously commented, “Colour is the mother tongue of the subconscious”. When it comes to our consumption of moving image content, colour, again, is key to that experience.
As Bellatoni notes regarding Rebel Without a Cause (1955):
“The minute we see that red, we form an opinion of this guy. Of course Dean would be the rebel without it, but red pushes his personality to the max. It’s a visual translation of who Jim Stark is. We can’t separate Dean from red” (Bellatoni, 2005: 13).
As such, colour grading can be understood as “the process by which the picture image is altered in post-production, to ensure that the colours, contrast etc are all calibrated in accord with the intended design of the film” (Paul Richardson, Director, 2014). The colourist is the individual who controls and manipulates these potentialities to key aesthetic and psychological effect.
The origins of this process can be seen in the choice of film stocks, selected by early filmmakers with a view to their exposure ratings (ASA) and colour temperature (tungsten, daylight) to generate certain colour-specific outcomes. In addition, filters on lights or the camera itself were used, as well as deliberate reversal of film stock colour temperature and other film processing techniques (Anderson, 2011). Indeed, many of these stylistic choices have created visual references still in use today, albeit mimicked digitally, for example, bleach bypass and cross-processing.
With intermediate print film came the development of colour timing where broad entire frame corrections were made via three printer light buttons, one for reds, one for greens, and one for blues, which allowed the film lab to tweak the footage to get the desired result (Anderson, 2011). However, it is the evolution of technology and the process of digital intermediate, whereby film is scanned to create a digital file for manipulation within specialized grading software, which allowed for a rapidly increasing sophistication of image manipulation.
O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) is commonly cited as the first film to bring this digital colour correction process into mainstream film awareness, with its use of DI for the entire film, a practice which has since been incorporated into all high-end post workflows (Anderson, 2011).
According to Filmlight’s Arthur Johnsen (2014), grading in its current form can combine three key areas of specialty:
- Colour space management (e.g. Rec 709, P3)
- Shot matching (including footage correction)
- Look creation
Once confined to primary corrections of the entire frame, digital tools now allow the colourist to perform secondary corrections whereby the image is split into multiple parts for localised tweaking. For example, sections of the frame might be isolated according to area, colour or even brightness.
As such, the colourist, with newly precise tools, acts to facilitate an immersive audience experience and particular emotional mindset by harnessing our subconscious psychological response to colour. This can be as basic as warm and welcoming versus cool and uninviting colour palettes, or the complex incorporation of colour as a motif which may denote temporality, geographic location and character, to story arcs or a particular emotion (Bellatoni, 2005). Moreover, the possibility of shooting RAW creates even greater flexibility as camera settings are not ‘baked in’ in the same way.
Techniques may include:
Look Creation
– Exposure / contrast alteration
– Chroma alteration
– Colour keys
– Blurs
– Shaping and relighting
– Use of grain
– Glows / dark diffusion
– Film stock emulation
Fixing/enhancing existing material
– Exposure re balance for foreground and back ground objects
– Colour cast correction
– Skin tone correction
– Preserving memory colours
– Reducing highlight blow out
– Day for night
– Sky replacement
So, with that in mind, here’s a small reel: