Colour Grading
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The colour grading for my video was arguably the most crucial feature of the post-production as it transformed my footage into the cinematic and striking style that I was trying to achieve. After some research, I decided to use Davinivi Resolve as the application to carry out my colour grading as it offered the most detailed and custom range of tools, that the adobe apps could not offer. Nevertheless, it was a very difficult piece of software to understand and consequently led me to spend many hours over my first weeks of the brief to learn. Looking back I doubt I would have used Davinci if I was aware of how difficult it was to learn and understand, however I'm very glad I did as I am very happy with how the end footage turned out.
When choosing how to colour grade my footage, I took inspiration from the 2019 film "Joker" as I felt that the green tint visible throughout the colour grading of the entire film created an intriguing and iconic look. However I knew I wanted this tint to be more subtle in my footage and instead feel natural and somewhat nostalgic to a viewer.
The process:
To begin, I opened my clip that I wanted to colour grade, and went to the colour panel on Davinci Resolve
Next I right clicked on the node ( the small square box), and clicked create serial. I then did this 3 more times to create 4 of these serial nodes that I could now edit.
The first node that I adjusted was exposure node, I opened up the colour wheel panel and brought down the exposure on the gamma, gain and offset channels to reach my desired exposure for that specific clip.
I then used a second node, to adjust the white balance which was the most significant part in changing the colour of the clip. In the colour wheel panel, I went the gain channel and brought the colours slightly towards a green, this way I would have the green undertone that I was trying to achieve.
My third node was to adjust the softness of my clip. I opened the fx panel and dragged over the gaussian blur effect onto my node. I changed the vertical and horizontal strength of the blur to 0.19.
My fourth node was to add halation to the video, but it was the most tricky to create and required multiple steps. To begin I right clicked on the node and added a serial.
I selected the node and the serial and right clicked on them to create a compound node. I then opened up the compound node in order to edit it's contents. To begin I created a layer node and changed the composite mode to add.
I then added another serial node to this and added a colour space transform from the fx panel onto the nodes on the far left and right of my compound node.
I changed the input gamma to linear and the output gamma to rec.2100 HLG on the far right node. On the far left I did the same except vice versa so the input was rec.2100 HLG and the output was linnear.
Finally, I opened the layer node on the compound node and adjusted the radius of the blur tab. I raised the red and green channels whilst lowering the blues.
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