The Most Important Things in Life

Last year I graded a short film shot on a Red One by director David Schofield and DOP Doug Walshe, called "The Most Important Things in Life". 


The project had been edited in FCP using ProRes422 transcodes based on the DOP's white balance and exposure settings. I had planned to try out the proper workflow to Color, conforming the edit back to R3D wrapped Quicktimes and sending to Color so that I could access the illustrious Red Tab. Unfortunately the edit ran over schedule and I had to do a quick job so that the film could be entered into a film festival, so I sent the ProRes files to Color and graded from them. I did some basic Color balancing and contrast evening work to all the shots and did some work in secondaries to remove a green spill from a faulty HMI. I ended up applying a saturation curve to remove green in most shots, even those without the spill because there were a lot of green elements in the location that weren't fitting in with the colour scheme I was going for. I then went into the secondaries room and mixed the original image with a blurred duotone version of its self using an add node. This added warmth and a little diffusion. Check out the final draft below.




I have a couple of Red grading jobs coming up in the next couple of months and I will definitely be going for the proper workflow so I will let you know how it goes.