Color

With the drama assembled in Final Cut Pro, Simon switches to Color for the grade. It’s a powerful piece of kit - in fact it’s alarming what you can do. At one point Simon says ‘we haven’t made a black and white film, have we?’. This, film texture, ‘vaseline on the lens’, upping contrast, ‘crunching blacks’, saturating, desaturating… there are almost too many bells and whistles. We want it to look good but we also want it to serve the drama, to feel ‘natural’ and right for the piece. But a concept like ‘natural’ struggles a bit in the convoluted artifice that is making a film. With a test grade done, we instantly forget what the film looked like in its ‘raw’ state. Simon describes the look as ‘smoky’ but also ‘meaty’ - it’s like wine-tasting and the palate (or rather the palette) is infinite. Have we made good decisions? Will anyone even notice? The sheer labor (go with it, color lost its ‘u’ too) needed to make something so apparently light…

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