Grade Entry

Well I am sitting here at a grading session. It's Friday afternoon, the weekend is on the horizon. Yay!

Now attending the colour grade is one of the more boring aspects of my job. For those that do not know - and I imagine there's many of you - a grading session involves transferring the film negative back onto videotape again, but manipulating/accentuating the colours of the image for the final product. Prior to this process, when I begin the edit, the footage is transferred without any colour grading, so I am pretty much working with flat images that look like shit! The reason being that the transfer process from film to videotape is bloody expensive, and requires our company to outsource another company who has the specialist equipment (named a telecine chain) to do this.

So this Nokia China commercial I edited has been approved yesterday, and now we are colour grading the shots that are used, one by one to the director's artistic vision, so that it all looks good. The company we are at is called Cutting Edge, in Chippendale, and I'm going to be here for a few more hours, as this process is time-consuming!!! I suppose my role is both creative and technical. Creative in the sense that I also have some input into the look of the images, and can drop my 2 cents worth into the discussion about the colour grade. Technical, in that I need to make sure that all the shots we chose in the edit are all there (!), and to oversee any issues that might affect the next process, which is the online session (finishing the commercial at high resolution).

This ad is looking good so far. It was shot day-for-night, and some of the shoots you would swear were shot at nighttime. Stunning images on a lake....I'll have to post some frames up when we are finished....