Written by Simon Cox, Colourist. (Man in charge of colouring in)

We’ve just finished putting the finishing touches to our colour grading reel, which you can see here.

Grading is something we all get quite excited about here at Oakslade, but it’s often difficult to explain why, but here goes… A question we get asked quite often is: “Why bother?”  The easiest way to answer is to think of all the feelings and emotions that we readily associate with colour. Romance…red? Jealousy…green? Cold…blue?  Heaven…Mila Kunis?   OK, perhaps not the last one, but all the others are examples of how we constantly relate to colour, whether we consciously realise it or not.   Given that these are all common responses, think of the multitude of ways that we react we unconsciously react to colour. How much effort goes into choosing the colour you paint your living room or the colour of your new car? Which is why colour grading your film is important.  Don’t you want to own a TVR just because they come in Felix Chameleon Black?

If you watch your favourite film without sound, it will be a very different experience (providing it’s not a silent movie, of course!) Watch a film without colour and the same rule applies (again, providing your film isn’t black and white - but even then it will have been graded).   So what do we do?

Once a picture lock has been signed off we get to work in our dedicated grading suite (running Apple Color and our super shiny 23″ Vutrix LCD Grading Monitor) to get the most from the images, working on the tonal range and overall contrast until all the shots are equally balanced before moving on to our secondary corrections. These can range from simply improving skin tones and replacing dull, grey skies (a fairly common feature here in the Midlands!) to isolating specific colours and adding stylized looks and moods.

Each sesson with our colourist is specific to the clients brief and helps to achieve a specific ‘look’ to help tell the story. Having an in-house colourist means that not only can we make the changes to your film that you need, but we can can advise you so that even if you’re not sure what you want then we can help you work it out.

Take a look at the reel and see how we can bring your images to life.

Hi, Simon here. As an editor here at Oakslade I get to see a lot of lovely, crisp HD footage pass through my edit suite on a daily basis. I always enjoy sitting down and cutting this together according to the client’s brief.

Something strikes me as odd though. People always seem to forget about sound. I’m not sure why, obviously its one of the two key senses we use when watching film and TV. So for me, nothing we do here feels complete without a good soundtrack. I’ve seen many corporate films in the past where its clear that 95% of the client’s focus has been on the image and the soundtrack is an afterthought, usually just dropping any old royalty free soundtrack on the bottom as background music to finish it off.

Sometimes people recognise the need for a voiceover but haven’t budgeted for a professional voiceover artist. In our experience these people are called artists for a reason. As Oakslade has it’s own recording studio clients will sometimes ask us to just grab someone from the office and whilst we understand that ‘cash is king’ this just doesn’t do all of this gorgeous footage justice. No-one in the office sounds like Don LaFontaine so films made in this way, without the proper budget or planning never reach their full potential. Which is a shame because the hard work is always already done.

I think what I’m trying to say here is to always remember that sound is just as important as the image. If you were able to watch Blackhawk Down without the sound effects, I think you might get what I’m on about.

Even better, watch this:

We’ve been playing with a timelapse camera in the office and it seemed rude not to share some of the results…