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.