Editing - Colour grading

Grading our shots was an essential part of the editing process, to give the footage a greater vibrancy and more contrasting but natural look. For most of this, we used ProcAmp and Three-Way Colour Corrector, features of Premier Pro that we had all previously had experience with:

These were used for every shot, but for some we also used Change Colour if we needed to. The guitar close-up is an example of when this was used:

Grading was particularly important for this shot to improve the contrast between the black and white of the guitar, improving it aesthetically, and making my skin less yellow (the colour wheels on Three-Way Colour Corrector were also useful for making our skin tones look more natural, as they often appeared too yellow in the footage). As the first shot of the video, it was especially important that the colouring stood out.

I had never used Change Colour before and Juliette was much more confident with this, so she was mostly responsible, but we all had input on what the shots looked like and what needed to be done.

Possibly the most challenging part of the video to grade was the 80s footage, because we had filmed the same scene on two separate days and so there was a colour difference between two takes. To fix this we had to use Adobe After Effects. I didn't know how to use this software, so most of this was done by Juliette, but again we all had input on how it actually turned out.

Grading the 80s