I’ve got 2 scenes left to edit and some final tweaks in order to finish my new short film The Climb.  The 2 scenes in question are massively important and I was having difficulty getting them right.  Eventually, I reached a point when I simply had to take a break.  The scenes simply didn’t have the emotional impact I wanted them too convey.

I still had some spare time so I decided to take a couple shots into Color and work on the color grade.  That’s when things got really frustrating.

Since the moment we decided to shoot the film, I had a specific look in mind.  This was going to be my first attempt at grading a film myself and I was extremely excited to learn a new skill.  At work, I color correct on a daily basis but that’s more along the lines of balancing and matching shots.  I can boost levels and tweak colors with the best of them but grading and creating a unique look is relatively new for me. Not too mention I use a completely different software package at work.  It’s one thing to know the techniques but translating them from one piece of software to another can be challenging to say the least.

A while back, I registered with Lynda.com and used their software training tutorials to teach myself Color and it’s workflow with Final Cut Studio.  The course was a fantastic start and I was ready to get going.  Except the edit wasn’t ready then.

Time can be a killer when you haven’t spent much time with new software.  I should have practiced all along.  When I finally got some shots from my movie into the program I found myself lost and frustrated.  I have a basic knowledge of the program but I couldn’t achieve the look I wanted.  I couldn’t make the software do what I wanted it to do.  There were a couple presets that were close but I don’t want to settle for ‘off the shelf’ looks.  I wanted to build a look on my own.

HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED AT A NEW INTERFACE
AND FELT LOST?

It gets to a point when you feel helpless.  Like you’ll never see results.  You have to push through it. For me, the whole point was to learn a new skill!  So I dug in.  Slowly, my shots began to look a little like I wanted it to but I have a lot left to learn.

Clearly,  I won’t be able to blast through the color grading process as I had originally intended but I’m still going to reach my goal.  This movie is going to look exactly how I want it to look because I won’t settle for anything less.

As a bonus, while I was working on the color grade, I came up with a different approach for the 2 scenes that weren’t working.  Nice.