Indie Color Grading: A Conversation between Director & DP

Ever wondered how indie filmmakers conjure that cinematic allure? Join me as we pull back the curtain on the world of color grading. From painting with light to the subtle dance of hue and contrast, we'll reveal how the right color choices can evoke deep emotion and transform a simple shot into a visual feast. With anecdotes and wisdom gleaned from the cutting room floor, this episode is your personal masterclass in crafting a film's visual heartbeat, delving into nodes, color palettes, power windows, and the nostalgic charm of film emulators like Dehancer.

Navigating the labyrinth of projector settings and display discrepancies can make or break a film's visual integrity, as vividly illustrated by our struggle with "The Bear." Learn why becoming adept at color grading is more than a skill—it's a necessity in ensuring your story resonates exactly as intended, regardless of the screen it graces. We also tackle the untold saga of preparing a Digital Cinema Package on an indie budget, sharing the gritty realities that filmmakers face when distributing their masterpieces. This episode not only arms you with knowledge but also champions the quest for more accessible color grading solutions. 

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A Podcast for Indie Filmmakers

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In the world of social media, and fast-paced journalism, knowledge is abound. But with all the noise, finding the right information is near impossible. Especially if you’re a creative working in independent film.

Produced by Cinematography For Actors, the Indiewood podcast aims to fix that. This is a podcast about indie filmmakers and the many hats we wear in order to solve problems before, during, and after production.

Every month, award-winning Writer/Director Yaroslav Altunin is joined by a different guest co-host to swap hats, learn about the different aspects of the film industry, and how to implement all you learn into your work.

"We learn from indie filmmakers so we can become better filmmakers. Because we all want to be Hollywood, but first we have to be Indiewood."

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

welcome back to the indie wood podcast, where we talk about being indie filmmakers and the many hats that we wear, because it's hard to make indie films and we do this. We do these things by wearing many hats, but I think it's important for us to understand what all these hats are doing in order to become better creatives. Each month, I am joined by a guest host from a different filmmaking discipline and we talk about the craft learning, the things that are crucial to the filmmaking process, and we'll discover how all the different hats we wear can make or break a project. And so this is episode three color grading.

Speaker 2: 1:09

I'm really excited.

Speaker 1: 1:10

And, as a cinematographer, I feel like color grading is just crucial. Yeah, I was looking for a different word crucial to your workflow. But tell me about your experience with color, color grading, color management.

Speaker 2: 1:26

I. It's funny, like when you were asking me what disciplines to talk about and we came to color as one of them. I think it's probably surprising for people to hear that a DP wants to learn more about color, because I should already maybe know a lot about it. I work with a colorist on most of my projects and so I don't actually I'm terrible, and I also don't know how to color grade to an extent of like what that workflow is Like. I know you have to like start from a baseline so you get everything into like a baseline workflow and then you design your palettes and the nodes and everything. But oh God, it's a nightmare.

Speaker 2: 1:59

And when you and I work with some incredible colorists recently I've been working with so I want to shout out um, jenny Montgomery from company three in New York is one is like finding your director or finding your operator or finding that key collaborator that you're like oh, I want to work on everything with you. I feel like she just like understands what I'm trying to do and I tell her like oh, I want it to be kind of like this red, or I want it to be kind of like this red, or I want it to have this emulation of look and immediately she just goes there and I'm like, oh my God, she'll power window certain things that she knows. I tried to keep down on set like match it and I just I'm never able to do that and I think that magic in that eye is such a cool, cool thing. And I was floored when you showed me that fun film emulator you have yeah, dehancer yeah, can you tell me about dehancer?

Speaker 1: 2:44

well. So just to rewind a little back a little bit, a power window. You said power window. Power window is literally a window in your uh color grading suite, most likely, let's be real davinci resolve and you basically draw a window it could be a circle, a square, a custom shape over an object and that masks that object, either the object itself or an inverted version of that and then you can do things like color just within that space, yeah, or you can uh create effects with, with, um, uh, a focus roll off, yeah, or a blur roll-off, I'm sorry. So it's a really cool tool, masking tool, but in color grading suites we call them power windows, and it can be as small as like going over the iris of your eye.

Speaker 2: 3:34

Which I do all the time. So for my feature I asked Jenny to go over and make people's eye light brighter, and so she literally would power window eyes and track them into certain shots where I wanted eye light to be bigger and brighter.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Interestingly, you mentioned that Eyes are so important in a film. I forget his name. He did Only God Forgives Drive Nicholas Winding Refn. He has his thing about eyes. So his director, his VFX team, went through the entire film and took out everybody blinking.

Speaker 2: 4:08

Love that.

Speaker 1: 4:08

Which is crazy, and I think it does have a subtle effect, because then you look at the scene and like, oh my God, no one's blinking.

Speaker 2: 4:13

Which is the opposite of that book In the Blink of an Eye which teaches people how to edit, and it says you cut on the blink or after the blink, you know what you can remove the blink completely and then you just cut wherever you want, I know, but I remember that from like film school readings.

Speaker 1: 4:28

So we were talking about.

Speaker 2: 4:30

Eyelight and Jenny and.

Speaker 1: 4:33

And doing power windows specifically. And you asked about DeHanser and DeHanser is, I think it's part of this weird ecosystem of tools called film emulators. It's part of this weird ecosystem of tools called film emulators. Yeah Well, they'll try to emulate a film stock, either from photography or from motion picture stock onto digital. Yeah, and honestly, like everyone's got their own flavor. Everyone's got their own flavor and it never looks exactly the same because the film look doesn't exist.

Speaker 1: 5:06

saying because the film look doesn't exist because, depending on how you expose your film stock even the age of the film stock and how you process it, how you process it and how you scan it, and then also how you grade it. Yeah, fundamentally changes how it looks which used to be called timing instead of grading, yeah and so.

Speaker 1: 5:22

But in the end, you know, you always print to this, like, even when you do a digital intermediate intermediate, yeah, intermediate uh which is you scan the film digitally, color grade it and then print it to back to film. Uh, when you print back, you print a film stock that also has its own kind of thing. So when you actually actually render out a piece of footage that's going to print film, it's going to look not great because it needs to be prepared in a certain way, and then that extra layer of film stock adds a little flavor to it. So there's a whole world of film that that people want to explore, uh. But you know there's. There's now these digital tools that you could do it from with, and the answer is one of them and it's fun. I think for me it's less about. It's less about having it as a tool for color grading and more about a tool for making my images look fun you know, it's like a really god.

Speaker 1: 6:20

I don't want to say this. It's like a really high-end instagram filter don't say it.

Speaker 2: 6:25

No, I'm just kidding. I'm not judging you. It's true, it's like it's a layman's way of putting it.

Speaker 2: 6:29

Yeah, yeah like just just for people who don't know what any of what I just said means, it, it all these tools are basically just really like complicated high-end yeah instagram filters which is fine and I will say like something I learned about with jenny um when asking her about you know, I a lot of the time, depending on the director, I'll find like that I love, like a 16 200 t, which I think is 72, 17 kodak stock originally and we'll do that as like a digital emulation on top, and but I realized that the software that a lot of them use, uh, colorist and I don't know if it's dehancer another one is that not only are you controlling the population of the grain so like quantity of grain and how present it is based off of the size of the grain you're picking but also the transparency of the grain, which is not something you do in actual film.

Speaker 1: 7:18

You don't choose the transparency another thing that people don't think about when they so there's just to kind of lay the foundation for this. There are different versions of film grain. You can have overlays, which is, oh, we recorded a film grain from, uh, whatever film. Now, just overlay it, you know, do a certain kind of blend mode and you know, um, do opacity to taste. And then some are like, oh, we have a uh like algorithm, algorithmically driven grain generator, which is for every frame you get a different kind of grain. That's specifically like engineered to look like film. Yeah, and I I think what people don't realize is film grain isn't just dots of different kind of luminosity, it's also color and how you know your lens choice also affects. That is important. And so when you think about grain, it's not just about kind of that like texture, but also the color of it and on top of that, what's really cool.

Speaker 2: 8:18

And luminance.

Speaker 1: 8:19

Yeah, and what's really cool about that is you can actually make an image perceivably more sharp by adding in grain. So you have an HD image. You can make it, you can give it texture and make it look more sharp versus, you know, just doing a sharpening filter on it.

Speaker 2: 8:37

Or you can make it look softer, depending on the size of the granule.

Speaker 1: 8:39

Yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff so fun.

Speaker 2: 8:39

It's affordable to do because softer, depending on the size, the granule.

Speaker 1: 8:41

Yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff and being so fun it's, it's affordable to do, because you can just have.

Speaker 2: 8:47

Uh, you know how much is dehancer? It's like 229 or something it's.

Speaker 1: 8:49

I think when I paid it was around 300.

Speaker 1: 8:51

Okay, but it's a lifetime license yeah you can get two seats for it, which is cool, but that doesn't mean you need it, because if you just want to play with grain, for example, you can get an overlay and while it won't be a perfect like one-to-one for film, it's still something that adds a little bit of texture and, uh, can elevate your, your, your image a little bit, just because it can soften, it can hide things, it can, you know, hide imperfections, it can a little je ne sais quoi. But having said that, just a simple, simple video overlay isn't always going to be the best thing for you, because grain is affected differently depending on if it's the highlights, the mid-tones or the shadows. So there's a lot to kind of explore there, and I think film grain can deserve an episode in and of itself.

Speaker 2: 9:39

Yes, I agree.

Speaker 1: 9:41

But in the grand scheme of things, things it's a very small part of color, uh, and I think one of the last things that we do, and especially, like you know, if you're going to to, uh, if you have a digital film that's going into to theaters, add grain, but if you're delivering to youtube, don't use grain oh why? Because? Because youtube has this weird compression algorithm that is very efficient, but if there's a lot of movement in your frame, it'll condense it.

Speaker 2: 10:10

So it's quicker to play when someone loads it and it thinks it's going to have to run your CPU higher or something. So it tries to calculate.

Speaker 1: 10:16

It's less about your computer and more about YouTube's end.

Speaker 2: 10:18

Oh, okay.

Speaker 1: 10:19

I'm going to kind of butcher what's happening, but I'm going to try to paraphr it. It's to make it more efficient. The compression takes all that fine movement and just it just has such a hard time with it for some reason. I'm not sure specifically why, but it'll just scrunch it so like it'll.

Speaker 1: 10:37

It'll block everything into a single kind of pixel, almost right, because it's too fine of a detail so, like if you have, like a really finely textured shirt and you wear it for a YouTube video, it will have issues showing that on the delivery end. So if you use Grain, everything's so fine that your compression will just completely and utterly ruin your footage.

Speaker 2: 11:00

So remove your Grain, don't use Grain at all. Or if you want to use Grain Vimeo.

Speaker 1: 11:06

Vimeo has. It's better, but anything is going to. If you're going to send people files with Grain, just download them and put them on Google Drive.

Speaker 2: 11:14

Google Drive got it Frameio maybe, uh, with grain, just download them and put them on google drive and send them frame?

Speaker 1: 11:19

io maybe yeah, because honestly anything is going to compress your footage you know, to hell and back. Yeah, um, but for me, I think the coolest thing about color grading is how many different variables you have and how every single variable affects your entire image pipeline. So you have your camera color space, your timeline color space. Yeah, dude, you have your camera color space, your timeline color space.

Speaker 1: 11:37

You have your delivery color, space and and it all depends on where it's going and thankfully you know if you're going to theater, you're going to do, I think, p3, and then if you're going to anything else like broadcast or um youtube, it's rec 7 or not which is like, fine, okay, you can, you can, you can go to those, go those tunes, you're okay. Um, and then I think, oh my god, I think netflix wants, wants, delivery in rec 2020, which is like a larger color space, anyways.

Speaker 2: 12:02

So uh, my white points are all different.

Speaker 1: 12:05

Yeah, and that's the hard part, I think, is because, yeah, from beginning to end, you're having to think about that and I and I want to say to folks that are kind of like really wanting to know, oh, what's the best? The one thing that I really really bothers me is, like, what are the best settings? Whatever you want them to be I think whatever makes it look good to your eye, if you have a display that's properly calibrated, which is fairly affordable now and most rental houses will do that exactly.

Speaker 1: 12:34

You know they have to, yeah, so and so you can see, uh, what your image is going to look like. But then the problem is is no monitor, or unless you're going to a screen, and even then like a movie screen, even then it's all. There could be differences depending on which you're going to to, but no display is the same. Phones, laptops, tvs, monitors, everything has a little bit of a different kind of manufacturer color shift.

Speaker 2: 13:03

And yeah, I mean that's why ACES was created right, Because they wanted to try and standardize it, Kind of Future-proof it.

Speaker 1: 13:09

From my understanding it's that but also to have a color space big enough to include rec 709, rec.

Speaker 2: 13:19

2020 it's like future proofing so that, no matter where we go in the future, we're able to see the film as it was intended and we can go back to films shot in the 90s and show films in the 2050s sorry, not the 90s.

Speaker 1: 13:36

When was aces was like?

Speaker 2: 13:38

2010, 2010. Yeah, yeah, roughly. And so the aughts yeah, 2010s the aughts are the 2000s. I love saying aughts so I just wanted to throw it in there I was. I was an aught kid when do I ever get to say that?

Speaker 1: 13:49

so yeah right, yeah, so if you see a movie from like 2020, yeah maybe not 2020, 2020, 2019, and you see it in 2060 or 2050. They can then go back, uh, if it was shot on aces restructure, recolor, regrade, reprint, uh, into whatever this new, larger color space is that we're using for exhibition, um, which is cool yeah which is cool.

Speaker 1: 14:14

But the thing is, the problem is is, even if you use aces, people are still going to watch your movie on like a vizio that has like motion uh turned on, turned on and has like a magenta shift and it's using that like cinema and it's just going to look bad this happened with.

Speaker 2: 14:32

I was watching the bear with my partner and we have a projector and and um, and it was, it was like playing. And I just went. I was like he's a director and I sit beside him and I go yeah, that doesn't look right. And he goes what he's like? They probably shot it that way.

Speaker 2: 14:46

I said no one would allow that to be released that way. That's just not ever, that's just not. And he was like okay, and so for 30 minutes we paused the episode, 30 minutes we tried to figure out what setting was on the projector and then I think we eventually found it in some like deep advanced setting. And then it looked proper and I went yeah, that's like the ads I've been seeing and like it's just like crazy, because you could be sitting there like judging something for the way it looks.

Speaker 2: 15:09

I mean, I know I do, unfortunately, just like acid ep, but I like judging it like why are they allowing that?

Speaker 1: 15:14

like better, call saul has a very specific aesthetic, but on certain tvs that have contrast turned on it looks terrible because they cannot handle the highlights and so I'm like that's really like, like shitting on someone's work but the thing is the the people that are most important to that piece of you know, art.

Speaker 1: 15:34

For lack of a better word, don't care, don't know, I went and saw Haunting of Venice and same thing In the theater. Just something was off, it was desaturated and the contrast was too high. Something happened, someone screwed up, something was broken, and I went to talk to the people like four times and they didn't do anything. But everyone's like yeah, this just how it's supposed to look, I know. And I was like no. And so when I went home I showed my wife I was like this is the trailer, these are the scenes there you go, yeah yeah, yeah, I guess that's different.

Speaker 1: 16:05

So I think, when it comes to color, you do it for yourself you try and do it right you did try to do it right, and then you have to only do it for yourself, because when you get to the end, even in a big theater, yeah it could be screwed up and nobody is gonna be.

Speaker 1: 16:20

Oh, that's a great movie and the cost of like a dcp for a festival so expensive and like, yeah, you know, and that includes because the dcp and so, for those listening at home or watching, a DCP is called a digital cinema package, which is a specific set of files that go to movie theaters for their digital projectors.

Speaker 2: 16:42

Yeah, and I find that is something it was more like from a producer brain, but I feel like that's something that people don't factor into their budget.

Speaker 1: 16:49

They don't know.

Speaker 2: 16:50

Especially short filmmakers or independent filmmakers don't know that they're factoring in, unless you have a school who provides it for you for free a thousand to two thousand dollars for a short film in order to get a proper dcp.

Speaker 1: 17:01

We had a web series that that we did in new york, and I don't know why I emphasize new york, in new york, yeah I've been to new york, I've traveled there. I'm a world traveler I might be from la, but I've been in new york yeah by coast again.

Speaker 1: 17:17

Yeah, um, so we, yeah, we did a film and then we got into dances with films and I think our dcp was like several hundred dollars, dude, yeah, and and we just didn't even think about it, like, oh, we can just send you like a h264 file. They're like no yeah, they're like.

Speaker 2: 17:31

Here are the rules for the dcp, what we're gonna need it by and then you know, these production houses get like last minute, like oh, we need this dcp, and they're like, well, we're gonna rush.

Speaker 1: 17:41

Quote you, and then you're at like 1500 for a 12 minute film and you're like, oh my god, and you can't do it on your own, which is crazy.

Speaker 2: 17:47

You. You can try. You can have a good editor who tries to do it for you, but it's not. It's hard because it's single images. Right, it's like a sequence. The TIFF sequence.

Speaker 1: 17:56

I don't know how it's structured, so I'm going to just trust you on that.

Speaker 2: 17:59

Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 18:01

But it's I don't want to say proprietary, but it feels like it's proprietary because you have to go through all these weird hoops. You can't just be like DaVinci Resolve, premiere Pro, render a DCP. It should be. You should be able to do that, I know right. And for anybody listening at home, please do that, because I feel like it's just a business model thing that takes advantage of filmmakers. I'm sorry, uh, not sorry, but yeah, it should be that simple.

Speaker 1: 18:27

There needs to be some affordable way of doing a dcp, yeah, and I wonder if there's probably youtube tutorials out there on how to make your own dcp there are I bet it's you know trial and error to some extent, yeah, and then and then, even then, if you make your own, you can't really like trust the integrity right 100, and then you see it on the theater and you're like, yeah, so it's one of those things.

Speaker 2: 18:47

Yeah, but I mean it's funny because, like color grading, you know how to give direction as a dp or a director. When you get in with a colorist, you know, like, what you want. You've been working with the project for so long. You have your references, like you know what you want it to finally look like. But it's all the things outside of actually have like knowing what you want.

Speaker 1: 19:03

That are the things that get in the way often I think the coolest thing for you to explore would be having a display lut. And so what a display lut is? What a lut is? It's called a lookup table and it's just a set of just, it's a grid of numbers that translates one color space into another, and this could be, for, uh, technical reasons, so you can have, you know, um, a log image from a camera transferred to a rec superdine color space, or you can have it be a creative thing like, oh, let's take this rec superdine color space from this camera and make it a film emulation. So, uh, it's cool. But also, I think it's one of those tools that has become you know the, the one click color grade, you know which is. You can do it fine.

Speaker 2: 19:46

Yeah, it's just gonna look I've had like a lot of the dps of my year at afi worked like years on their own show.

Speaker 2: 19:52

Let's like creating their own and I've never gotten into that workflow yet. I want to eventually do it because currently the let's we're using right now are like a classic k1s1 or you know stuff like that. So, um, eventually, on a bigger project, I might look look at doing showlets or how to create your own, because I think it's really interesting that process of like. Why am I treating my highlights that way? What are the?

Speaker 1: 20:11

rules around shadows.

Speaker 2: 20:13

You know why is green skewed this way? Or why am I appropriating what tungsten is you know for this narrative? And I think the slow, sorry, small shifts like that are the things that are like subconsciously perceptible to an audience and kind of tell your story in a different way.

Speaker 1: 20:29

I just need to figure out how to do it so uh, just to expand on that, uh, because you said for people creating their own personal and also kind of you know something that mimics a film stock or a look and um for a delivery sorry, not for delivery for a display.

Speaker 1: 20:46

It would be something you would create in your editing software, resolve and then you would put it into your camera. So whatever raw and or log image your camera's producing, it would display to you this kind of unique look that you've created. And I've seen people be like, oh, I need my own custom kind of visual for that 've created, yeah. And I've seen people be like, oh, I need my own custom kind of visual for that. And they did this for the joker. Yeah, uh, they created their own custom. Look that that kind of mimics the, the feeling and vibe and film film. Look that they quote unquote film.

Speaker 2: 21:18

Look that they want yeah and then uh.

Speaker 1: 21:19

I've also seen folks do what's called um. I've also seen folks do what's called cinema-based, I guess, exposure. I'm sure someone much smarter than I would be able to explain it a bit better, but the concept is that because you're in a movie theater, your exposures and your skin tones are actually towards the lower half of your histogram Because it's so dark and you don't need it to be that bright. It's so dark and you don't need it to be that bright, and that's where that's kind of like cinematic look comes from, where all the mid-tones are kind of actually lower on the histogram than they would be, let's say, if you shot a video for right, you know your phone or whatever, and so what some folks are doing is they're creating a lot specifically for that exposure balance but you know why they're doing that too is because normally we're told as dps to light higher, because in color we'll bring it down, because we want the information, and so that allows you to see, okay, to what extent, percentage wise, if I'm lighting 10 above or 20 what the?

Speaker 2: 22:15

final will be what will it actually end up looking like? Because it's hard on set to communicate as a dp to producers, directors and whoever's looking at the monitor which is everyone nowadays.

Speaker 1: 22:24

Yeah, like oh, it's not going to really look like like later we're going to bring it down like it's going to be actually like dusk or like you know it's gonna.

Speaker 2: 22:30

Yeah, and and because a lot of people are. Although we're all in a visual medium a lot of people look at and they're like is that how it's going to look?

Speaker 1: 22:37

and you're like no we just need to make sure we have that so that when we bring it down later, the information is there and we're not crunching it's such a crucial tool for communicating what the final product is going to look like, because sometimes you have stakeholders look at a log image and like why is it so washed out? Where's the color? The?

Speaker 2: 22:55

biggest fear as a dp is your director gets used to that look and then is in that in edit and gets used to it because they're looking at it for hours they looked at on set and then when you start to change it or add contrast and this has happened to me directors freak out and they're like well, that's really contrasty. I'm like you've been looking at a flat image, like you know.

Speaker 2: 23:11

So you make sure that your lutz always on um for the director and producer and then you have the log image separately, unless you have a really technical director, I think, who kind of understands that you know that the lutz off right now um, because it can really be a shock for a lot of directors who are with that footage for a long time.

Speaker 1: 23:28

No, you're totally right. And and it's interesting because you can go a step further and create something like oh, we're gonna shoot day for night. Yeah, you know. So you can create a lot that's day for night, yes, uh, you can, you know, be like what's that? Trope is like? Oh, when you're in mexico, everything looks orange you can create those looks, yeah, that you can build into the camera and and they're not baked into the image yes uh, so you can.

Speaker 1: 23:49

You can still get your clean raw and or log image for color grading, but then you know they can use that lot for reference or as a starting grade. And speaking of dcps, uh, unlike dcps, uh, they're really easy to make and really affordable and resolve yeah uh, you can.

Speaker 1: 24:08

You can make them fairly simply, but the thing to consider when uh folks are making their, when they're cooking their lots at home, is you have to make sure that the color space you're making them for matches the camera that you're using, because sometimes what's happened with my workflows? Because I was using multiple systems, whatever the the the color space that I had that I made this lot on top of just didn't match my camera, and when I plugged everything in it was like, oh, you want it brown yeah or blue.

Speaker 2: 24:40

Yeah, I think we'll call it a transform one instead of a display love yes not for visual purposes or aesthetic. It's more to like tell the math to go from here to here, exactly, yeah, yeah um well, I'm really excited about this episode.

Speaker 1: 24:51

I thought this was fun with a lot of like technical knowledge for people out there and getting into it yeah, no, this was a fun episode and, um, I, I'm, I feel like, I feel like we can talk a whole lot more gosh, I know I have to do a season two electric boogaloo and have you come back on and talk more about color I mean we just need to get like a grain specialist in here or get someone from live grain, and I've always wanted to hear about that.

Speaker 1: 25:13

Yeah, because that's an interesting thing too it is yeah, tbd yeah, well, uh, we have one more episode to do, so we'll see everyone next week. We'll talk about music. Do you know anything about music?

Speaker 2: 25:24

I know I like that's about it.

Speaker 1: 25:26

Well, there's a lot to explore there then. Thank you for listening to the IndieWood podcast. You can find us on anywhere you find your podcasts and on Instagram at IndieWoodPod. See you next time.

Speaker 2: 25:34

From the CFA Network. Cinematography for Actors is bridging the gap through education and community building. Find out about us and listen to our other podcast at cinematographyforactorscom. Cinematography for Actors Institute is a 501c3 nonprofit. For more information on fiscal sponsorship donations because we're tax exempt now, so it's a tax write-off and upcoming education, you can email us at contact at cinematographyforactorscom. Thanks.