The stills below from the movie show the offline, with a temp grade on the top against the final grade below.
Ocean View
The balcony scene was the hardest to grade in the entire show. I was initially worried that there was nothing out there! The producers had gone to this wonderful expensive ocean location, which looked fantastic to the eye. They then had to sufferer the burnt out pictures all through the edit, only seeing blue skies and ocean come back during the grade. I used the RED metadata settings to lower the ISO settings and the exposure control a little. This brought the detail back into the sky and ocean. I turned the saturation up and keyed the girl to bring her out of the BG. There is a Power window on the lower part of the ocean to bring up the effect of sand under the water. Matching the rest of this scene was very hard as the conditions changed between his and hers CUs and wide shots.
Mum at the top of the stairs.
This shot was very green due to a gelled lamp at the bottom of the stairs. I don’t mind colour changes but this one stuck out a little too much as we hadn’t scene strong colour differences before in the movie. This grade was all achieved with just 2 nodes. Get the primary right, then use a window to pop out the face very slightly. She didn’t move much so only the later CUs needed tracking.
Boys by the salt water pool.
This was the first real time we saw the guys so they had to look good. A primary balance helped bring some contrast back into the image. Then I worked on the sky, water and skin tones keying each to try and give the boys some separation from the BG. The water had a big hue shift to bring out the aqua look. My clients wanted more, but I eventually pulled everything back slightly. We had fun trying to flatten out the ‘Speedo’ effect thinking it wouldn’t sit well with US viewers!
Boy in the classroom.
This shot was very flat to start with. I had made the wide shot of the classroom a more high key afternoon feel so needed to do the same with the CU. This was achieved by using shafts of light that ran across his face from top to bottom. A second window was placed around the eyes just bringing them up a little. The window did cover the bridge of the nose so had to be very soft.
Girls in Bikinis.
The blue grade was the initial thought coming out of the offline to show the scene is a flashback. I didn’t want to throw away the natural skin tones of the girls, so we tried many things here and decided it didn’t have to have the same look as the earlier flashback shots. Eventually deciding to de-saturate a little using a reversed vignette, that means it gets brighter on the edges which are blured slightly.
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