Color Grading at Griffith Film School 2019
We have just wrapped the 2018 course at Griffith’s South Bank campus in Brisbane.
The course included a five day Colorist Strategies class in the university’s Mac lab, a 60 minute multiple choice quiz and a two hour grading pressure test. We’d also make time for a grading Happy Hour each day where they could color and work on any area or footage they wanted to.
There was two days of one-on-one 60min sessions in their grading suite working on suggestions for their one min presentations.
One day in the theatre, with each student presenting three minutes of footage:
- One minute ungraded,
- One minute graded,
- One minute side by side.
Each student had to talk about why and how they graded their 1 min selections. They could edit their minute, so could use their own footage or make use of the ICA footage we had used in the class.
The presentation put them on the spot, but that is what it will be like in the real world, not just in coloring. Being able to explain their work to an audience is a skill valued in almost any field.
These students will mostly be grading third year graduation short films in 2019. I hope that in a small way I have helped de-mystify Color Grading for them and at the same time pushed the quality of all Griffith films.
Color Grading at Griffith
In 2011 I visited Griffith Film School in Brisbane for the first time, conducting a one-hour lecture on Color Grading. The next year it was two hours and I showed them Resolve. The students had mostly never seen a real color corrector before; they graded their graduation films with FCP7, Avid and After Effects.
In 2013 I spent 60 minutes with the designated colorist of each group making a Grad film. One out of 10 films used Resolve for Color.
By 2014 Griffith added Color Grading as a third trimester elective, it was a three-day Lab class very similar to my ICA Colorist Strategies class.
In the following years the relationship and the class structure continued to develop. In 2016 we shot two 90sec scenes – a courtroom drama and an exterior escape lifestyle sequence. Each film was shot with different cameras, not always with the correct exposure, Color Temperature, color space etc. The students were then tasked with correcting this difficult footage in two hours.
