Blog 4: Production

I used to be the all-around guy in our group, basically doing everything. But you can't fix everything only with editing when you film stuff.

In this preliminary, I learned two new things: colour grading and lighting. I switched from Final Cut Pro to Da Vinchi just for the coloring panel in Da Vinchi. I can't do this with Final Cut Pro: I have to sort every single step I did in chronological order so that I can always go back and review my last step.

The coloring went pretty smoothly (?). I learned how to deal with H265 with a computer that does not accelerate with hardware. I also learned how to manually restore images from a Log video rather than just dragging lut onto the video.

Most of my coloring is in low-key and cold temperatures. I tried to control most of my color pallet to dark blue or bright orangish red.

I was kind of trying to learn lighting on my own. I used three lights for this shot: A small F970 at right, 1 meter away, was used as the primary diffused light source; a stick light in the left corner gave Louis rim light. A circle light at the back symbolizes the golden ring on the top of an angel. Semiotics???

I used some light at night just to ensure my Camera could capture something in the dark.

I used to cut everything to the beat. However, I don't think I need to do that with the sound of silence. The opening did not have a strong pulse of rhythm. We used many close-ups, referring to the original disturbed version of the sound of silence. I tried to imitate the toplight the concerned used in their MV, but we don't have light tripods that are like... 3 meters high and a 200w LED light.

Shooting in the dark is pretty crazy. I had to crank up my ISO to 102400 at night to overexpose my Clog3 footage and save some details in the shade. The downside is that I used three noise reduction plugins during editing, and it still looks terrible. Perhaps next time, I should use more light in the pre-production and edit the surrounding luminance down.

Also, I learned a lesson: never shoot over a fire with bare hands. I almost burnt Danny's lens by dropping the camera on the fire plate. Not letting go of all the smoke killing my eyes was pretty challenging.

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