Je je, whatzup guys?!!!

These are some shots (through a 3 days span in February of 2013) badly put together registering an idea we had at A Empresa de Limpeza (Cleaning Business): to read Henrik Ibsen's Vildanden (Wild Duck) outside in the streets.

At some point there's a tiny bit of Mr Jonathan Coulton's - Your brains live in L.A.

Camera was a P&S and I tried to keep it simple while experimenting on new visual approaches; dumping everything into premiere and grading (or conspurcating like @Alienhead likes ,-) with colorista and looks. Plus parts with a lighter tweak of Eran Stern’s false hdr tonning technique. I want to apologize beforehand to @jpbturbo and people with good eye-coefficient for any inconvenience or damage :P

gashô

Some pics during the process +)

Also do you think that one should start with a simple color grading tool like Magic bullet Colorista/Looks or Color Finesse or move directly to more advance stuff like DaVinci Resolve. Also i heard some criticizm of Adobe Speedgrade, what is your take on that?

Do you need well lit scenes for color grading or can you grade scenes that are lit using only the sun?

I have a nice Panasonic Plasma hooked up to my workstation. I am in the process of grading my short film (with AE and Colorista) and I was thinking to do all the color directly on my plasma. Since blu-ray will be the medium for delivery and I do not own a pro grade balanced monitor. In After Effects all my grading projects are in rec709 color space.

Any thoughts on that? Are there any pitfalls to look out for? Thanks!

Wanted to share the video and, if you like it, please vote for me on the link below.

Vote Here

Filmed on my Canon 600D(1920x1080 @ 24fps) over two days. I only decided to enter the competition at the start of January and the deadline was the 20th so I didn't have as much time as I would've liked, fitting it around my day job(animator/3D generalist). Decided to spend 2 weeks planning and refining the idea and a week to put together an animatic and then assemble everything from there.

Location is in my flat, actress is my wife(who is an actress, handy!), I've still got a lot to learn about lighting so I'm not entirely happy with the look. Lamp lighting for the sofa and laptop close up shots and we have no plug sockets downstairs so just had to suffer the ceiling halogens :(

Used a bare bulb for the close up shots of the hands which I'm happier with(the typing one worked best I felt)

I used the Tamron 17-50 2.8 for all of it, I'm kicking myself for not using the 50mm 1.8(what was I thinking!?) mainly on a tripod and a shoulder rig for the final shot outside the door.

Edited in Premiere and graded in After Effects using Colorista II, once again I was short on time but was able to get a general warm hue on the live action shots and a green hue on the computer screens in fitting with the Amelie movie and the colour palettes used for her appartment and the outside world. Ended up being so tight on the deadline I didn't get to do a noise reduction and sharpening pass unfortunately.

I was going to just do the computer shots in after effects and apply a filter to get the screen look but after some tests it actually worked best just filming the monitor so I stuck with that, most of it is just me manipulating layers in photoshop in realtime(in the splitscreen email shot the cursor that appears is the move one if you look closely, couldn't find a workaround for that :) )

If there are any lighting/gaffers on here living in the London area that are looking for projects to get involved in I'd love to hear from you, it's definitely a weakness.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it. If you voted, thanks very much!

Comments and feedback welcome.