The colourist is usually in a very privileged position of seeing the raw edited material and then applying his or hers very specialist skills to tailor the footage to the will of the director and the requirements of the commissioning agency, while still serving the cinematographer and how they shot the piece of promotional material and ultimately wanted it to be seen by the public. In today’s oversaturated world of images both moving and not, the advancement of post-production technology have also placed colourists in that tricky position – some directors and agencies expect them to be miracle workers, while others sometimes don’t give them enough credit, but whatever the case, one thing is certain – a good colourist is vital to the final look of any promo.
Recently one of our readers, Lenon Veronese, who happens to be a very good colourist, shared a couple of breakdowns for some commercials he has done, which shows the flat, ungraded footage compared to the final look. Of course, that being said, there is also CG work thrown in but as with anything filmmaking related no one person is solely responsible for what you end up seeing on your TV or computer monitor as a final product.
Here is the breakdown for a Mitsubishi Outlander:
And here’s the TV spot in two versions:
And here is another breakdown followed by the actual commercial:
And the commercial:
You can see more of Lenon’s work here.
I hope this has been useful, and for those of you who want to learn how to grade like a Pro using DaVinci Resolve 12 you can get a whopping 57% discount on Resolve 12 Simplified Online Training by colourist Alex Jordan or alternatively you can use the links below.
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