We Have Film School At Home

I have always had difficulty with color-correction, and have gotten in my head about it. What I decided to do with this video was to use some LUTs to make the process of color correction faster. I suppose a while back I might have felt that color correction was an expressive part of the process of filmmaking. Probably because I used to be a painter, and color correction shares so much psychology with the act of rendering in painting.

But part of developing filmmaking skills involves, I think, practice. And in order to get as much practice as possible, I need to streamline the process. And this involves streamlining color correcting. I am sure I am using all of the language wrong, but I used two LUTs. One prepares the LOG film to look more “regular” (REC709?), and the other lightly adjusts it to look “stylized”. Unlike in the before times, I’m saving the color-correction settings so I can re-use them in all future projects.

In the clip below, I decided to shoot two night shots with minimal indoor light, because I have always had difficulty with that. (And BlackMagic cameras are notoriously not great with low light). I also used two different lenses, because I wanted to see if the Lomo Minitar lens (with I got in the last year) rendered colors that differently my Takumars. It’s not that different! And I think these came out so much better than when I tried to color correct everything from scratch! Took me almost no time from shooting the video to color correction to compiling.