Monday 16th May - Sunday 22nd May

Deadline Week - Crunch Time.

On Friday (Deadline was 4pm) at 10am, my assignment extension was approved, moving the deadline to Tuesday 24th at 4pm.

This week was the last week of Post-Production, it was very much crunch time. Tuesday I had the editing suite booked and went there with Corbyn and a friend of ours to work on the edit however not much came to fruition during this, trying to assemble scenes 9 to 16 on a small laptop with no mouse was a struggle. So I headed back home to utilise my computer and prep the timeline with scenes 9 to 16 assembled in preparation for Wednesday when myself and Poppy met up.

On Wednesday we quickly went through the 1st timeline (1-8) to make sure she was happy with everything, there were a few notes but we decided that it was ready to be colour corrected/graded.

This is the resulting structure of the timeline after the assembly had been completed. I had colour coded the audio for Corbyn as a way to reference what part of the timeline I was talking about in my sound notes. 

During the assembly, I felt that for the first time, my input and knowledge of film editing was being utilised and I had more freedom to make suggestions like getting rid of a couple shots for certain reasons or to add a different take/shot here for so and so reason.

That day was really productive and by the end of it this is what the checklist for Post-Production looked like

the 2nd timeline was ready for colour and sound and the way we went about doing both at the same time was Corbyn would work on the project, doing sound design while I utilised DaVinci Resolve to do colour.

Now, my biggest weakness in Post-Production is colour correcting and grading, I've always had an issue doing it with Premiere Pro. However, DaVinci Resolve was such an easy program to use with Chris teaching me the basics of how to use it. 

With Chris' help, I colour corrected and graded scenes 1 to 8 towards the end of Wednesday.

Before and After of Colour Correction and Grading

Having separate nodes for each section of colour correcting/grading was heavenly. 

WB (White Balance): Adjust the tint and temp of the shot, making it either feel more warm or cold.

Colour Correction: Any adjustments to the shadows, midtones, and highlights.

Color Space: The settings for the camera.

LUT: Look Up Tables.

Poppy's vision for the film was to have two separate colour grades to it. One for reality and one for when our character hallucinates.

Reality: No real colour grading, just the corrections.

Hallucinations: Darker and a tint of red.

I personally didn't think it suited the tone and the overall look to the film but at this point I didn't really want to argue with her about it.

This is what she was happy with when it came to the hallucination colour.

She wanted to utilise sound and colour as a way to transition from reality to hallucinations which honestly turned out well. In DaVinci I used keyframes to do the transition. 

I had completed Scenes 1-8 and exported a review draft that'll allow the rest of the team to watch and give their feedback.

I told them that they need to keep in mind that there's not much time left and I will have to set a cut-off point at 5am where I stop whatever I am doing to begin exporting and uploading because I knew that exporting the colour, exporting the film, and then uploading it in the settings required, would take roughly four to five hours. Poppy decided to give me an even bigger list of things to do and in a sort of demanding tone that I had to get the colour grading fully done otherwise, the film wouldn't make sense. I understood where she was coming from but, I told her that it's likely that we may not be able to submit in time of the deadline if I did everything she wanted but she didn't understand that it's better to submit something that shows our abilities than to submit nothing.

So throughout Thursday Night and Friday Morning, I sat there and colour graded the rest of the film (Scenes 9 to 16) and in the process accidentally deleted a few scenes without realising. Roughly around 3:40am I began to export the colour which honestly took such a long time. It was around 7am when I finally got the coloured footage into the timeline.

This is what the timeline looked like at 10am.

Both timelines were merged, all the colour footage was resynced, and the sound design was completed. Corbyn made a few songs for our film in FL Studios. The final thing for me to do was place the credits at the end and the title sequence at the start and boom. It was ready for export. Exporting didn't actually take that long which was very unexpected considering the settings we were required to use made the film 11GB, 30 minutes.

At this point my team was getting antsy about the looming deadline and as I began the upload to OneDrive, Christmas came early in the form of an email.

Oh the joy, I had quickly informed my team, stopped the upload, and went to sleep.

24 hours later.

Unimpressed with Poppy's vision for the colour grading and a renewed sense of motivation for editing the film, I proposed to Poppy that we change up the tone of the film, especially the colour depiction of the hallucinations.

The first one is the original one while the second one is the one I suggested to Poppy.

The reason I suggested this is because I felt the overall tone of the film should be cold and mysterious, our character is unhappy with his reality, it shouldn't have a hit of warmth but the opposite. She was really on board with the suggestion so I proceeded to start the colour correction/grading from scratch.

 Throughout the entire Post-Production stage I constantly kept the director updated with drafts and screengrabs to get her opinion, to make sure everything was to what she wanted eta eta.

Throughout the entire colour correction and grading stage, there were numerous limiting factors that hindered my ability to correct and grade the film effectively. All the forest footage was shot over the span of a couple days and each day had different weather (Snow, Sun, Overcast, Rain), therefore it was really hard for me to adjust each clip to lessen the effect the weather had.

These two shots take place one after another and yet you can see the difference between the two. The top one was shot on a day where it was sunny and our actor has a shadow and is overall just brighter. Whereas the bottom shot was on a day where it was overcast and overall just dim and he doesn't have a shadow. This is the issue I came across for almost all the footage shot in the forest and I did my best to adjust the temperature and tint of the footage as well as the shadows, mid-tones, and highlights but it is still noticeable. 

Now the biggest issue when it came to colour grading was the fake blood we used.

The blood was very vibrant and didn't suit the overall dark and dim tone of the film. To counter this we isolated the redness of his hand and turned down the saturation.

You can see from the three extra nodes that we had to use in order to isolate the hand but in the end, it worked effectively to desaturate the redness.

Again this issue cropped up during the last couple of scenes with the makeup on our actors as well as the apparent usage of a red LED panel.

Before adjustments and isolating the red

After adjustments and isolating the red


In these later scenes, I did less adjustment of trying to combat the reds in a way to make it seem like as the film went on, the evilness was spreading in a way.

After exporting the newly colour graded footage, I resynced the timeline, added the credits at the end and title sequence at the start and then I moved over to adding a few distortion effects to a couple of shots as seen below.

I utilised the Wave Warp effects with an inverted mask to give this visual feel that something is out that and I used this for multiple shots of the forest.

As I export the final film, I am sad to look back and think that for all this amount of work, the final film is just not up to my standard, I wish the director had put more research into directing than she did into the screenwriting.