Overall Ben was happy with the progress of the grade but had changed his mind on the look of some scenes mostly with contrast and shadowing  he sent me through a document with notes and photo references of where he wants changes made, I made a few correction examples before i met with him to show him how its looking, he was happy with these and after going through more scene changes he was happy with the final product.

We discussed grain as well as Ben had expressed that was an important part of the look for him, we used 35mm grain on the first and brighter half of the film, after the power is shut off we switched to a 16mm film grain to help with the darker turns in the storyline.

Complete creative control has its challenges though as it means I don't have any guidance on the original vision for the grade other than references and have only been able to schedule one meeting for review due to the busy schedule of the client.

Jenny was happy overall with the look but wanted to go through some specific shots and edit them in person, this helped us to choose a final look for the middle dialogue scene with Alice and to match the reverse shot also.
We also were concerned with the London office scenes that as we wanted them to be dull and grey they were lacking depth and looked very flat, I added contrast, a warm undertone and some light highlights to help this as it was bringing more detail from around and on the main character.
After this, I added noise reduction and grain after discussing with Jenny my plans to add 35mm grain to emulate a similar look to the original Alice in wonderland as it was shot on 35mm.
I will then send Jenny my project file to go back to her editor for the online and VFX, I will be submitting my copy without the vfx as their vfx won't be ready in time for my deadline.

I picked home alone as I felt it had a lot of potential to move the story around and to work on the sound design to enhance the story, after looking at the rushes I chose to cut straight into the main character making breakfast, no music but with enhancing the natural sounds of the scene, cupboard doors shutting, milk pouring etc, I felt this set the tone for the main character with jump cuts to show him being there alone and struggling a little to make his breakfast, jumping quickly into a wide shot of the little boy alone again this time playing by himself, I then chose to introduce the deceased mother after he runs into her room and is talking to her, I then chose to reveal her face as a confirmation that the little boy is all alone.

I chose to have these boys meet briefly in the middle of the piece to form a connection over losing their parents but then to represent grief not being linear you see as soon as the boy becomes comfortable with his new friend and falls asleep he is awoken afraid and alone again, becoming panicked I used jump cuts again to show again how long he spends alone, eventually returning to the grief of losing his mother and being alone again.

A negative of this project was that when you are trying to reshape a story that was shot for a specific plot it can be difficult to find a story that works, is interesting and flows well, I felt deleting some of the scenes and moving the dialogue where possible would help to make a more concise story.

Overall I feel this edit could have benefitted from a more in-depth sound design but overall has a nice flow to the story and is an interesting edit.

Gourmanium was shot in an indoor set designed for the piece so the lighting really lends a hand to a consistent grade, I had a meeting with Ben before shooting about the kind of final look he was going for and we agreed warm lighting overall would be the best base as he wanted a lot of reds, oranges and yellow tones rather than cold lighting would bring out more blue which Ben didn’t want at all.

A negative about this project was it spent a long time in editing which left a shorter deadline of 2 weeks for the grade, I would have preferred to have more time to have Ben sit in on the grading process shot by shot as I feel this would have benefited the final look and grain especially but because of the short time schedule, I chose to instead make use of all of my available time and send Ben over video files to review at each stage and have one sit in meeting at the end stage to go through shot by shot and have him confirm he’s happy.

I enjoy working with clients and helping create their vision, especially on well-shot pieces, Ben shot Gourmanium on RED footage so I had an amazing colour gamut captured to work with, this gave me a lot of freedom to push the shadows and contrasts in the way my client wanted.

I started initially with my client wanting a very saturated and bright piece with leaning into the natural hues of each scene including the backlighting such as the green in the kitchen scenes and the more red tones in the living room, after review we decided to go into a different direction of bringing more shadowing and contrast in, this matched the feeling of the scenes as the characters start out very cheery and bright and move into a dark and sad environment in the second half.

As this story becomes more sad and dark with the characters losing power halfway through it was a great opportunity to use these natural hues to move more into yellow candlelight and away from the reds and more into the yellows, this complimented the shadowy tones and the flow of the story as the main character gets sicker throughout, it also lends a hand to blend into the dream sequence towards the end as they shot this with a bloom on the camera to naturally add this effect so I could subtly enhance this in the grade to keep a natural look, with yellow hues all through this scene it still keeps a nice flow between the candlelight scene before and the end scene which has prominent red lighting in, we used the highlights to push that candlelight flicker on the character to keep a consistent undertone all the way through as not to be a jarring experience for the viewer.

The only thing I would change if I did this again would be receiving feedback earlier on from Ben, because of his specific vision he had a large number of notes, all very similar overall but he was wanting to make lots of revisions close to my deadline because of receiving the grade so late and also changing his mind on what he initially wanted after seeing it cost a lot of time because Ben is so hands-on as a director I think it would have benefited having more time in the grade and also more time to have him sit in with me to avoid any miscommunications but has expressed he is very happy with the final outcome of the grade.

At first, I followed Jenny's general idea of what she wanted for these scenes such as very grey, dull, unsaturated and cold but when we had our first review meeting in the grading room it became clear that these scenes really stood out of the overall vibe of the other shots and didn't give any flow to the story and were overall flat and lacking any depth. We spoke about what compromises Jenny would be happy to make to these scenes to blend them in with the overall piece and also give enough depth to the scenes that the main character isn't lost in the dullness of the office setting, we agreed to try bringing a red/warm undertone into the scenes as this is what brought both the wonderland and rabbit hole scenes together and this worked well, I also suggested we raise the contrast to add more detail and depth to the Hatter character and highlights to lighten the scene in a way that isn't boring to the audience. I felt Jenny was disappointed with this compromise but due to how these scenes were shot and the short timeframe we had (one week out from the deadline) I felt this was the best way to compromise and manage expectations while keeping consistency in the piece for the final exports.

This piece has been challenging as I don't often work with scenes that are needing to be made dull or grey and this has taught me so much about different types of grading away from realism and high saturation grading, I have also enjoyed working on RED footage as it is so versatile and even the most subtle grading can make such a big difference in a natural way, I have come across file sizing issues with having a large amount of raw footage for this grade and my other piece “Gourmanium”

It has been difficult to manage storage for these files, slow playback times and extremely long export times but I have learnt how to properly manage my projects and have included multiple export versions as ProRes 4444 can be difficult to playback I have also included H.264 files of all my grades to allow for easy viewing and a Graded/ungraded file to really showcase my final looks.

The VFX are still in the works for this project so I haven't included them in my exports but this hasn't affected the look at all. Finally, I have ensured that I used noise reduction overall on the timeline and grouped together the wonderland shots, rabbit hole shots and London office shots to apply 3 different film grains, Wonderland has a 35mm grain as the original Alice in Wonderland film was shot in 35mm and a subtle shift in grain for the London scenes to 16mm to help the audience visually transition between scenes.

Overall I feel I had challenges with this but I managed my client's expectations well, delivered to them a consistent and well-graded piece and both myself and Jenny are pleased with the final outcome of the look.

I have had issues with this piece such as not receiving all the footage from their editor, one of the shots was an active after effects file so when I reached out to ask for an exported mov file of this shot I never heard back so I had to just pick out a similar shot from the rushes and add that in to be graded instead.

The footage is ProRes 4444 but there are many lighting issues throughout the piece such as the main character standing next to a very overexposed window in a panning shot between getting up and sitting down, I used keyframing to raise and lower the lift and gain to even out the overexposed windows and not have a very dark shot of him sitting down.

The other issues were in the edit they had chosen shots where they moved the camera and adjust the lighting in the middle of takes which affected the grade as it made some shots of them over dinner look different and inconsistent, I therefore had to spend more time colour matching these as best I could with the lighting changes during shot matching.

What I did enjoy about this project is creating a naturally enhanced environment that compliments the story well without taking focus away from the important storyline and message within the short film.

This included keeping the skin tones even throughout and creating natural lighting for the different scenes of night and day.

There are VFX happening in the future for this piece but unfortunately, they aren’t ready in time for my deadline so to keep the grade consistent and make the storyline understandable I have chosen to grade all scenes as a naturally enhanced look rather than their original intention of a mix between dream and reality as I feel this would have not have made the scenes cohesive without those added VFX, I have spoken to my client and explained that I am happy to rework some scenes with the VFX shots included to grade those and blend the scenes together nicely when the VFX is ready later this year.

Overall I enjoyed this grade but I’m disappointed without the VFX I couldn't lean more into the fantasy elements for this piece.