Can't Stop Time

Can’t Stop Time was my second attempt at colour grading for a collaborative project and the first time I had graded without being the vision editor. This project tested my ability to collaborate with others and pushed me to communicate clearly.

We ran into issues with the workflow between Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve. The music video was edited in Premiere Pro and then graded in Resolve. It was the first time that Molly Turner, the Vision Editor, and I had worked like this (typically, we would work on our own projects and do everything in either Pro or Resolve).

Molly made the XML file that I imported into Resolve however, I didn’t realise that the masks she had done wouldn’t be transferred by the XML, meaning that Molly would have to do them again when the grade was done (as XMLs don’t transfer grades either). This was an important learning experience for me as film is a collaborative medium and you must know the ins and outs of your field in order to communicate them with your crew.

Once the XML had been imported, I checked it over to see if there were any other elements of the vision edit that had failed to transfer, but everything else had worked, I set up my nodes and began the colour grading process with the Director Yuki. This was the first time that I worked so closely with a director like this, I was initially nervous about making mistakes or not knowing how to do something, however, Yuki is a calm and polite guy with an ability to communicate what he’s looking for, it helped that he had a reference image for me to get a feel for what we were aiming for.

We initially graded the music video to look in line with the reference photo however, Yuki wanted to try something else, so we pushed the image in a more extreme direction. Once the entire music video was graded this way Yuki changed his mind and wanted it to be more similar again to what we initially had, this annoyed me at first however as I thought about it longer, I realised that I’d had the same thought process on my own projects; I find something I like then second guess myself and go too far, then have to revert to what I originally had, I realised that isn’t a failure, it’s a necessary part of the creative process. Otherwise, you’ll always wonder what if I’d tried this or that “it could have been so much better”, this way you know and sometimes you’ll push it and it’ll work.

It was also great to bounce ideas off Yuki, there were things he picked up, things that I wouldn’t have even thought about and ideas that I got to bring to the table. When the collaborative process clicks it really clicks and reminds you why you want to do this and the artistic synthesis of two people and how awesome that is.