Delinquent

Delinquent tested my skills as a colour editor and pushed me to further develop them in concert with my ability to collaborate with others on a technical and creative level.

I had been involved in the pitching phase of Delinquent’s production and was the sound recordist on the Sizzle reel/proof of concept short. After that, I didn’t have much to do with the project until Director Mackenzie Nebenfuhr put out a call for the crew, I put myself forward to be the colour editor. I showed him my previous work and he liked the look of it.

Mackenzie, E.C. Lewin (Vision Editor) and I worked together to develop a look for the film the inspiration was the 70s and early 80s Grindhouse/exploitation films we specifically wanted to emulate the Halation, Grain and damage those films have from being shot on film. I was somewhat naïve about what it requires to take digital footage and make it look like film, I initially tried using Filmbox Lite to emulate film, I tested it using an old experimental film of mine I wasn’t impressed with the results and began researching other ways to emulate film specifically in Davinci Resolve.

During this research phase, Davinci Resolve 19 was released. Version 19 added the Film Look Creator, a native effect that can be applied to a node and used to emulate film (not a specific stock), it seemed perfect for what I wanted to do and a way to avoid LUTs and plugins, this plan fell apart when I found out the computer that I would be using for the colour grading process wouldn’t be able to be updated to Version 19 until the after our post-production window.

I had to go back to the drawing board. While initially a setback it forced me to learn more about film emulation, how it works and what makes film, well film. I set myself the challenge of making my own film LUT that I could curate to what I wanted, I began by creating a node that would handle the RGB; I changed the Red Output by decreasing the blue by -0.9 and increasing the green by 0.9 this way the image would be warmer, (we had landed on wanting an oppressively warm look that would emphasise the Queensland summer) and the overall values would be at what they should be.

Then I made two separate nodes to handle saturation one in HSV colour space and one in HSL colour space each had only channel two active (the saturation channel) that way the saturation would be subtractive rather than additive and the luminance wouldn’t increase as saturation increases. Subtractive saturation is a more natural way of handling saturation and mimics film more than additive saturation. I brought the Gamma down in the HSV node and my Gain up in the HSL node, creating my saturation curve. I created a contrast curve to mimic the way that film handles contrast (I had to find and maintain mid-grey). I then made a Split Tone node to handle split toning, I made the shadows warmer and the highlights cooler. I then used Resolve’s film grain, halation and film damage to complete the look.

I began to run into issues with the video playback and had issues where Resolve would crash if the video was played for too long, this was caused by the halation, film grain and film damage, and was worsened further when I began the noise reduction process, this made the process difficult but manageable. I had initially turned down the playback resolution, however, to get accurate results with noise reduction it has to be done at the full resolution. I found that no matter what I did to try and improve playback I couldn’t find a solution that wouldn’t degrade the final product. When I looked at the computer specs I was using, I found them to be inadequate for the task of colour grading.

At the end of the colour grading process, I found that I had learnt many new skills; skin tone isolation, colour isolation, LUT creation, the use of power windows to highlight certain areas or to more subtly shape the highlights and shadows in a scene and graded a day-for-night shot. This is perhaps the most I have learned on a single project and has made me more confident in my abilities as a colour editor and given me many more skills that I can use in my projects and others. It has been a pleasure to work on a project that is so Australian, warts and all.