Week 04 – ColorGrading

During week 4 we had important advances in each of the departments that allowed us to move towards a more solid iteration. In this new iteration, Eaza in charge of the LookDev department, developed some lighting rigs that work very well with the plates of each of the shots. The shaders have details that give them a lot of realism. From the Fx department, Elizabeth and Jie were working on the file exchange pipeline between Houdini and Maya. This stage is a critical process in our project because it allows us to export all the effects developed in Houdini and import them into Maya to have everything within the same render engine, which in our case is Arnold. Doing this assembly is important so that all the interactions of lights, fx and reflections happen within the same render engine and be able to have all the render passes needed to make a successful composition.

I had the opportunity to make a basic setup of the composition of each of the shots. From the render passes that eaza gave me,I was able to do a quick breakdown of the challenges that each of the shots has, for example: shot010 has an obvious DOF that i have to integrate from the Z-depth pass. Shot030 has a very interesting challenge which is a very strong DOF together with a Motion Blur caused by the speed of the car’s movement together with the speed of the camera’s movement. I think this shot will be very interesting to achieve because it has a lot of details to integrate. For the moment, I have already integrated the DOF, when I have a more advanced iteration of Lookdev, the challenge will be to integrate the Motion Blur.

The great challenge I had this week was to make a color grading proposal. In my opinion the art of color grading is divided into two main parts which are the technical part and the creative part. From the technical point of view, our project has important challenges because the cinematography decision was to leave the WB of all the shots fixed at 6500k. This is very practical during the shooting stage but shots 010 and 020 are lit by much warmer lights than the other shots. Shot 010 has a very big contrast between the cold lights in the background and the yellow lights of the table, while shot 020 is predominantly lit by a yellow light on the ceiling and a red light behind the table.

From a creative point of view, the challenge is to create enough color contrast to make the car stand out and give the whole piece an interesting look. By carefully analyzing the different temperatures and color that each of the shots had, I decided to make a color proposal by highlighting the red that the street naturally has due to the influence of the theater lights. Additionally, I managed to extract some blue and green tones from the background of the 030 shot, which gives a contrast to the palette of the shot. By balancing shots 010 and 020, I managed to extract some blue tones that were not evident in the original material and unify all the shots and make them feel like a single location.