Colour correction

Zach took on the role of 'colour correction', which is basically where you simply adjust or tweak the colouring of the footage which we have filmed. In the words of Zach 'colour correction often occurs after the first few rushes have been made and towards the end of the editing process', however we needed to get the colour correction done beforehand. 

The reason that Zach took on the role of colour correction lay in the fact that he has a Final Cut add-on called 'Magic Bullet' which is not available on the school laptops and therefore he needed to do it on his own laptop, and would then be transferred onto the school laptop at a later stage once completed. It was however, important that the whole group were aware of what Zach would be doing to the footage and what the colour correction would look like as an outcome, therefore we needed to discuss what sort of atmosphere and look for the footage that we wanted to achieve from the colour correction. We also wanted a different look for the lip synching scenes and in this look we would have to correct the exposure in some of the shots and to also reduce the background noise, which can become very time consuming, as Zach would know. 

After a short discussion, we chose a look which we feel heavily borrows from the original music video by Passion Pit. This look had quite a vintage finish to it which creates a soft rather than edgy atmosphere to the footage, which should hopefully look really good. 

Here are some screenshots which Zach took whilst undergoing the colour correction process: 

Zach dragged this effect onto the footage in order to activate the 'Magic Bullet' add-on. 

These are the scopes that can be played around with, and the main one which Zach used was the 'Hue/Saturation' ones. 

Three way colouring is key to successful colour grading, slightly offsetting the highlights, mid-tones and shadows helped Zach to achieve this look successfully.

Adding a slight vignette adds a faded look and changing the colour curve on the subject can sway the hue and saturation in order to make the colours softer. 

Here is a brief video in which Zach demonstrates the difference between the colour corrected versions of the footage and the original, and hence stresses the importance and the effect of colour correction.