Weekly Progress - January 19th, 2008
Today is one year since we wrapped principal photography. It was also my last day to tie up any loose ends. I had only 5 shots to work on since finishing the cut on Tuesday, but one of them fell into the category of “too awesome.” One thing that really bothered us in the beginning, but we’d learned to live with, was the presence of an orange princess in her cell. Well, there was also a handheld shot of her that was way too shaky, and the “last” thing I had to do was stabilize it. However, once it was stabilized, I felt the urge to remove the orange, and make her look more natural. Also, her cell is supposed to be this ethereal white room, but one could see the texture of the drywall all too well.
All that was fixed, my friends. All that was fixed. However, that was only one shot, and there were several shots in the cell. So, that took up the bulk of my day today. Well, that and Super Mario Galaxy, but we shan’t speak of that.
Color correcting is yet another art that I’ve had to learn by fire on this project. Not only is it a pain to get just one shot to look right, but you have get it to match with all the other ones. AE has this great plugin from Synthetic Aperture called Color Finesse. It has a lot of power, but it is full of features that require studying to learn. Like, what is a vectorscope really telling me? What is the difference between gain, gamma, and pedestal? What are all these other black and green scopes? Head explode!
Anyway, I went through all the shots of the princess, and stumbled my way through all the various oscilloscope, and eventually got a good group of shots that aren’t too orange, and all look like they are in the same movie. We’ll see what Adam thinks when I bring ‘em over to him tomorrow after the sound design is complete.
Yep, tomorrow the long road of actually making the movie comes to an end. Now for the long road of promoting it.