Mars has left the building.

Handed over all the graded footage of Last Flight (short film set on Mars) yesterday. When I agreed to grade this I was thinking it would be easy, just put a red wash over it right? Boy was I wrong! As it’s been shot in lots of locations all over the country (including composited shots filmed at Sunset Studios), the footage was all very different and a scene was seldom made up of the same location. Also the Mars look is actually quite difficult theres very little white and the shadows are quite orange/brown due to a dusty atmosphere. The gamma curves are very different (esp the red), there’s very few black regions as a lot of the shadow areas have a high ambient illumination and most of the highlights are muted with an orange hue however the extreme specular highlights are relatively white. I’ve never had to use so many secondaries before and I found myself using the advanced tab in Apples ‘Color’ app a lot to tweak the lift, gain and gamma for each channel separately. Another thing that didn’t help was the Actors space suit was the same colour as a lot of the backgrounds making it damn difficult to separate when needed. If your going to set a film on mars use blue space suits.
Damon’s now putting all the audio and soundtrack together so it should be done very soon. I’m hoping to go over it all again and make a tweak or two where needed. Also keen to see it on a TV and perhaps a projector before it get finalised. The colouring is very sensitive, just a tiny little bit too much green or blue and it looks heaps different. Keep an eye on www.lastflightmovie.com for more info.