Post Production

Well I'm right into post production of 'Breakdown' after a very short shooting period of two days. Well it might not seem so short after watching the film, in fact you may be thinking 'This took two days to shoot??', due to the relative lack of anything in the film. Well dollies take awhile to setup etc etc.

Anyway the rough cut is completed and I've been color grading the footage, I managed to get quite a distinctive look to it, roughly emulating film style but without doing any effects to degrade the footage like adding grain or flicker etc. Below are a couple of before and after shots, it's hard to see what it really looks like from the stills, but in moving form it makes it look a lot less like video footage. The color grading consisted of reducing the saturation and chroma slightly, desaturating the highlights, adding a little bit more contrast, and in some shots reducing the levels of the highlights due to overexposure in areas of the frame.

I'll definately be using some similar color grading in my decent short, except not taking as much of the colors out of the video.