This document discusses color grading footage to match the aesthetic of an album. It describes importing shots into a color grading software and applying three color correction effects - brightness and contrast, color balance, and color temperature - to each shot to darken it and add pink and purple tones to match promotional images from the album. It notes that the colored shots always look better than the originals.

1. COLOURING
OUR
FOOTAGE

2. COLOURING:
We’ve decided we’d like to do some colouring of our footage
in post production so it matches the aesthetic of the album
that we’ve talked about elsewhere on our blogs. Below are
promotional images from the vinyl release of the album we
are taking a song from, and we’d like to capture these pink
and purple tones better than what we have already filmed.

3. COLOURING:
To achieve this we have decide to experiment with a new
piece of software, called Hitfilm4Express. To begin, we have
to change the aspect ratio of our footage, as we filmed in
16:9 and want the video to be in 2:35.1. We do this by
entering the appropriate resolution when starting a new
project.

4. COLOURING:
We then import whatever shot we want to edit. We edit and
export all of our shots individually just so it’s easier to use
the individual shots when we come to editing the whole video
together. When it’s been imported, I put the video on the main
track and resize the image so I’m sure that everything fits
appropriately inside the newly sized frame.

5. COLOURING:
There are three colour correction effects we add to the video
to change the colours: Brightness & Contrast, Colour
Balance and Colour Temperature. First, we add the
Brightness & Contrast effect, using the slider to change only
the brightness to the desired point. We usually make it darker
as opposed to lighter.

6. COLOURING:
Next we add the colour balance, which lets us affect the
Red/Green/Blue levels of the shadows, midtones and
highlights of the video. We change the sliders until we’re
satisfied with the result.

7. COLOURING:
Finally we add the colour temperature effect to see if there
are any last adjustments that can be made to improve the
picture.

8. THE COLOURED SHOT
V. THE ORIGINAL:
We find that the coloured shot
essentially always looks better
than the original, so we repeat
this process for virtually every
shot featured in our music video.