That’s the marquis at the Fine Arts Theatre here in Asheville, NC. They have two theaters there and back in June the whole building was filled with independent films which I was involved with (a pleasant coincidence). Raven Fork (colorist), Solatrium (colorist), and The Transmission (composer and actor). What a night! Too bad I was on vacation and missed the whole evening.

The beauty of nature, the importance of friendship and the unpredictable perils of fate are each the subject and the breathtaking form of Thomas W. Oliver’s cinematic experience Raven Fork. Living in the mountains of Western North Carolina, two friends Dave (Glenn LaPlante) and Blake (Frank Jordan) find life, friendship, and adrenaline in a whitewater paradise. While passing their time traveling from kayak trip to kayak trip the two make plans to run their most ambitious river to date; the class V Raven Fork, a river carved deep in the heart of the rugged Appalachian wilderness.

A tragic river accident followed by a self-destructive tailspin explores the emotion of life itself, the search for closure, and the momentum of the human spirit to prevail.

The Atlanta Horror Film Festival showcases the very best independent films from across the world.

We will showcase the very best horror, sci-fi, gore, mysteries, dark comedies,  experimentals, creepy, campy films of almost every genre you can imagine!

Although we love traditional horror, we are not attempting to create the typical showcase of blood and guts. We are looking for cutting-edge films that represent the new genre of horror. Films that audiences can’t and won’t forget.

Wanderlost screens on opening night (Friday August 13th, 2010) at 6pm in Atlanta. Nilo Post colorist Joseph Nilo performed principal color correction on Wanderlost in collaboration with Director of Photography Daniel Judson.

It’s funny how in spite of having been involved in post-production for many years now, each new major project still offers a new opportunity to learn something new.

I’ve completed principal color grading on a feature-length movie called Raven Fork. It’s an action- and emotion-packed story set against the backdrop of whitewater kayakers in Western North Carolina. Filled with exciting whitewater sequences and plenty of beautiful scenery (I’m biased since I call this end of North Carolina home), I was surprised how much I learned about the art of color grading and about how the director of photography often has a unique point of view on what needs to be done to color a scene.

Water, Water, Everywhere!

In spite of all the actors in a movie about kayaking, there is another distinct character: the water. Water played a large role in the film: opening scenes out on the ocean in the South Georgia islands . . . scene after scene of whitewater kayaking action, lakes & rivers, a scene of a burial at sea, a home on the water.

I learned quickly how important the water would be while sitting with the director, going through the motions of color-correcting a kayaking action scene. Waveform monitor up, blacks to zero, whites to 100, stretch the contrast . . . while keeping an eye on the subject (a kayaker). “Wait,” the director said, “we’ve lost all the detail in the water.” Yes, the whitewater had gone a little soft by adding gain, but everything else was balanced. But he was right . . . the water was another character in the scene . . . involved in a complex dialogue with a kayaker navigating the ins and outs of dangerous rapids and waterfalls through moments of exhilaration, fun, and even nervousness and panic. From deep-moving green water to fine detailed spray of waterfalls and whitewater, the water ended up being as complex to color-correct and as expressional as a human face.

Incidentally whitewater is a perfect, built-in white balance reference.

Nature

I also got a crash course in the complexities of nature shots. A motif in the film is a series of aerial shots and panoramas over and in the Blue Ridge Mountains, signifying the seasons and the passing of time. Many scenes are spent on the ocean, in the river, in a low country swamp, in the forest. Challenges included footage shot mid-day on a raging whitewater river, shots with huge contrast differences going from deep, dark forest to blinding white water, scenes with little or no contrast information in foggy morning swamps or out on a foggy ocean. On the first color grading pass I started to long for the few-and-far-between indoor scenes (a home, a trailer, a shop), as balancing standard angle 1, angle 2, angle 3 dialogue scenes pose less of a challenge than matching up complex kayaking sequences.

A few color-correction tips:

• color-correcting leaves, grass, and forest is hard! There is a lot of color information here, and a lot more black than you think.

• Grass in real life is not as green as a movie viewer thinks it is (it’s actually quite yellow or brown on the whole). Isolating it with a secondary or a vignette and coloring it vivid, dark green adds to the punch of the scene.

• Like grass, the same goes for sky. Sky is really usually cyan, but we feel compelled to create a gradient with a vignette that goes from blue to deep blue toward the top of the frame. This is what a viewer often thinks sky looks like in their mind’s eye (or their “movie-memory eye”). And yes, in real life the sky gets lighter and less saturated as it approaches the horizon line.

• Like sky and grass, ocean water poses an interesting challenge. It often comes out deep & dark & black or even green. I ended up isolating it with a secondary key and coloring it blue. In the first pass it ended up being an odd Caribbean or Florida Keys crystal blue, but that was not right for the brackish water of the South Georgia low country. We settled on a deeper, more understated blue.

Are You Broadcast Safe?

Is your video project safe to broadcast, well within the specifications of NTSC?

“Final Cut Pro has a broadcast safe filter.”
Final Cut Pro’s Broadcast Safe filter only affects the Luma (black and white) information, not the color.

“This is for web; we’re not going to broadcast.”
Are you sure your project won’t ever get viewed on a TV? Are you sure your client won’t request a DVD or Blu-Ray of the project? We’ve learned to always be prepared to make sure a project is broadcast-safe so that it will look its best in any medium.

We’ll Just Color-Correct in Final Cut

Many folks think it’s much quicker to do color grading right in Final Cut Pro with the built in tools. Some editors might have opened up the very foreign Apple Color application and thought, “That’s overkill, it’ll take too much time.” A trained colorist working with a professional tool such as Apple Color, using a control surface, can color grade substantially faster than an editor moving 3-Way Color Corrector plugins around in Final Cut Pro. Our video mastering engineers can easily do a complete color pass of a half-hour TV program in under a day, usually in a few hours; and complete color grading on a feature film faster than you’d think.

In fact, we believe that hiring a professional colourist can save you money. Have your editors focus on editing and not worry about the overall color and look. Let the colourist worry about that.

And if you’re grading in Final Cut Pro and just looking at your Apple or Dell display, you are not viewing your project on a properly calibrated broadcast monitor.

Make Your Project Look Its Best

You’ll be amazed what a trained colorist can do for your next project, no matter what the budget. Contact Us today to find out how we’ll make your project shine.

Harvest Eating, created by Chef Keith Snow , is not a fad diet. Rather a lifestyle of cooking and eating seasonal foods, a method that has been practiced for centuries all over the globe. The approach is simple: buy foods that are fresh and in-season; then prepare them using whole, natural ingredients produced by farmers not chemists. We like to say “If your second-grader can’t read it, you definitely don’t want to eat it”.

The Harvest Eating TV show, slated for national broadcast on PBS in 2010, was directed & produced by Nilo Post principal Joseph Nilo, and edited by Nilo and Charles Heilig. Nilo is in final video post-production, with audio post being handled by collaborator Adam Greenberg at Whitewater Recording.

View the first episode here.

Nilo Post principal Joseph Nilo acted as HD colorist for the up-res version of the short film screened at Slamdance.

Joseph Nilo oversaw the post-production, final color grading, audio post, and delivery for web and DVD.

About the film:

Drifter is a train hopping gutter punk, alone in the world, isolated by years of ritual abuse and life on the fringe. He returns to his father’s grave to break the curse that haunts him. Here he sees salvation in a beautiful young artist who could be his key to freedom, but curses don’t die so easily.  Wanderlost is a dark, fantastical two days in the lives of a gutter punk, a  graffiti artist, a shaman, and a young artist. In a world of urban decay, the story unfolds viscerally, embodying a world of art, demons, ghosts,  and shamanic journeys.