Wasting Away + Looks = Winning Film

Update: Stu at ProLost wrote on his blog about this entry. Very cool.

Background

I should start by saying this isn't the kind of thing I'd normally post to the blog, as it's a bit on the self-indulgent side and talks about details of filmmaking that most prefer to keep anonymous. However, the very good filmmakers (writer and director, in this case) of Wasting Away - the Zombie Comedy from the Kohnen Brothers - have agreed to allow this information to be posted to the Internet.

Thanks Sean and Matthew, you guys were a treat to work with and made a hell of a good film.

In late 2007, I worked with Sean and Matthew Kohnen to provide Color Correction on the film Wasting Away. The film had already been graded in Apple's Color (formerly "Final Touch") but the color just wasn't what they wanted. We were under an extremely tight deadline as we prepared for the LA Screamfest Horror Film Festival, which was 10 days away.

Because of the tight deadline, Apple Color was not a viable solution. The film had been shot on a Viper FilmStream Camera, which gives footage a strange kind of greenish tint, and Color was taking way too long to export footage after color correction had been applied. We needed a solution which allowed us to try different looks, iterate very quickly through them, then export the footage from Final Cut Studio at full resolution once color correction was applied.

I'd been using an early version of Red Giant's Magic Bullet Looks and had been a long-time fan of Colorista, and so I decided to try Magic Bullet Looks as part of the production workflow for the film.

Needless to say, we managed to color correct the film, enter ScreamFest and win the Audience Award for Best Film. Since then, Wasting Away has gone on to win another 5 Audience awards and 5 First Place awards in over 15 festivals.

As far as I know, we were the first feature film to ever use Magic Bullet Looks as our color correction solution.

Before I get into the specifics, I'd also like to thank Stu Maschwitz for his good work on the programs we used and his kind words about our results.

Color Correction

One of the hardest things when doing color correction is waiting on the output and renders, once the looks have been established. In the case of Apple's Color, the rendering of footage takes an incredibly long time and the program itself is not - in my opinion - stable at all once you start dealing with large amounts of raw footage. I've seen cases where people do not complain about file sizes, render times and other bugs with Apple's Color, but in every case, they were not editing a feature film shot on a great, high resolution camera.

Workflow

As stated, we imported the footage into Final Cut Studio (using an AJA Kona system), then used Magic Bullet Looks to modify the footage and perform color correction.

Here are several scenes, with before and after color correction, along with a short video.

In each case, the screen shot was taken directly from Final Cut Studio or Magic Bullet Looks, with the exception of the video, which was exported as a low-resolution H.264 file.

On the left, we have the original footage. On the right is the corrected image. Notice the lights go from ugly green and yellow, to pure white. Beautiful!

In some scenes, the characters (Zombies, in this case) appear as black and white. Color grading black and white is easier, especially with Looks, but still requires highlights and lowlights to be visible and make sense. Compare the above and below scenes to see what I mean.

Notice the lights again, yellow to white.

Magic Bullet Looks

Here are several examples of Magic Bullet Looks workflow, where you can clearly see the before and after of the color settings, along with just a few filters applied. Looks really was both amazing and up to the task for this film. And, I mentioned the whole film was corrected and rendered out in 10 days, which is impressive for any software solution.

An example of black and white, as seen above.

In this next example, we have both Looks and Final Cut working together to create both a color and black and white version of the final footage.

And, finally, a color corrected version of 8-10 seconds of footage from the finished film.

You can download the footage (in Quicktime H.264) by clicking this link or watch the not-as-good, but easier, YouTube video below.

Final Comments

Overall, the experience was a great one and I cannot wait to use Looks on another film, now that we've proven it is both reliable and a great (and high speed) solution to even large-format footage. I'm hoping the next film, which was shot on a RED Camera, will listen when I suggest Magic Bullet Looks over Assimilate's Scratch Color Grading Solution.

We'll see what happens.

Comments

[Jason Diamond]

Hey-
great job. not sure when yours was but we did the same finishing process on a horror feature called "Fear House" back in in dec 2007 and was blown away by the outcome. we've been using MBLooks for a long time for various things but it was the first feature we used it on and even if Stu says he doesn't reccomend using the NLE adn this workflow sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do for various reasons and thank god for people like Stu who make that possible.

[Ed. Note: We used MB Looks on Wasting Away in October, 2007]

[Jason Diamond]

Also we're grading a music video we shot on our RED cam now using MBLooks and let me tell you you will not be dissapointed. Scratch is great and all but again given budgets and other issues its nice to know you can slam some pixels around amazingly in your NLE with great outcome.

[Ed. Note: Keep me posted on your progress. I'd love to see before and after shots and hear how the process is going as you finish the project!]

[Juan Falla]

Very COOL post. Thanks for letting "outsiders" know how this process was achieved. I can't believe you color corrected a whole movie in only ten days, WOW!!!! That's an achievement right there!!!

Thanks again!

[Jason Diamond]

Will do. we're using the QT proxies Xcoded to DNx and it still looks badass even un debayered and whatnot.

[andy cochrane]

Question for you about the video- is the strobing in the fast motion parts an intentional style, or a framerate problem in the output to youtube? mostly just curious. Thanks for posting this writeup, have not used MB for anything yet, but am in the process of weighing options for the next few projects, glad to hear it worked out for you on this!

[Ed. Note - thanks for the kind words. The "strobe" was intentional and an artistic choice (when you see the movie, it'll make sense). It's tough to convey that in such a short clip, but yes, it was on purpose.]

[Gopal Balaji]

Great work mate.

Would love to know little bit about the codec in which you captured the Viper footage, how maintained the bit-depth and how the Final Cut Pro timeline which can only give you options of either 8-bit or 10-bit YUV video color space which helped you for feature film finish. How you view the image while doing grading since LCD cant be used for final film finish as I believe.

I try to do same with a AD shot on Phantom HD Digital Cinema Camera at 2K as Raw 16-bit Tiff, which I find it difficult to maintain the same color space, monitoring options and later decided to manually conform to 10-bit log using Glue Tools and send to Lustre for film finish.

[Ed. Note - We had a Sony 10 bit monitor and an AJA i/o card and used the AJA HD 10 bit CODEC throughout the entire process of the film.]