Job Role – Film Colorist
Start Date – January 2024
Pay – £1,000
We are in the process of editing our independent feature film and will soon have a final picture lock ready for January 2024. We are now looking to hire a colorist in the meantime to ensure we’re ready when the time comes to provide colour correction and colour grading to the film. Ideally, we would like to have all aspects of the film completed for March 2024, but there’s no set deadline if you need more time.
Film Details
The Reflected Self
Psychological Thriller
How do you know you’re not the reflection?
Dion awakes to find he now lives in a different reality. His entire existence is thrown into uncertainty as he begins to transcend uncontrollably between a real and projected world within his own mind, a projection that was created to mask the events of his traumatic past. Distinguishing between the two realities soon becomes impossible and he now desperately searches for the truth to find his way home.
Colour Grade Details
In terms of style, we mainly want to use the colour grade as a narrative tool to show the audience which reality the film’s protagonist is in at any given time. There’s 2 realities he switches between, one where he is somewhat happy and taking care of his younger sister after the death of their parents, and another reality where he is saddened to find out his sister actually died along with his parents, and he’s now in therapy to cope with the trauma.
So we want to use something of a ‘warmer/earthy’ tone for the reality with the sister and ‘cooler’ tones for the stark harshness of the other sad reality – but both having a similar overall style as to not make it feel like the audience is watching two films.
Also at its core the film is a tragedy, with every character hiding the truth, and so we would like to ensure there’s always a moody, ‘noir’ feel to show this theme visually.
The link at the end of the posting contains two reference images for the style of colour grade we were thinking for each reality – but we’re of course open to suggestions and collaboration if you have a specific idea in mind. Equally, we appreciate the lighting of our scenes may not be similar to this style, but it would be perfect if we could create something that matches this.
The film was shot in 4.2K, however the edit is being outputted in UHD 2.35 ratio (3840×1634) to ensure the film has a cinematic quality, giving the audience a ‘larger than life’ visual style to make them feel the full impact of what the film’s protagonist is experiencing.
Footage Details
Camera: Sony A7s III – externally recorded via Atomos Ninja V
Footage Type: ProRes RAW – QuickTime Movie
Image Size: 4264 x 2408
Frame Rate: 23.976
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0
Alpha: None
Color Space: S-Gamut3.Cine/S-Log3
Project Details
And lastly, to ensure full discloser of all information before applying:
– The main thing to note is the footage is not lit perfectly by any means, it was a low-budget feature filmed in 13 days with a 3-person crew battling the elements and natural daylight with minimal kit – so there are times where two adjoining shots have inconsistent lighting, and of course any colour correction you can do would be amazing, but we appreciate some shots will be difficult to match. This isn’t to say all of the film is badly lit, it’s just to be aware that approx 10% of the film will be difficult to correct/grade in that respect. We’ve included a worst case scenario for the colour correction/grading, entitled ‘Example Clip’, please ignore the edit/music, sound etc – this was simply used as an edit guide on-set – but is a clear reference to the worst inconsistent lighting in the film. We’ve also included the ‘Fireplace’ scene as an example of something that had better lighting so you can see the balance. As mentioned there’s only approx 10% of the film with bad lighting, the other scenes are pretty consistent
– The lighting/colour style of the footage was always kept as neutral as possible to ensure ease of grading in post and always trying to make sure darks and lights weren’t clipping, sometimes shooting over-bright to keep dark areas somewhat lit – but to confirm there wasn’t any sort of LUT etc filmed in-camera, everything is raw and we would like a darker style for the grading as mentioned above
– The film is looking to have a runtime of approx 1hr 54mins (without credits), so it’s quite a large undertaking, but equally a very exciting project to have achieved such scale on a micro-budget and time
– The film was directed and DOP’d by Kelvin Richards, who’s profile/work can be seen here – https://www.instagram.com/kelvinrichards_/ – and this is who you’ll be collaborating with directly on the project
Here is the download link to the mentioned files:
We hope this all sounds of interest and if you would like to apply or ask any questions then please send all your details and link/copy of your work to info@aetherfilmproductions.com