John Flowers provides a detailed look at the process he used color correct the film Wasting Away, a zombie comedy by Sean and Matthew Kohen, in this post to his blog.
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.
Flowers provides several split-screen frames and a video clip from the film that clearly show the improvements he made to the films look.
Stu Maschwitz mentions Flowers’s article in his own blog. That’s where I learned about it. Stu, who designed Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks for Red Giant Software writes:
As far as I know, this is the first feature film finished using Looks and Colorista, and I feel like a proud pappa.
He goes on to makes some astute comments about customers using developers’ products in ways the developers didn’t intend, as Flowers did with Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks.
Often a company needs its customers to tell them what their product truly is.
[snip]
So if you read Flowers’s excellent article and see his screenshots and ask yourself, “Is Stu listening? Does he realize that filmmakers want powerful and easy-to-use color correction tools that turn their NLE into a proper finishing tool? And that they’re already using Magic Bullet for this, despite his intentions?”Well rest assured, the answer is yes.
Both the Flowers and Maschwitz blog entries are worth reading.