Colour Grading

With the genre being Sci-Fi I knew straight away how I wanted I want my footage to look. I want it to be quite muted and quite contrasty. I took a lot of inspiration from the Short film called 'Plot Device' by Red Giant. The film is about a boy who buys this object called 'The Plot Device' and when the botton is clicked, he moves to a different genre of film. In the VFX Sci Fi part of the film the colours are very muted and have a cool tone to them. Another reason I chose to grade in this style was because I wanted the colours from my spaceship to really stand out. So I wanted to drain a lot of the colour from the clips to ensure my spaceship stood out. Another reason was I just wanted it too look cinematic. The lighting was nice (in most shots) so I had a lot to play with to make sure I got the grade I wanted. Playing around with the curves was very effective even though it is one the most basic tools to use. I then cooled down the shot by just putting a cold pre-set in on an adjustment layer. I am really happy with how my clips look after they have been graded. When compared to the originals, you can see a massive difference in what the colour grade has done to the shot. 

Because I shot my own footage on my Canon 7d (DSLR) it was much harder to get the colour grades the exact sameas the clips from the XD cam. I think this was to do with the DSLR's being a bit more contrasty than the XD Cams which isn't a good think when it comes to film making. The less contrasty, the better.