Closure
"I have worked with Marcin before and you know, you've got to look out for this guy. He is one amazing director when it comes to violence. He really knows how to make it work. This guy is seriously talented. So when I heard about the 30 Day Challenge he had set for himself to do a feature film, I knew he would make it work. What they achieved onset was truly remarkable”.
"The only problem was they went into this thing thinking they could do it without a color grade. The biggest problem facing any director when baking in looks using a 3DLUT in something like Final Cut, is it’s too tempting to just keep stacking one LUT on another to deepen the color. It's only 8bit, and every time you stack one on another, the blacks just get darker and darker, until everything is crushed.”
"This is pretty much what we were facing with 'Closure'. The look was baked into the ProRes files, so when it came into my suite and on my grading monitor, everyone got a fright. The blacks were pretty badly crushed on the three scenes I was working on. We couldn't remove the baked in LUTs, so it was a greater hardship than was necessary. I couldn’t really do a grade Marcin, all I could do for him was adjust the color. I was doing things like flattening some looks, so the audience wouldn't look into these massive black holes. You trying anything you can just to make sure the audience doesn’t look at the image the wrong way. Basically you're hiding a whole bunch of things this way.”
“I guess trying to do an entire feature film in 30 days was always going to come with the most difficult learning curve imaginable. And Marcin and the guys did it all in an insanely short period of time, so there were always going to be some mistakes. I think that this was such an amazing concept and a really great outcome. I just wished that I could have been able to contribute more and have been able to give it the full grade it deserves. Having said that, it’s an amazing achievement. To have been able to make this film happen in 30 days is a true credit to Marcin, Tom, and Aaron.”
