In a dark, dark (ish room), at the bottom of a dark, dark house (not at all), in a dark, dark Soho street (actually blazing sunshine) PILI is being shaped, stabilised, and warmed up by the super Colourist Malcolm Ellison in the company of Director Leanne. This morning I was allowed into the dark, dark room to see the work on the grade thus far and more excitingly for a geek like me, discuss the font for the credits.
As with most things PILI, you trust a professional to do the job and they make things awesome. Heads have been ‘shaped’ to make them more defined, some colours have been warmed up, others toned down, any slight errors (hello camera shadow!) have been corrected and the continuity of colour is starting to flow.
As with the sound edit (post to follow!), I am learning that you need to have a super eye for detail and pay a great deal of attention to be involved in post-production. People see random catches of light and hear slight squeaks that seemingly pass me by. This can be embarrassing when often as the new person in the room someone turns to you and asks, ‘did you catch/see that?’, ‘erm, no really didn’t notice/yes slightly/gah! Don’t ask me!’ Post-production is all about the tweaks and details.
The only thing note I had to offer today was a pretty lame, erm sometimes the characters in daylight look more Sudanese than Tanzanian. An important point, after all the film is set in Tanzania, the actors are Tanzanian, and the actors’ skin is lighter than it appears in some parts, so important to keep the colour true to their skin as much as possible (note this is not me being some weird skin-lightening, whitening person, I think we can all agree that would be not cool). I didn’t notice any of the small things Leanne did, and I oo’ed when Malcolm got his shape thing up on screen (I am sure there is a technical word for this, but I am going with the Iron Man Mask shape thing).
Malcolm will continue to tweak away this week, shaping up some more, and colouring the continuity with the plan to screen the film for the last tweak opportunity in a real cinema next Tuesday. Readers, I can see the end.
And the font for the titles, fellow font geeks? Abode Gurmukhi.
Not Another AIDS Film 