How a Bill Becomes a Law

I've been meaning for a while to post a little bit about how I come to some of the images I've been showing off of our current film, "The Betty." I do all of this work in Adobe After Effects CS3, and in fact the way we shoot is geared toward a post-intensive process. This is nothing original, though. I really have Stu Maschwitz and his book "The DV Rebel's Guide" to thank for introducing me to this process, which is really ideal for low budget filmmaking. There's a lot to it, and when the Betty's done I expect the final render to take the better part of a week, but I've got more time than I do money.

Nothing in this post is final, of course. I have a preset look that's constantly evolving while I work on the picture so that I'll be prepared when it comes time for the final online. Having this preset also allows me to get these images out and share them with people pretty quickly. For this example I'll use an image that we shot yesterday and I spent a little time this afternoon working with.

The sensor image (off the camera) is purposely low contrast. This is to maintain as much detail as possible so that I can add contrast and saturation later on my computer which handles color a lot better than my camera. The parts of this image that are hot are mainly because of the lighting. We shuttered the windows so the brightness of day didn't go to pure white, which it almost does anyway in the images below.


First I use the Rebel CC tool to color correct the image. I do a 3 point color correction and then use the hue/saturation tool to de-saturate the reds which are really hot.
Now I apply my preset look. This is a little backwards from a typical workflow, but I like to start off from where I am, know where I'm going, and try to figure out the best way to get there. For "The Betty" the look preset has a couple of key characteristics. I use two photo-filter effects: a cooling filter and a sepia filter. The cooling is generally pretty subtle because it can make things really blue really easy. I adjust the curves with a very slight s-curve to bring up contrast in the lighter and darker portions of the image. In some cases I use grain removal, which is the case here, with temporal filtering, because the curves brought out some of the grain more than I wanted. Lastly I do a color profile conversion based on a film stock, bump the brightness a little, and letterbox it for the cinemascope aspect ratio I want.

The problem I now have is that I've lost some detail in the background, and our abductee just looks kind of dull sitting there, everything but Oatmeal is just too dark. So I relight the scene using the exposure effect, but I mask it so that Oatmeal isn't effected - and feather the mask so you don't notice the transition.

She's more present in the scene now, but I've blown out (overexposed) my windows, losing the shutters. So now I duplicate the initial image, mask the windows portion of it, feather that out, and place the layer in between the exposure effect (which is in an adjustment layer) and the Color corrections (which are also in adjustment layers).

I've also overexposed the TV and lost detail in its image, which just seems all kinds of wrong because the TV is a light source itself. So I apply the same methodology I just used for the windows, but with a smaller feathering of the edges.

And with all of these pieces finally in place, you have the image that I want you to see - or actually the conceptual image that I spent 30 minutes on. Like I said, this isn't final and the final cut of the movie will probably have another shot of the scene and a somewhat different look applied.


That's all for today, but I'll have more up later in the week. I'm excited about some of the footage we got. None of the shots were particularly amazing or challenging; but the flow of ideas as to how we use them to tell the story is really exciting.