Explorations

Introduction

Learning new skills was the base of the explorations project. In every class, Freestyle pushed us to try new things and wanted us to pick up something we weren’t familiar with. In English, we created lyrical essays which were a long poem sort of writing. In Film, I explored color grading and was able to learn new skills with that. In digital media, we utilized our new recording studio and used instruments and voices to create a song. In my case, my partner and I sang a cover of our song. We edited our music in ProTools and were able to play around with our effects.

COLOR GRADING:

In Film, we were able to choose whatever we wanted to research and produce as long as it was film-related. I decided to highlight color grading and learn more about what I could do with it.

I chose this because I will be making many films in the future and color grading adds a different level of emotion and creativity to the piece.

For this project, I watched numerous YouTube videos trying to see what styles I wanted to achieve and I was able to narrow it down to skin tones, dark tones, and my own preset.

Once I was able to research the basics of color grading getting familiar with the different things it Premiere Pro had to offer I was able to get started.

Editing

For skin tones I first watched a tutorial and was able to see significant changes. After I played with HUE curves and was able to turn my characters pink while keeping the background the same without any color grading or mask.

This process was overall not too bad and I will 100% be using it in the future as ensuring people’s features are enhanced can bring a more cinematic feel.

One key trick I used in this process was you use the pen tool and draw a little triangle somewhere on the face then look at the vectorscope chart the line must line up to the color grading.

The next steps of my project was playing with HUE vs SAT and HUE vs HUE. In my production you will be able to see the skin tone and hair color is changed without a huge difference to the background!

I was able to move different colors around on the chart to keep the green popping on the grass and leveling out the warm tones for a more tinted green.

The project after its was applying a clipping mask over one side of the screen as I was trying to portray the other character darker and moody while the other one was the good guy.

For the last part of my project, I created my own preset. I was able to use basic correction and other options to help create a sort of retro film look. I do wish I could have added grain but as this was a research project I know I will improve more in the future.

final result

Final Film

After researching my project, I was able to put it into slides. Formating it correctly ensuring people had some basic understanding of color grading before I dove into what I did was important.

I am happy with the way I formatted my slideshow as I was able to show what I did and then explain the process after.

These are my slides where I touch on the basics of color grading and my process!

LYRICAL ESSAY

I am beyond happy on how my lyrical essay turned out. I was able to turn my ideas into in-depth metaphors.

I touched on themes of growing up and gaining autonomy through a metaphor of swimming out into the ocean.

I connected ocean things such as tides, riptides, and waves to real-life experiences.

Reflection

Overall I am so grateful to end the year with this unit. The broad learning freedom made it an assignment I could be creative with. I am going to be able to use the color grading techniques not only in my senior year films but my summer productions. In digital media, I am now more familiar with the studio and the attributes that go into editing music. Pro Tools was challenging to work with but I now have a boarder understanding on how to work with clips. In the end of the music project, I was able to create album art that helped connect to our cover song. This unit was overall able to bloom my creative mind.

music

I was able to learn all of me on the piano and sing to it with my partner. This was an easy song and one of the only ones I know as I am self-taught. I’m happy how it turned out and cannot wait to do more with it in the future. This process of recording in the studio was able to help me understand the work that is put in at recording studios. Both in the studio and after editing it and tweaking it in ProTools.

Enjoy!