Colour Grading on FCPX

[benj09]

Hey, I started my University Course last month and I have been asked to shoot, direct and edit a music video and epk and I was very excited to see how my epk would turn out so I started to edit this first. I wanted a distinct look about the video with lots and lots of lens flares and just some gorgeous visuals, I shot on a Sony NX5E in 1080i converted to 1080p and I used Apple's FCPX to edit with.

I wanted to make my work stand out more than the other pieces of work that I was competing against, my course and the industry is very competitive as most of you know, so I began colour grading it. It was long and tedious, and when I had my finished article I began adding in some lens flares, now most of the lens flares where very boring and couldn't be tweaked very much and I wanted some of them to be very subtle and others to be very over powering because I wanted the landscape to reflect the artists voice, which it could never do as her voice is amazing.

But i spent 30 hours in post colour grading and I hope you enjoy it and I hope it was worth my time. I just want to know if there is anything I should do because I want top marks on this and I don't just want the artist to look at it once or twice I want her to actually use it to help her get recognised.

https://vimeo.com/52925854

Here's the link. Please watch it and please please please leave me a comment, I'm a student filmmaker from Liverpool and I want to one day be in as high demand as Philip Bloom as he's my role model in the DSLR world. So thanks for the support.

 

[Nate Haustein]

Good job. The color on the b-roll shot in the forest is really really great. When you first cut to the artist, however, it kind of took me out of it. There's not enough contrast in the shots of her and it doesn't really match the beginning. Her face is what gives it away the most I think - it's very flat and bright compared to the rest. Crush the blacks and bring down the mids and that should get some contrast back into the picture. The look at 2:07 is closer to what I think it needs to be. You may also want to try adding some vignettes to make her pop from the background a bit more.

The black text at 2:48 is also pretty bland and isn't doing you any favors. A bit hard to read as well. Your other titles and credits at the beginning were really cool and fit perfectly, can you replace the text with something similar to those?

Anyways, nice overall. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Victor Nhat Nguyen]

Good job. The color on the b-roll shot in the forest is really really great. When you first cut to the artist, however, it kind of took me out of it. There's not enough contrast in the shots of her and it doesn't really match the beginning. Her face is what gives it away the most I think - it's very flat and bright compared to the rest. Crush the blacks and bring down the mids and that should get some contrast back into the picture. The look at 2:07 is closer to what I think it needs to be. You may also want to try adding some vignettes to make her pop from the background a bit more.

The black text at 2:48 is also pretty bland and isn't doing you any favors. A bit hard to read as well. Your other titles and credits at the beginning were really cool and fit perfectly, can you replace the text with something similar to those?

Anyways, nice overall. Thanks for sharing!

agree, great color at the beginning, but the girl looks off somehow. Her skin color really does look weird. Were you turning your f stop higher to compensate for shooting outside? I'm guessing a little bit shallower depth of field could help somewhat. It would also have been nice if you introduce slider shots, close up of the guitar string or something like that to add more dynamic because it just feel awkward with the cut when she was singing.