Week 6, Korneliusz

Directing and colour grading

This week I was a director, and I have a mixed bag of feelings about it. On one hand I finally had a chance to tell my own story, on the other hand I went with the first thing I had in mind, which I dislike doing. I feel like it could have been developed more. Poor timing too, as exactly the time I was working on the story I had a dense brain fog and a minor case of a creative block.

As for the idea, I chose to base it on an essay by the French philosopher Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s a short reinterpretation of the Greek myth that shows Sisyphus as more than a person living an everlasting punishment. The famous quote “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” is often left without context, and might be confusing “why exactly is he happy?” you might ask, the full quote makes a bit more sense: “the struggle itself towards the hights is enough to fill a man’s heart, one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. He’s just living a life like every person on Earth, just a bit more simplified, he’s everyone of us.

Ultimately I don’t think I managed to tell the story I wanted well enough, it’s there, but lacks context; it makes perfect sense if you read a 5 page essay beforehand but then what’s the point of it, you could just read the essay.

Nobody but Juliette got very engaged either. I don’t really know if it’s my fault for being too soft of a person to give out orders or their fault for not being interested in this project? I’m pretty sure they understood the point of the story so I don’t know what went wrong there. Not a nice feeling, to give your best on others’ projects only to be mostly ignored during your turn.

Then there was the shooting, I should work on my leadership skills, probably should try yelling a bit, anything above -12db coming from my mouth probably means I’m on fire.

I also did the colour grading on this one! Did it in my room on my semi-professional graphics tablet and laptop so it’s not perfect, but I think it’s quite nice. Apart from Juliette the rest of the group didn’t really like it but heck, I think it turned out very nice! (I have overdone some shots, but nobody’s perfect). Working in Davinci Resolve was a treat, I like Avid but you sometimes have to get through hell and back to make it work, most functions if you aren’t told are there, you wouldn’t even know they existed. Colour grading in Resolve on the other hand – it felt like a glass of cool water on a hot day, the interface was intuitive, if I told it to do something it actually did it, and making titles was incredibly easy!

During the colour correction I aimed at a balanced and neutral look with a bit of a touch of my own. We had some drastic light changes and yellow skies in several shots, I fixed those as far as I could. Personally I dislike pure black in most places, it doesn’t really exist in nature and unless I’m trying to create something unnatural deliberately I drag it up a bit on the curves.

No looking back this time, as I’m adding a lot to the initial notes long after I’d written them. I do have a good excuse though, a pandemic happened! Yeah that was definitely the last thing I thought would happen during my first year at uni, I honestly thought a nuclear war would be more probable. Even though most of us were still around Aberystwyth before the spring break, we were too panicked and emotionally exhausted at that point to think of filming, a lot of things happened in very few days. A constant stream of bad news isn’t good for creativity, take notes to make realistic pandemic films for later but don’t do it whilst it’s still on its way.

“just like a bad cut, the illusion of order was suddenly broken” – my closing thoughts on this module and its sudden end