Speaker 1: You know, when it sits right, it sits right. And, of course, everyone might argue and tell you you've done it wrong, but, you know, I was there. I got up at what time? I did a pre-light. I'd select the gels.

Speaker 2: Once we've wrapped, I have a bit of a hiatus in that the director and the editor have to stick the picture together. And then maybe I'll go off on another job. By the time I finish that job, they're starting to be ready to start the grading process. And that can only happen once they've locked the picture, so that's a fine cut and it's been approved.

Speaker 3: And after that, of course, then it's the editor and then it's the... and the director work on it and you pop in occasionally and have a look and things like that. And your big task at the end of it is obviously the grading. And, you know, there might be something very specific. A look that might not be there when everybody's cutting it. You know, there were rushes and they weren't quite... And you haven't quite found the look that filters through the whole thing. If there's a progression of colour and black and white or whatever it might be, you do it then.

Speaker 1: I've never not made post-production. Only on Robin Hood, I only did a few days on it, which I wasn't very happy with and I didn't really like what I saw in the end. But I think it's part of the process. I've always managed to finish the post on the film, so I think it's very important to... Because, you know, if you don't do it, who else is going to do it? You know, the editor... And I think, you know, you were there on the day, you chose the gels, you put the lights up. If the rushes weren't quite right or the grades not quite right, you know what it was in your mind. Surprisingly, how you can remember things. And it's also surprising when you get it to look right, whether it's a negative or even modern digital image, that, you know, when it sits right, it sits right. And, of course, everyone might argue and tell you you've done it wrong, but I was there. I got up at what time? I did a pre-light, I selected the gels. You can tell me afterwards what you like, but you weren't there and you're not part of that process. So I do try and ensure that those ideas come across.

Speaker 2: My job in post-production is to oversee any visual effects and to make sure that they will marry in with all the work that we've shot and to do the grade, and the grade is where we colour match all the pictures. So you may have shot one scene in a room, but over three days when the weather changed, for instance, or shot outside and the weather's changing, and you need to, in the crudest sense, grading's about matching all those pictures so they look like they were all taken on the same day. But on a creative sense, it's about you can change a lot, you can enhance a lot, you can make things cooler or warmer, you can take one colour and make it a different colour, you can add shadows.

Speaker 3: You know, you could say to somebody who grades, oh, I want this scene to be warm. Well, there's a lot of warm. You know, there's a yellow warm, there's a magenta warm, there's all sorts of colours warm. And it's all in the subtleties, all in the one point of yellow and one point of magenta and a tiny bit of something else. And so the colours are actually complex. They're not just a wash of one colour. It's not like a sepia over the whole thing. It's much more complex than that. And you can't not grade your own film. It's impossible because it's a question of taste again.

Speaker 1: Two to three weeks sometimes, maybe sometimes more, sometimes stop, start, sometimes reshoot. But usually the DI process, as it's still called, is two weeks, two and a half weeks. I mean, some people spend more than that, five weeks, six weeks. But I think when you're working in the DI, it should be fast, like a piece of music. You shouldn't noodle with things too much. You fiddle with it. If you noodle and you always say the powerful windows you can do, you take all the kind of imperfections and all the rawness out of your work. And every image looks too manipulated and do the same. The film's too smooth. It doesn't have any ebbs or flows or jangly bits or beautiful bits or dark bits or brighter or more glidy, soft bits. If you noodle with things too much, you fiddle with it, then you lose all your design.

Speaker 2: You can't do lighting, but you can subtly enhance lighting. And it's a very, very important process. It's so important that I insist on it in my contract that it's paid attendance at the grade. And I do a lot of work. When I'm shooting, I'll take stills, either with a camera or through the Alexa or Sony or whatever I'm using. If there's a facility to press a button to take a still from the camera, I'll take stills all day. At the end of the shoot, I've got a library of images taken on the set in the lighting I've used. And I can then, if I can't make the grade or I miss a few days, I can actually grade those in Lightroom or Photoshop or some online editing system and send those to the colourist. So this is kind of what I'm thinking. I'll obviously send it to the director and say, I was doing this all the way through Wolf Hall. I was grading images, sending them to Peter and said, what do you think of this? And he'd go, yeah, that's exactly the way to go. So all the way through, you're working on the image. So when you get to the grade, which is an expensive process, the grade isn't where you start to play with looks. The grade is where you've already decided everything. You've already decided how it's going to look. It's where you apply it.

Speaker 4: I'm on the phone every night with the dailies or with the digital files because the director and the editor are going to get used to looking at the film in the editing room. So when then you go in the final process of colour correcting, they'll think that's the way it should look. So I try to get it as close as possible to what I think with the dailies. And then when I get in the colour correct, it reaffirms what they're looking at.

Speaker 2: And so by that time, I know and the director knows how we want it to look. As a talented colourist, you use the tools at your disposal to really lift the image and make it as good as it can be.