"Cotton Wool" Client - Churwell Productions
Telling a Director their film looks bad is a risky thing to do but thankfully, in the case of “Cotton Wool,” it led to a conclusion where everybody was glad it happened!
In 2018, David was in attendance at a film festival in Derby when he saw a phenomenal film by a young director by the name of Nick Connor. Nick had crafted a beautiful story with an outstanding cast, screenplay and script which was intensely moving and well shot but there was one issue – The colour grade.
Post-Production
Backstory, Requirements & Approach
Nick had been left with a dilemma. He had the budget for a full colour grade to be undertaken for his film and when he was contacted by a “professional colourist” offering to do the grade for only £500, he accepted the offer only to be left in limbo for weeks until receiving the final grade the day before the film’s premiere.
The grade on the film was overly contrasty with crushed blacks, inconsistent throughout with little to no colour separation and an overly warm and muddy look. This led Nick to try and make corrections to the grade himself until the early hours of the morning of the premiere.
When David approached Nick to tell him how much he loved the film but felt it was let down by the finished look, both Nick and his producer, Mark, agreed. David offered to re-grade the film, starting from scratch to give it the look it deserved and work started less than a month later.
There were considerable issues to overcome on some of the raw footage with the majority of the film being underexposed and lit entirely by natural light, including interiors. This meant considerable digital noise and a lot of dead pixels in the footage. The film was scheduled for an extensive festival run so aside from creating a high quality look for the film, there was a lot of work to be done in regards to fixing those errors.
Process, Aesthetic & Delivery
The first thing was to rebuild the project in Resolve, remove any trace of the previous grade and establish the aesthetic. David worked closely with Nick to understand the kind of look he wanted for the film, watched through the film making notes along the way and sent two different graded scenes over for approval.
When the look was signed off, he got to work on the grade. We chose a cool filmic look with low levels of saturation and a slight, silver tone, bleach bypass. Shadows were accented but softness was retained so as to augment the idea of childhood innocence which runs as a theme throughout.
When the look was built, every shot had to be denoised and over sixty individual clips required multiple dead pixels to be manually removed. A painstaking process which took several days.
Upon completion, David and the film’s producer, Mark, watched the film together as a final review and to say he was delighted is an understatement.
“Cotton Wool” has since gone on to receive 72 award nominations, winning 45, and attaining international distribution. David also became Mark’s colourist of choice on his productions following “Cotton Wool,” leading to a rewarding professional relationship and years long friendships with both Mark and Nick.
