American Cinematographer - August 2016 - 16

Top: Director Jack Bradley (left) and cinematographer Tobias Marshall line up a shot inside
the car. Bottom: Colorist Chris Francis and Marshall finesse the visuals in a grading suite at
Company 3 in London.

darker quality," the cinematographer says.
"It's easy to overexpose green on digital,
and it can look nuclear - it becomes
distracting."
When Marshall and Francis met to
begin grading Jessica, they spoke for about
an hour, examining the look of the short
and considering how it would evolve over
the course of the story. Francis, Marshall and
Bradley then completed the grade in a
single afternoon, viewing the footage
projected through Barco 2K projectors.
Working in DaVinci Resolve with the
original Redcode Raw files deBayered into
16

August 2016

RedLogFilm, Francis began by applying one
of Company 3's in-house LUTs as a neutral
starting point before dialing in the look. He
notes that he "wanted the story to be more
of a focal point than the color. We didn't
want to push things too far; we tried to be
very gentle with it and tasteful, pushing the
saturation more than the contrast to give it
a more cinematic log look." Francis considered applying a grain filter to give Jessica
even more of a film look, but he ultimately
decided to eschew both a grain filter and
noise reduction, instead letting the minimal
noise present in Marshall's well-exposed
American Cinematographer

shots remain, providing the imagery with a
touch of grit.
While Francis' focus was on preserving the integrity of the images, he nevertheless employed certain tricks to alter shots for
narrative purposes. For example, even
before the sun sets, the headlights of the
pursuing van appear very bright, with a
pronounced flare. To achieve this effect,
shots of the van's headlights at night were
passed through Autodesk's Flame and
composited into the shots of the van during
the earlier sequences. Francis explains,
"Flame [was used to] create grading mattes
and add minor lighting effects, which I
enhanced depending on how much we'd
pushed the look of the particular shot -
some of the effect shots were graded to
look later in the evening, while some were
just coming into dusk. For the darker ones,
I blew out the highlights more, and used
mist and blur on the edges of my windows
to simulate flaring. The mattes from Flame
complemented the power windows that I
had tracked to finesse the realism of the
effect."
The bright headlights make the van
more threatening when it suddenly appears
behind the main character's car. Francis
recalls, "Without the bright headlights, it
didn't quite work. But once we added the
headlights, it made a huge difference." To
make the van even more mysterious and
menacing, Francis also employed power
windows to darken the view of the vehicle's
interior. Indeed, the viewer never knows
who's following the main character - or
why - until the credits roll.
Bradley notes that "Jessica was an
experiment in tension - trying to create it
within the camera, edit, sound design and
post. Editor Edward Cooper and I spent
long evenings trying to create these waves
of tension without ever boring the audience."
Marshall is proud of his work on the
short and feels that "it went really well. To
be able to replicate some of the work that I
had done with the action units I'd worked
on in the past, and bring some of that experience to this film, was great."
To view Jessica online, visit:
https://vimeo.com/156399394.
●

https://www.vimeo.com/156399394

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2016