TECHN I COLOR | ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE
going so well. We did let some dirt from the film go through as well, just so we still had that feeling of being film.” TRICKY SHOTS There’s one shot in particular that Davidson remembers; a digital shot of fog rolling outside a window. “It was rear projection and had some atmosphere, but it wasn’t very thick. It was a 35-second take of the main actress sitting on a bed on a phone,” she says. “The feeling was to keep the fog outside the window. English fog will thin out and then thicken again and then move on. We wanted to make the rear projection more real, so I added more rolling fog. There was some atmosphere there I grabbed onto and ‘blurred’ it out. I made it brighter, thinned it out and moved it left to right, so it actually feels like it’s natural. That was probably one of the shots I worked the hardest on.”
shooting them using the 16mm sensor required a bit of testing initially, as Davidson explains: “We had to figure out how we were going to treat the projection and how much control we had over it, which in the end was quite a lot.” One of the goals was for everything to feel similar and part of the same world. The 8mm footage was part of Hogg’s actual work from film school, which is at the heart of the film. “We did try to tie shots to each other – like going from a wide shot of a vista to a close-up and having the same type of colours intertwined.” As for Hogg’s footage, Davidson only touched it lightly. “Joanna wanted to keep it as close to how she had the footage originally – it was really like a memory.” Interestingly, Davidson’s technique for matching film and digital doesn’t rely on addition or subtraction of grain. She explains: “To start with, I like to work in colour management system, ACES. I find it just puts everything in a better world for me. I didn’t add any grain to the digital – because they were using the 16mm sensor mode, it gave us a little bit more noise. And the 35mm digital needed to look as clean as possible. Generally, there was a distinction throughout the movie where film was used to reflect the healthy moments in the main relationship, and digital used when it wasn’t
“Grading film and being able to make it feel cohesive with the digital is really my forte”
MORE INFORMATION: Technicolor.com/London
IMAGES Colourist Jodie Davidson (above), and various stills from The Souvenir
SEPTEMBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 43
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