Well I'm working away on editing '3 Pointer' now, the main edit has gone surprisingly quickly and I'm sure that's mostly down to my actors getting everything right within a couple of takes. Oh I'm going to apologise now for any terrible spelling errors in today's blog I'm just trying out a word press iPhone app to see what writing a blog on it's like so bare with me.

Anyway like I said I've gotten the structure together and we're currently sitting at 2.34 when the limit is 2.20, right now this seems like a nightmare trying to cut out 14 seconds but I'm sure in the end the film will flow better because of it (and if it doesn't I'll blame such short time limits) I've decided to start grading the short whilst I decide on what to cut. Hopefully that will give me a better idea of what isn't important to the story.

For grading i'm mostly using Red Giant 'Magic Bullet Colorista'its a great plugin though it doesn't have a lot of controls with a bit of know how you can get some really great looking picture from it. Red Giant also make a bit of software called 'Magic Bullet Looks' this is an amazing plug-in which gives you much more control over your grading. The only problem I have with Looks is that I think sometimes it's to easy to absolutely apeshit with the different effects and ruin what you had in the first place, it's also very easy to get in the habit of using presets all the time. Presets are fine when you're new to the world of grading but don't stop there play around and come up with some looks of your own. Remember when you grade a video the same look isn't going to work on every shot, you may well need to tweak it here and there so don't get lazy and globally apply it to everything.

I'm going to include a few comparisons so you can see before and after the grade. I'm still working on the grading so in the final video the image wont appear quite as green as it does in the second of the 2 comparisons.

Alan