For the past few days, filmmaker Razvan Anton and I have been working steadily on our film entry to the Chicago International Film Festival’s ‘The Human Condition Competition’. The Post-Production process on our film, now entitled X+Y, proved to be quite a task to complete given the short amount of time we had left prior to the competition deadline and the heavy amount of color grading our project demanded.

While most film projects are color graded after a final cut is locked, Razvan and my self chose to color grade each of our still images individual (500+ and counting) prior to/while editing the film. This decision was made based on our still images each being unique in their lighting and color properties, and us wanting to push that individuality as far as we could, dramatizing each image to its full capacity.

We managed to pull together a very strong 60 second entry and it has been shipped off to the Chicago International Film Festival for judging. We both felt the project could have been far better given more time, and so we are taking a few weeks to refine some of the aspects of the film. We also felt that being held to the 60 second time limit was a bit hampering in what we were trying to achieve visually through the film, and as such, we will be releasing a final and definitive version of the film online once it is completed to our total satisfaction.

The color grading process and it's abilities to manipulate the visual properties of an image was something Razvan and I were both intrigued by and we hope to push this aspect of the film even further for the final version of X+Y. Below you can view some of screen grabs from the film that we were most happy with in their working color graded form.