Reflection

My main role in the KPB326 work was colourist on the psychological short film Solitary. I was also credited as colourist on the KPB326 Showcase Group production. Solitary is where most of my evidence sits, so this reflection is built around it.

On Solitary, my responsibility was the look of the film in grade. I worked in Adobe Premiere Pro, using Lumetri Color and a Rec.709 workflow, inside an organised grading project. The film follows Roland, a military veteran whose experience of the wilderness becomes unstable after the disappearance of his dog, Shepard, while memories around Zack's death intrude on his perception of the present. That premise shaped every decision. The forest had to remain a credible physical place, yet its emotional meaning needed to shift as Roland's perception shifts.

My answer was to grade the film in four narrative movements: Grounded, Threat, Rupture and Re-entry. Each movement has its own LUT treatment, and a consistent show look sits across all of them so the film still reads as one world. The practical work underneath that structure was less glamorous. It meant matching shots, correcting exposure, keeping skin tones accurate, treating foliage and integrating stock footage so that it belonged with the original photography.

The hardest creative problem was the look of the flashbacks around Zack's death. Their bright daylight look had to feel different from the present without becoming a separate film. The wider challenge was to differentiate three things on screen: traumatic memory, present-tense perceptual distortion and the apparition of Zack. Variations in contrast, temperature, saturation and tonal separation were the tools I explored to communicate those differences while keeping the original photography credible.

Technical discipline mattered as much as creative intent. I kept reference chart frames for each movement and for the show look in the project, and I measured the movements against the show look using a same-film scorecard. Black floor, white point, grey balance, skin hue, skin colour, magenta chroma, neutral axis and contrast budget all passed their limits across the four movements. That gave me a way to change the mood of the film without changing how people on screen look, and it gave me evidence rather than an impression. The project also holds chart targets for each movement as well as for the show look, so a change in mood could be separated from a change in accuracy. It keeps reference frames for the key stills too, which let me return to the same images whenever I checked a change.

Iteration was part of the process, and the evidence shows it. The grading project holds successive grade versions. In the Roadside Distress passage, the memory images fall from 242 frames to 110 frames, about 10.09 seconds to 4.59 seconds. I also tested a Directional Light effect on a dark frame. It increased chroma noise and mottled texture, so I rejected it, and no Directional Lighting is in the final film. For Blood and Sap, I made a dedicated portfolio re-edit of eight picture cuts, using rendered custom finishing assets rather than Lumetri slider values.

Collaboration shaped the grade because colour does not belong to the colourist alone. It has to stay accountable to character, performance, continuity and the intentions of the wider production. That is a professional and ethical responsibility. It also applies to the material I publish: I only show stills and excerpts with the production team's permission, and I do not publish any other footage.

On the Showcase Group production I am credited as colourist. I have not yet gathered the full details of that project, so I am keeping this account of it general. What I can say is that it gives me a second production in which to apply the same habits of matching, checking and communicating about colour.

My independent experimental work sits beside this narrative practice. My short film responding to Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Earth's Creation I (1994) let me test how recorded natural imagery changes through altered time, colour inversion and layering. I mention it here only because it explains my philosophy: an image's meaning is not fixed by what it records. The experimental work questions the limits of an image, while narrative grading asks those interventions to stay answerable to the story.

Working this way has changed how I think about colour. It is not a finishing coat. It is one of several interdependent elements, alongside sound, editing and context, through which filmmakers guide perception. It has also made me more careful about evidence, and about the difference between what I planned, what I tried and what I can verify in the finished work.

My goals are to keep building as a professional colourist in narrative film, and to extend the same thinking into experimental music videos and VJing, developing visuals with musicians, DJs and interdisciplinary artists. I do not yet have professional credits in those areas. I want to earn them by being precise, collaborative and honest about what I have done.