[In progress] Shaun of the Dead "inspired by 35mm trailers"

[deleted user]

A little regrade project. I always found the colors in Shaun of the Dead a bit boring and dull and thought the movie deserved a more exciting look.

I regraded the movie with a couple of 3D LUTs which I generated using DrDre's ColorMatch tool and some snaps of 35mm film cells on eBay. 

No idea what those film cells were taken from. Likely trailers. Either way, there is little consistency in them. Sometimes the same scene is present with two different gradings.

But, for what it's worth, I was able to figure out two basic looks with a few variations. The one is a normal kind of warm film look. The other is something that looks like some extreme kind of Bleach Bypass. 

I don't know which one of these looks is more theatrically accurate, so I decided to use them both depending on the current scene/context/music/score. Neither really fits in all the scenes, so a blanket LUT doesn't make much sense. Bleach Bypass look usually when zombies are involved, the normal film look in more calm scenes - especially in the beginning of the film, at Shaun's workplace etc.. And then there's one that looks a bit like pushed slide film and on the colder side, which is good for the indoors shots in the bar; but I think that one is just a variation of the normal film look.

Here's an screenshot comparison of thumbnails: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/130893

Here is a screenshot comparison of a few images I semi-randomly picked for demonstration: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/130894 (it has multiple tabs!)

I don't think there's a big chance of me ever finding out the "true theatrical" colors, but I like my results so far and I think it's a step up from the boring standard colors which look not much more exciting than some random TV show. After all, it's a zombie apocalypse movie and should be a bit flashy/fancy/gritty.

This whole thing also pushes out the grain of the movie a little more, especially in the final scenes.

Will be rendering the movie out soon.

[Feallan]

Looks very nice, definitely interested in seeing the final result

[deleted user]

Looks very nice, definitely interested in seeing the final result

Very glad to hear, thank you.  

Just started rendering out of Premiere as lossless video, now to hope it won't crash or anything. I've never rendered 1000 GB files yet!

[applesandrice]

Sounds like a great project! Wish I'd had a chance to see this classic in a theater. Good luck!

[spoRv]

Very nice, and a lot better than untouched.

Theatrically accurate? Don't care, I like it anyway!

[deleted user]

Happy about the positive feedback, thanks guys.

Have rendered the 885GB file and am now encoding. Didn't do any further filtering because I wanted to preserve 10bit (plus, Premiere somehow spat out an 16-235 thingy, so at least I had a little "buffer" through the 10 bit for correcting that during encoding). May carry over some occasional compression artifact from the Blu Ray, but I think it shouldn't be too bad. Maybe in the future when I get into AVISynth+ I'll do an encode with proper filtering.

[Jetrell Fo]

I like it but I think it could be reeled in a little. Some of the bright seems to negatively affect skin color in some shots. I can't wait to see a final edition of this project.

Thanks for sharing Tom.

[spoRv]

Have rendered the 885GB file...

885GB?!? Never heard of lossless codecs?

[Valeyard]

That is lossless.

[deleted user]

@Jetrell It's the final one for now, but if it cannot convince, I might do another version later.

Edit: While I'm encoding, here are some shots I already posted in the Blutopia forum:
                 

No blown out highlights in most cases, I made sure of that. Skin color is definitely affected, but it's on purpose. Remember, those are scenes that also feature zombies and zombies are supposed to look bleak. Other scenes look more natural. In particular, the scene towards the end where they walk among zombies has extremely bleached colors (as were in the trailer). This is the single most bleached scene in the movie.


@spoRv @Valeyard It's the Blackmagic 4:4:4 10 Bit lossless codec. Unfortunately the codec seems to force 16-235 colors (in the 10 bit equivalent), which sucks. Will have to find something better in the future.