I recently watched The Devil All The Time (Antonio Campos, 2020) and loved the brutal and vintage look that cinematographer Lol Crawley achieved. I wanted to experiment with this style, however, much of this was because of the film stock they shot on, but I don’t have the ability to shoot on film. So I set out to try to recreate this hard-grain film look.
First I shot the footage. Luckily there was a pretty great sunset with a soft and sinister look that suited the aesthetic of the film’s cinematography quite well. I exposed for the sky and sun, casting the landscape into shadows; adding a darker feeling to the shot.
My favourite shot of the shoot is the third. As I was filming after the sun had set, it had pretty low-contrast lighting, which lent itself to the look of the film well. The colours just look really great.
I colour grade in Adobe Premiere Pro, so to achieve the film grain I used some film stock overlays. I opted for the hard grain 35mm option and set it to overlay over the footage I shot. The overlays slightly lowered the contrast of the frame, which I liked the look of and enhanced.
For the colour grading process, I slightly desaturated the shots, lowered the contrast, and pushed the blues more towards a teal.
I also emulated the characteristic of filmstock: halation; which is most visible in the first shot, on the edge of the rooftop by the sun, and in the third shot between the treetops and the sky.
I think the third shot might be one of my favourite frames I have ever filmed. Something about it is just very pleasing; the colours, the composition, the way the hard grain works with the look of the image. I just really like it.
I think shooting in the style of different films’ cinematography that I like helps me to step out of my comfort zone. Making me try composition, lighting, and colour grading that I normally would not try. This shoot for example; I shot some really good shots that I probably would not have shot in that way otherwise.