Transcript excerpts from a Rosebank grading session, on heat, dust and the temptation of the teal-orange preset.
Two afternoons in a Rosebank grading suite, watching a colourist work through a slate of local shorts. The room is small, the monitor is calibrated, and the desk lamp stays on because nobody trusts the ceiling lights in that building. What follows is edited from roughly five hours of conversation, cut down for length and clarity.
The first thing he does with every new project is throw away the teal-orange preset. Not because it looks bad on its own, but because it erases the specific light the crew actually shot in. High-veld midday is not a soft key. It is hard, it is slightly green, and it bounces off corrugated roofs in a way that a generic warm-cool split cannot reproduce.
Skin tones are the harder problem. Under a 1 p.m. sun, faces go two stops hotter than the rest of the frame, and the dust in the air reads as a low haze on a wide lens. You can pull the highlights down, but then the dust disappears and the shot looks like it was made in a studio. His compromise is usually a gentle lift in the shadows and a very small gamma tweak, keeping the haze visible without letting it flatten the mid-tones.
Budget shapes the grade as much as taste does. A festival cut in a week means two passes, not six. There is no time for a full second look at every scene, so the decisions get made early and stay made. He says the hardest part is not the technical work, it is accepting that some shots will ship slightly off because the deadline is real.
