Secondaries with the Pros - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 218

Kiss Me In the Dark
The short film “Kiss Me In the Dark” is a production of Seduced and Exploited Films. It
was directed by Barry Gilbert, and the DP was Robin Miller.
Gilbert has been working as a director and producer for several years on indepen-
dent features and spots. Currently, he works out of New York City.
Gilbert explains that this short film has its genesis in a feature script he was shop-
ping. The aesthetic of the film was influenced by Gilbert's love of Ingmar Bergman films.
Many of Gilbert's earlier projects were heavily reliant on dialog, so for this film, he
sought out the challenge of making a film completely without dialog.
If you want the context of the footage from the short as you are attempting to grade
it, here is Gilbert's synopsis of the film:
It's a woman who lives in a big, old empty house and apparently spends all of her
time thumbing through old photos and watching videotapes of her and her dead hus-
band. What we see rather quickly on is that apparently the husband is back in the house
and comes and embraces her. But the issue is clouded when she wakes up and wonders
if she was merely dreaming, and it becomes apparent that this is not an isolated incident,
that this is a pattern. This is the night that she decides, after quite a few drinks, that she
is going to settle the issue once and for all. She's wired the house and there are all these
surveillance cameras and she has ordered some fancy night vision goggles, which on
one level is absurd, because if it was that easy, then everyone would have night vision
goggles. It's really a question for the audience. Is she privy to a ghost that wants to be
found, or is she so torn by her desire to reconnect with him that she's gone through
these kind of sad attempts to rationalize? The point is that she's probably just as afraid
of finding out that she's wrong than that there really is a ghost.
Before Matusek starts adding secondary vignettes, he shuttles through
the footage past the first frame and sees that a man comes down into the
frame from above. Matusek is glad he checked the shot: “The thing that's
a big pain in the ass is when you spend ten minutes on a shot like this and
hit play and then the guy comes in the frame and screws up what you did,
so what I would typically do is go through the whole shot to see what I'm
getting myself in to. So he does come in, but I notice that he doesn't really
go in front of the pillow. What I notice is that my eye goes to this pillow
(above her forehead) and even down here (the sheet under her neck and
shoulders), so what I'd like to do is put a window here (on the pillow) and
drop the exposure. Put a window here (foreground sheet) and drop the
exposure. I really hate this highlight on the back wall, so I'd put a Bezier
shape and bring that highlight down ( Figure 6.20 ) and really soften it,
and if I had to, I could keyframe it to stay where I wanted it to stay. First
I'll put those other two windows, because I know they'll actually work.”