Colourist, Claire Winter worked closely with director, Joachim Hedén to explore creative ways to embrace some of the natural challenges of grading underwater footage.
The Last Breath follows a group of old college friends who reunite on a Caribbean scuba diving trip. Their exploration of a WWII battleship wreck turns into a terrifying fight for survival when they become trapped inside the underwater labyrinth of rusted metal, surrounded by great white sharks. The film stars Julian Sands in his final performance.
Joachim’s experience in shooting underwater was invaluable in understanding the limitations of the footage. For example, the underwater footage is often very naturally noisy, something that was leaned into in the grade. Instead of eliminating the noise the director asked to add more grain to even it out overall and create texture. The idea was to contrast the grittiness of the underwater scenes with vibrant saturated colours above water, where the poppy, primary colours were accentuated.
Balancing the extremes of light and dark also presented a significant challenge, but one that ultimately defined the look of the film. Joachim envisioned a high-contrast, gritty underwater look, characterised by deep shadows shaped off and darkened into obscurity to create a claustrophobic atmosphere, while the torch beams and mask lights of the divers were at the high end of the scopes, stark and punching out of the screen.
The HDR grade and Dolby trim pass to SDR proved challenging with regards to these contrasts of tone. The extreme highlights resulted in the Dolby Analysis to SDR conversion producing excessively dark results. To address this issue, an extensive effort was dedicated to refining the SDR trim, meticulously replicating the theatrical grade to achieve the desired balance between light and dark.
The Last Breath is available on VOD on Amazon & AppleTV now.