Grading the last train

The last metro of the night is lit by cyan strip lights, and that colour is the whole mood of the short. It’s also the colour that makes a face look ill.

Sottel Nera is about the people on that last train, so the grade had to keep both: the station’s cold light and skin that still looks alive.

Two colours in one frame

Strip lights throw a narrow, hard green-blue. Faces under them go grey, and pushing the whole picture warmer turns the platform beige.

Leave the station alone

We graded the platform first, with faces hidden, until the tiles and the strip lights matched what we remembered from the night.

Then find the people

Only then did we bring skin back, with a soft key on faces alone. It pulls them a little towards warm and leaves everything around them cold.

A word of warning

Push a skin key too far and the faces float off the background. We stopped at the point where it stopped being noticed.

Where each change sits

The grade is a short stack, and every layer does one job.

Three layers was enough. Every extra one made the station look less like itself.

What I check on every night grade

Before signing off a shot, I look for three things:

• The blacks stay black, not blue.

• The faces read as people at a glance.

• The lights keep their colour at the edges.

Then I watch the film once on a phone in a dark room, because that’s where most people will see it.

Watch Sottel Nera