Grading Night Drive

Night Drive is sixty seconds inside a car crossing Manchester in the rain. There is one driver, one route and almost no light that we put there ourselves. For a colourist that sounds like freedom. In practice it meant the look had to be decided before anyone got wet, because there would be nothing on the night to fix it with.

Starting before the shoot

Rafael Duarte and Tomasz Wierzbicki brought me in during prep, about three weeks before the first night. Tomasz shot tests in the actual car, on the actual route, with the compact large-format camera and the set of vintage spherical primes he planned to use. We graded those tests together and built a single viewing LUT from them, which went onto the camera monitors and the video village for the whole shoot.

That LUT did two jobs. It let Rafael and the agency judge the image on set as it would finally look, and it told Tomasz exactly how much room he had in the shadows. If the dashboard read correctly through the LUT, it would read in the grade.

Two colours and a face

The look rests on one idea: orange and blue never touch. Manchester's streets are a mix of old sodium lamps and newer LED fittings, so the city gave us both colours for free. My job was to keep them apart. The sodium light stays orange, the LED and the shop fronts stay cold, and anything in between is pushed one way or the other so it does not muddy into grey.

The driver's face is the exception. It is lit by the dashboard and a single dimmed tube under the roof lining, and it sits outside the colour scheme entirely. I keyed the skin on every shot and held it close to neutral, a little warm, so that whatever the street was doing outside, the person stayed a person.

A night film lives or dies in the bottom of the image. The temptation in a grade is to lift the shadows to show off what the sensor caught. We did the opposite. The blacks in Night Drive sit low and stay there, so the street lamps through the wet windscreen read as soft discs floating in dark rather than as lights in a visible street. Those discs come from the old lenses at close focus; I left their highlights to roll off gently rather than clamping them.

Matching four nights of rain

We shot over four nights, in real rain on three of them and a rain bar for the dry hour. Each night had different cloud, different traffic and a slightly different colour of wet road. Clara Moss cut to the rhythm of the wipers, not to the shoot order, so neighbouring shots often came from different nights.

The fix was unglamorous: a reference still from the hero night for every scene, and a pass shot by shot to match the road reflections first and everything else second. Once the road matched, the eye stopped noticing anything else. A light layer of grain over the whole film tied the nights together.

What we left alone

Plenty. We did not clean the rain off the glass, sharpen the street or brighten the driver's eyes. The film is supposed to feel like the drive home after a long shift, slightly tired and slightly beautiful. Most of the grade was about not getting in its way.