«Giostra di Giovanni 2025 - Magna Carta Medieval Festival»
The Official Aftermovie
Last year, I accidentally wore orange glasses for a bike ride through the forest and discovered that the colors became such that it felt like I was in a Ridley Scott medieval film: warm, rich, with restrained greens. I tried to recreate this look in a couple of projects, but it didn’t work – the story didn’t fit.
Six months later, Maxim
@croc_studio asked me to do color grading for a documentary about a medieval festival with knight fights in Livorno, Italy, and sent me a link to Ridley Scott’s 2010 film «Robin Hood» with the exact same look.
We quickly did several color tests on footage shot at Kalemegdan fortress in Belgrade with Sirui anamorphic lenses and found a very warm, color-limited look. I created several showluts for the Sony FX30 so Maxim could see approximate colors during shooting. We discovered that even with a 1500-nit external monitor in bright sunlight, Maxim was overexposing a bit, so we added a +0.5 stop correction to the showlut. I also created LUTs for the editor, who was making reels for publication during the festival without my involvement.
After shooting, we fine-tuned the look – adding soft texture, Black Pro-Mist emulation, film grain, and a bit of anamorphic blur to the not-too-anamorphic Sirui 1.33 lenses. We also softened the rec709 drone footage to match the look.
I really love this work: I finally got to experiment with very narrow color palettes (all the colors fit into a small triangle between gray, skin tone, a bit of red, and yellow-green), which don’t look cheap even at high contrast and work perfectly with the medieval content.
client |
@magnacarta.project
production |
@croc_studio
director |
@croc_studio
dp |
@cetych
camera operator |
@daniil4green
edit |
@icanbreatheee
fpv |
@stagod_
sound |
@pinsker_id @gripsoundlab_rs
color |
@step2.color 🫡
#colorgrading
#davinciresolve
#coloristsociety
#FilmColorist
#cinematography
#doplife
