Grade

The colour given to a film after it is shot, frame by frame. It is where footage becomes a world: the same scene can be memory, dream or dread depending on the grade.

The grade is the film's last rewrite. Footage arrives as evidence, honest, flat, unopinionated, and the grade decides what the evidence means: lifted blacks turn fact into memory, crushed shadow turns the same fact into dread. Colour is graded scene against scene, so the film's feeling has continuity even where its locations do not.

The craft runs in two passes: correction first, making every shot true and consistent, then the look, one deliberate opinion applied on top. Building look on uncorrected footage is decorating a crooked wall. Our own surfaces follow the same logic, a cold, dark ground holding one warm accent, which is a grade by another name.