in the universe parallel to the Marvel Cinematic Universe an ordinary human recreates an iconic
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3C in his living room so to recreate this thing let's first analyze
this clip first problem is this background of a spaceship and I don't have a custom build set so I
used mid-journey to help me create this background if you haven't heard of mid-journey it's an AI
tool available on Discord where it generates these beautiful images from natural language
descriptions the first promo trial was Guardians of the Galaxy spaceship Corridor with bright white
light above cinematic with a resolution of 16x9 and it gave me these four Images which are okay
but they appear to be a little bit too far away so I repeated The Prompt and adding the focal
length of 35 mil and boom this is a lot better and I decided to go with this one pop that image
onto the TV with the camera in front then I look on the camera it was way too bright so I added the
ND to make it a bit darker from the TV screen and there we go that's how it's okay we need lighting
now let's look at the lighting setup and from his hair we can see how the light is hitting from the
top so there's a top light and if we zoom in into his eyes I just never noticed how black
your eyes were anyway so as you can see there's a reflection of a light that's coming from below so
I place one tube on the floor and another tube on the top and then this is my face realizing I
was way too low on the floor so I added some cushions okay it's time to shoot the scene
okay it's a bit boring let's fast forward
and this is the final shot I decided to use now you notice my camera doesn't move like here it
is because I don't have a set like this a virtual production on mandaloria where the camera moves
with a background now onto the Magical World of Color grading I use DaVinci Resolve to do all my
editing and color grading here's a clip zoomed in to crop out the TV and added the black bars and
here's the original image for reference now to get the color grading as original I could color grade
it from scratch but I'm feeling lazy today so all I have to do is make sure my clip is selected and
then right click on the reference image and then choose sharp match to this clip and voila okay
not quite there so need some more tweaks first thing I notice is a little bit dark so I'll
bring up with the brightness like this a little bit more yeah and then I want to color gray just
me not the background there's this new feature on DaVinci Reserve called depth map what it does is
it will isolate the object closest to the camera separate to the background so create another node
here and then in the library I will search for the effect depth map and drag that onto the new node
and immediately you'll see you're separating me from the background the white is the object that
you are collaborating on I'm going to switch off the preview so I can see what we're working on
okay let's look the original reference image again the skin and the hair is a lot lighter colored
so I'm going to drag that down a bit to Red here uh slowly down a bit more
and then saturation up a little bit
okay let's just have a quick look again right okay uh I think we need to go down a bit more with that
skin color smooth too red for me and there will increase contrast a little bit now I still feel
this needs a bit more adjustment um the skin and the whole area isn't quite right so let's go back
to the um the original let's just see what I'm actually missing okay yeah lighter skin okay I'm
going to drag the gamma down a little bit more just help to get rid of the two bluish color
I'm just trying to find the right spot I think this yellow part is quite nice yes right about
upper back up here about yeah about here looks good or down below up oh I can't decide um okay
yeah this looks good now I want to increase the contrast a little bit more and yeah that's better
I still feel the Skins a little bit too blue reddish so I'm gonna drag that a little bit more
towards the yellow side yeah this this looks good now okay now I need to color grade the
background same as before I need to create another node and then drop the effect on there again
but this time I'm going to select invert now you'll see the white is on the back so we're
color green in the back section the background is quite simple actually all I have to do is drop the
saturation a little bit because it's too blue and yeah about that looks really good okay let's look
at the reference image again yeah almost there I think I want to increase the saturation a little
bit more just a teeny tiny bit yeah okay this looks good uh let's have a look the original
again it's more contrast and let's yeah let's bring down left again give it a bit more contrast
now another thing I've noticed is that my face is super sharp because the lens I'm using if you look
at the original it's quite smooth so to smooth out my face I need another effect tool let's go
up here and search for face refinement that's the one and drag it onto the first node and then first
we need to find the face by clicking analyze and what it does is it will find the face throughout
the whole clip from start finish so what this means is that it will only grade the face now
so I can move the amount of beauty to make myself look beautiful it's just a kind of
smoothing tool I need which is I think it's in in the actual amount in in the Skin Mask section
and then we just increase the amount just a little bit on the smoothing because if you do too much
this happens so we don't want that we just want to just teeny tiny bit of smooth
to match the original kind of looks good and let's do a quick comparison
yeah and we play back and this looks good okay now we need to color grade the clothing he's got
this blue and burgundy color and I've got this boring greenish color so first thing I need to
do is isolate my jacket uh what I do is select the Color Picker and go over to select my jacket
and turn the effect on now you can see it's highlighting other areas as well I just want
the jacket to be color graded let me denoise that a little bit um like that yeah okay so
to select just a jacket I need to mask just that area so what I do is go to the masking tool here
window and select the curve and then just draw around the edge of the jacket and cut my head off
Heads Will Roll watch out don't go into the jacket just above and then we go all the way around to
the right and at the bottom here here we go okay now it's isolated we can color grade it okay here
we go um so to get the jacket looking uh like the original I think it needs to be a bit blue
you see that a little bit blue uh we'll adjust that gang a little bit towards the Blue Area
um I think yeah I think this is this is actually quite quite close yeah I'm happy with that let's
have another another quick look from the original a little bit darker um and more to the right
okay I need to bring down the contrast so it's a bit it's a bit darker it's too light at the moment
let's drag it down here we go yeah okay this is definitely good now okay the other thing I
need to color correctly is those stripes on my shoulders as you can see this burgundy colors
so again I need to isolate them using the curve tool I'll fast forward this bit it's quite boring
foreign
foreign [Music]
by tracking them as well through the clip because they do move a little bit so that
they stay colored during the whole clip and if I turn off the selection tool you'll see it looks
like it's just part of me and this is how you become part of the Guardians of the Galaxy and
let's give a quick final side by side comparison yeah it's like as if I was there well thanks
everyone hope you enjoyed it smash that like And subscribe button for more until next time