Quality Control

We hit a big problem at college in the last few days when our film completely failed the broadcast quality control test. This is something that every film has to go through so that it can be played at the degree show or online, etc. And we failed pretty badly on teh flashes. Technically speaking you're only allowed 5 flashes or under otherwise is becomes an epilepsy risk. The big problem for us is that soe of our flashes during the fast paced sequence reach 12 flashes in a second near the end which would obviously fail the QC test! I had previously tried emailing Mike Dixon at ravensbourne who is in charge of the broadcast sweets and testing film before the degree show but he never got back to me. Eventualy we became so preoccupied with other, far more pressing, issues that the film presented so we compltely forgot about the flashing being an issue. But really we were just committing more and more to an issue that could mean our film does not get shown at the degree show, and we've worked too long and too hard for that to happen!

We all went away and tried to think of a solution for the problem. A couple of staff members suggested scrapping the sequence and forming something else, but it had got the stage where the sequence had become a really integral part of the film, and I personally really didn't want to scrap the sequence at all because I really liked the idea of it and thought that anything else we added would seem last minute and tacked on.

But then...Greg had an idea! The luminosity is what the film failed on, and luminosity is the measurement of black to white and how quickly it goes from one to the other. White is made up of three colours: green, blue and red. Therefore in theory if we were to remove to of the colours we would reduce our chances of failing the QC test to a third of what they were, because the colours would be a third of its original intensity! Greg = beast. We therefore decided as a group tht it would be a cool idea to grade the sequence blue so that it not only passed the QC test but had a really isolated style to the sequence. Steph did a quick compositing change and graded everything blue, and Joe made a quick flash test with varying speeds which went on the completely ace the QC test anmd solved all of our problems! Sweet!