FUCK UP

Towards the end of 2010 the guys behind the successful dark comedy "Dag" shot the feature film "Fuck Up". 

The story is centered around Jack (played by Jon Øigarden) , who is pretty content with life, but needs to cut back on his consumption of women and drugs. Jack's best friend crashes a car on a drug-run and everything goes to hell. The following 24hrs Jack falls from grace and hits rock-bottom!

In flashbacks he dreams back to when he was growing up with his childhood friends, in an age where everything was perfect. I really like the film-making approach these guys have, and I have already been fortunate enough to grade 15 x episodes of "Dag". 

So when they asked me if I wanted to grade "Fuck Up" I was exhilarated! Finally I got to grade my first feature film!

Director Øystein Karlsen and DOP Pål Bugge Hågenrud wanted a very dark, desaturated look with plenty of contrast. Something that would match the nature of the story, as well as amplifying the cold Scandinavian light. 
Together we graded key-scenes from the movie and developed "the look", this way I had reference shots to work from while grading the rest of the movie. 

The movie has a Scandinavian all-star cast which includes, Jon Øigarden, Tuva Novotny, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Atle Antonsen, Iben Hjejle, Lennart Jähkel and Rebecka Hemse.

Grading the Canon DSLR-footage was quite a balancing act, since a lot of the movie was shot at night, with dark exteriors and interiors.

To begin with I denoised the entire movie in After Effects, so that I had less compression-artifacts to deal with. 
Cleaning up the image helps a great deal when trying to isolate specific tonal ranges while grading.

I graded in ShortCut's grading cinema, on a DaVinci Resolve R4 (Linux) with a Christie 2K projector.
It was really good fun "painting with light" on this extremely responsive system, with the pristine picture that the projector delivers.

After the grade was locked, I added film grain to the entire movie in Autodesk Smoke.
This gave the images a more organic feeling. Then we did some last minute fixes / rig removal and added the graphics. After the grade was locked, I did some last minute fixes / rig removal, followed by adding film grain to the entire movie in Autodesk Smoke.

This gave the images a more organic feeling. The last thing left was to add the graphics.

Check out the trailer!