Printer Light Play

Overview

One of the main “mysteries” of working with the lab involves grading the print: adjusting or “correcting” the color balance for overexposures, underexposures, or unwanted color shifts in the original. Grading is done by adding or removing degrees of red, green, or blue light on the copier: the standard setting for an average exposure in our lab is 30 Red, 30 Green, and 30 Blue. Filmmakers often leave this work to the lab technician, and they only have a general understanding of the process. In our case, we wanted to use this film to learn more about it. We filmed a scene, under the light, of our son Ivor holding a Kodak Colour Patch Card (a male version of the "Kodak Lady" often spliced ​​for quality control purposes on a print). This normally exposed scene is subject to a range of 84 different print light settings out of 132,651 possible combinations. The soundtrack consists of a voice announcing the print light variations used. (Arthur Cantrill & Corinne Cantrill)