Short Film Color Grading for I Hate You by Palvinder Jagait

C&I Studios delivered full short film color grading on director Palvinder Jagait’s 11 minute indie drama I Hate You. The brief was a complete color pipeline from raw camera files through final delivery: shot matching across every scene, primary correction to balance exposure and white balance, and a creative grade that translated the director’s emotional intent into a unified cinematic look.

Short film color grading carries more weight on an independent project than on a commercial. The audience meets the characters in the first thirty seconds and lives with them across the entire runtime, so any inconsistency in skin tone, contrast, or color bias breaks the spell. Our colorists worked through I Hate You shot by shot, beat by beat, holding to the script supervisor’s continuity notes while honoring how each scene was actually lit on set.

Color Correction Pass

The first pass on any short film color grading job is technical correction. We pulled every clip into our DaVinci Resolve pipeline, matched white balance across the daylight street exteriors, the warm restaurant interiors, and the cool rain washed car interiors. Skin tones were locked to a consistent target across cameras and angles so close ups feel like the same character even when the lighting changes between setups.

Once the primaries were balanced, we built grouped corrections so any scene level adjustments rippled through every coverage angle automatically. This kept the grade tight and the turnaround fast as the director iterated on the look. Post production color work at this stage is invisible by design — the audience should never notice that any work has been done at all.

Creative Grade and Look

The creative grade on I Hate You leans into a muted contemporary palette: warm midtones, slightly lifted blacks, and a controlled roll off in the highlights. The look reads cinematic on a phone, on a laptop, and on a festival screen. We built per scene looks for the brick wall opening, the restaurant booth conversation, the sunlit street walk, and the rain streaked car finale, with secondary qualifiers for skin and key wardrobe colors.

Short film color grading on indie projects often gets squeezed for time and budget, but the creative grade is the difference between a film that feels finished and a film that feels like dailies. We built the look in collaboration with the director so the final picture matches the emotional arc of the script, not just the technical baseline.

Why C&I Studios for Short Film Color Grading

C&I Studios runs a full post production pipeline out of our 30,000 square foot facility in Fort Lauderdale, with color suites equipped for SDR and HDR finishing. Our colorists have graded narrative shorts, feature films, music videos, branded content, and commercial spots for clients ranging from independent directors to global brands. Outlets like IndieWire regularly cover the role color plays in independent cinema, and the work we built for I Hate You is designed to live alongside that conversation.

Whether you are finishing a short film, a feature, a proof of concept, or a festival cut, C&I Studios is built to deliver the full short film color grading pipeline from raw camera files to final master.