….
The filming of [Superman] was officially completed, and the team dived into its post-production phase.
Regal sat in the color grading suite, the room bathed in calibrated darkness save for the enormous reference monitor displaying frame 4,847 of [Superman].
It was three in the morning.
Beside him, colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld adjusted the highlight rolloff on Henry's face during the pivotal moment when Clark first sees the hologram of Jor-El.
Regal leaned closer to the monitor, resting his forearms on the desk. "He doesn't look right. Feels washed out. I know the environment is alien, but his face still needs to read as… normal."
Stefan adjusted his posture and started working the color wheels. "Okay. Tell me when to stop."
"Ease some warmth back in." Regal said. "Not much. I don't want it to look lit, just… believable."
Stefan made a small adjustment and paused. "Here?"
Regal studied the frame for a second longer than before, then nodded once.
"Yeah. Leave it there. Now it matches the performance."
Stefan began propagating the grade while Regal checked his phone.
Forty-seven unread messages.
He scrolled through them–
Tolliver Lee suggested preliminary cut approval before the September test screening, which Regal also agreed up on.
Entertainment Weekly needed to confirm their cover story interview for October.
Henry's publicist was requesting clarity on the press tour schedule.
Leo Martinez sent lighting references for the final pickup shots scheduled for next week.
And buried in the middle, a text from Gwendolyn sent six hours ago:
[Gwen: You're not coming home tonight, are you?]
[Gwen: That wasn't a complaint. Was checking if I should save dinner or donate it to science.]
Regal smiled despite the exhaustion pressing against his temples.
He typed back:
[Regal: Still at the grading suite. Donate it. I will make it up to you.]
Her response came immediately, which meant she was still awake:
[Gwen: You always owe me. Current balance: four dinners, two movie nights, one weekend trip, and an explanation for why there were Superman storyboards in our bathroom.]
[Regal: The bathroom thing was accidental.]
[Gwen: Sure it was. Go work. I will see you when you remember you live somewhere.]
He pocketed the phone, feeling a little guilty between the work and the life outside of it.
The door to the suite opened, and Darren entered carrying two cups of coffee that smelled expensive and necessary.
"Thought you might need this." He handed him one. "Stefan, there's another in the hall for you."
Stefan nodded gratefully and stepped out to grab it, leaving Regal and Darren alone in the semi-darkness.
"You have been here for sixteen hours…" Darren said.
"...." Regal simply sipped the coffee.
It was perfect, black, strong, probably quadruple-shot. "Who's counting?"
"Your assistant. Your girlfriend. And your cinematographer, who called me to ask whether you had gone home or decided to move into post-production permanently."
Darren dropped into Stefan's chair, then added, dryly. "Strangely, no one asked about me. I have been here the whole time."
Regal huffed. "Get a girlfriend."
"I would last a day." Darren said. "And she would probably accuse me of cheating - with you."
That earned a short laugh, and the moment passed.
Regal didn't argue.
The trailer's success had been intoxicating, 32 million views, global trending, industry-wide praise.
But success brought its own weight, and that weight was currently pressing down on every aspect of post-production.
The audience wanted something bigger than the last thing they loved. Stephen Hawking Sr. expected something worthy of his return.
And Regal wanted to hit every one of those marks without cutting anything that mattered.
"The color grading is taking longer than scheduled." Regal said, changing the subject. "We're only forty percent through the film and we need to be at seventy percent by the end of week."
"Then we bring in a second colorist. Stefan can handle the emotional scenes, someone else handles the action sequences."
"That creates consistency problems. Different colorists have different eyes."
"Then you supervise both. But you can't keep pulling eighteen-hour days. You've got two other films in active production, and they are already feeling it."
Regal set his coffee aside. "Alexander's handling [The Matrix]. Shawn and Simon have [Deadpool] under control."
Darren shook his head. "You know that's not really true. Neither of them wants to lock big decisions without you. Shawn sent me a fifty-page email last week just to sign off on marketing layouts, and Alexander calls yo—"
Regal's phone buzzed.
"Hold on." Regal said, raising a finger.
Darren glanced at the screen. "Yeah. Figures."
It was Alexander.
[Alexander: Sorry for the late text. Assume you're awake anyway. We have a problem with the bullet time rig. The interpolation between cameras is creating artifacts. Yuen wants to reshoot the lobby sequence.]
Regal stared at the message.
Reshooting the lobby sequence would mean:
Rebuilding sets that had already been torn down.
Losing at least a full week.
Blowing a hole in the schedule, and the budget.
But if the bullet time didn't land, if those shots failed, the ones meant to define the visual language of [The Matrix]—
Then none of the shortcuts would matter anyway.
[Regal: Don't reshoot yet. Send me the footage. Let me see what we are dealing with.]
[Alexander: Already did. It's a big file, though. Figured it would take a while to come through. Didn't want to drag you into it immediately.]
Darren glanced over from the chair. "More trouble?"
"Matrix." Regal said. "There is talk of a reshoot. One of the key sequences."
Darren winced. "So… the break you promised yourself?"
"Delayed." Regal said, rubbing his eyes, the fatigue finally catching up. "Not cancelled."
Once the file was downloaded, he safely plugged it to one of the monitors, and played the footage.
Regal immediately understood what Alexander had flagged.
The bullet-time sequence, Neo twisting away from the bullets on the rooftop, had a faint but persistent ghosting between camera positions.
Instead of flowing cleanly, the motion stuttered in tiny increments where the interpolation struggled to bridge the still frames.
It wasn't on the nose or something, in fact most audiences might not even consciously notice.
But it was there, and Regal noticed, which meant it couldn't stay.
He called Alexander despite the hour.
The phone rang twice before Alexander's voice came through, alert despite the time:
["You saw it?"]
"I did." Regal pulled the footage onto the larger reference monitor, scrubbing through frame by frame. "But I don't think you need to reshoot."
["Yuen says—"]
"Yuen's right that there is a problem." Regal said, cutting in calmly. "But this isn't a photography issue. The cameras did their job. This is post. The software's struggling to interpolate cleanly between angles."
He paused on a cluster of frames and zoomed in. "Did you notice? The gaps are too wide for the current algorithm."
Alexander exhaled. ["So what's the fix?"]
"We build a better one." Regal said without hesitation. "I will reach out to Unique FX. They can loop you in with a VFX supervisor who actually specializes in motion interpolation. This is exactly their lane."
There was a beat of silence, then relief crept into Alexander's voice. ["That would save us… a lot. Time, money - everything."]
"Send me the full sequence, all camera angles. I will get it to them by morning and see what they can do. But Alexander?"
["Yeah?"]
"This is why we planned buffers. You are working with tech no one has really used at this scale before. Problems were always part of the deal. The goal isn't to panic and reshoot - it's to solve it smarter."
["Understood. Thanks, Regal. Seriously."]
"Get some sleep. We will fix this."
After hanging up, Regal immediately drafted an email to Leo Woert, attached the footage, and laid out the issue in clear technical terms.
It was a few hours to the next morning, but he knew Leo, and David, kept irregular hours. There was a decent chance one of them would see it before sunrise.
"You probably just saved them half a million and a week of shooting." Darren observed.
"That's our job."
"Yeah. Ours. That's how it's supposed to work."
Stefan returned with his coffee, breaking the tension. "Ready to continue?"
"Yeah." Regal stood, stretching muscles that had been locked in place too long. "Darren, can you handle the meeting with Tolliver and Carrow tomorrow morning?"
"It won't be too hard since we are on schedule–
"But Regal? Take tomorrow evening off. Not for work. Actual off. Dinner with Gwendolyn, sleep, something that reminds you that you're human."
"I will think about it."
"That's not a yes."
"It's the best you're getting right now."
After Darren left, Regal and Stefan settled back into the painstaking work of color grading.
….
The editing room shifted back to its usual 'lighting', everything dark except for the glow of the reference monitor, casting Zack Brag's face in shifting light as the Metropolis battle sequence played out frame by frame.
Regal stood, watching Superman dodge Zod's heat vision while simultaneously pushing a collapsing building away from fleeing civilians.
The colors were vivid, Superman's cape a brilliant red against the blue sky, the yellow of the S-shield catching sunlight even amid destruction.
Primary colors that belonged on a comic book page, rendered with cinematic weight but refusing to apologize for their brightness.
It looked nothing like what Regal remembered from his previous life.
Man of Steel had been... grey.
That was the word that always came to mind.
Grey and brown and desaturated, like someone had drained the hope out of Superman's world and replaced it with concrete dust and muted despair.
Zack Snyder's vision had been grounded, realistic, and grim, while missing the fundamental point of who Superman was supposed to be.
A symbol of hope doesn't exist in greyscale.
Regal had made that decision early in pre-production, sitting with Stefan Sonnenfeld and spreading out comic panels across the table.
The vibrant yellows of Kansas wheat fields.
The brilliant blue of Superman's suit against clouds.
The warm reds that made him feel alive rather than alien.
And Stefan had delivered.
The color grading throughout the film was conscious, Kansas scenes bathed in golden hour light that felt like childhood memory, Krypton rendered in cold crystalline blues that emphasized its alien beauty, and Metropolis... Metropolis was saturated with life.
The kind of city where people actually wanted to live, not the grey concrete nightmare that passed for urban realism in most modern superhero films.
It was a small change, technically.
Adjusting color wheels, tweaking saturation levels, choosing warmth over coldness.
But it changed everything.
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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