Road to Patagonia (winner of Best Film, Best Documentary and Best 'Byron' Film at the 2022 Byron Bay Film Festival) follows ecologist Matty Hannon on a remarkable solo adventure, surfing the west coast of the Americas while travelling by motorbike from Alaska to the tip of Patagonia. But deep in the wilderness, alone with the wolves and the bears, Matty's plans unexpectedly fall to pieces.
Shot entirely by Matty across 50,000 km using a Sony a7S, Canon 5D MkII and GoPro, the multi-camera footage captures raw, handheld cinematography across some of the world's most remote landscapes. Joined by travel companion Heather Hillier, Matty brought the film to RAVEL for post-production, briefing our team to strip back the digital look of the footage and craft a visual language that matched the emotional arc of the story.
Working with Matty in DaVinci Resolve, we built a filmic colour grade inspired by pre-digital photography, developing a flexible image pipeline that could be dialled in across all camera formats and adapted to each chapter of the journey. The colour grading moves from the warm, pinkish tones of Mexico's highs to the desaturated, cold-toned grade of Patagonia's unforgiving south, using hue, contrast and exposure to reflect each shift in mood and geography.
The film was colour graded over five days and screened at the Screenwave International Film Festival Preview Gala.
