The Salt Road: a rained-out evening, relit

The Salt Road is a feature about a family that farms reeds on a tidal flat. Half its scenes were written for evening light, and the schedule put most of them in the first two weeks of a 24-day shoot.

The sun lasted one day. The production also had a tide table to follow: the flat floods twice a day, so a lost evening could not move to the next evening without losing the water as well. Ottilie Marsh kept shooting under cloud and logged the hour each scene was meant to play at. “I wrote the time on the slate,” she says. “18:40, 19:15, night. That list became our grade.”

The colorist brought the reels into Glimr and worked down the list. Golden hour scenes got the sun at the height each slate time called for. Night scenes were relit to 21:05, and the farmhouse windows went on as practical lights at 2700 K, with the glow falling across the deck and into the reeds. Each relit shot went to Ottilie as a review link with frame notes, and she asked for changes on six of them, all about how high the sun sat. Where a sky had to be rebuilt, Glimr kept the clouds in the shapes the camera caught, so a wide and its close-up still share one sky.

For the long night sequence the team laid Nocturne over the relight, so all 14 shots in it share one moonlight. In total, 41 shots were relit from overcast to evening or night, and the production booked no reshoot days. The relight took the colorist nine working days, against the four reshoot days the line producer had budgeted and the tides would not have allowed.

At the cast screening the director asked the room to point out a relit shot, and nobody could.