M.C. Productions: Rough cuts of the first scene at the poker room and flat

I edited and uploaded the first two scenes of both locations in order to get some feedback regarding color correction. My assistant director suggested me to get rid of the glowing white effect coming from two diffusion filters that I added in post (CC Test 2), he stated it looked a bit clichéd, as referring to the tipical dreamy feeling added to similar situations in other films. Also, he recommended me to get rid of the softness of the characters' faces in the poker room (CC Test).

I erased both diffusion filters from the flat scenes and lowered the exposure compensation, which resulted in a much more credible environment. I considered that the dreamy feel was already suggested by my character's performance and the simulation of the bleach bypass process in color correction.

The process of controlling the softness of my characters' faces was a bit more complicated, the reason for this is that both characters were slightly overexposed from the raw footage, especially Frederick. This means that I lost plenty of color information which I could not recover in post, this is also why my characters heads grow from the background inappropriately. I lowered the saturation which I added previously in an attempt to raise the tension and emotion from the scene. I also lowered the intensity of the 'telecine net' effect (digital effect to emulate the process of converting film to video), this reduction brought back some clarity and realism to their faces.