If you become human, who will swim for you

If You Become Human, Who Will Swim for You is a hybrid film that masterfully blends raw, “home-video"-style documentary footage with pre-planned scripted elements. Actors were given the freedom to improvise freely around these prepared moments, creating an organic, unpredictable flow between reality and performance.

This setup presented a fascinating challenge for color grading: most visual decisions were born and refined in post-production rather than on set, allowing for deep, intentional shaping of the film’s emotional landscape after the fact.

Our primary goal was to evoke in the viewer a complex, unsettling sensation — “I shouldn’t be seeing this” — through a consistently cold palette and deliberate optical techniques. The overall atmosphere communicates isolation, rejection, and alienation, punctuated by brief, fragile moments of warmer tenderness and acceptance.

Within this chilled color world, every shade carries its own semantic weight, tied to the degree of immersion in rejection: from piercing, crystalline blues that feel almost painfully sharp, to murky, dirty turquoise tones that drag the viewer deeper into discomfort and unease.

The film was intentionally shot on Sony cameras to heighten the amateur, intimate, found-footage aesthetic. However, in darker scenes the sensor’s aggressive digital noise became a major issue — DaVinci Resolve’s built-in noise reduction tools simply couldn’t tame it at all.

We ultimately turned to the Neat Video plugin for powerful, clean denoising. After that, we carefully reintroduced controlled grain to restore the desired organic filmic texture — ensuring the footage felt authentic and textured rather than overly sterile or digital.