Gregory Oke photographed Aftersun as two textures layered on top of each other. The holiday scenes — pool, beach, hotel room — were shot on 35mm film: warm, grainy, overexposed at the edges, with the soft imperfection of a print left in a drawer for twenty years. The camcorder sequences that punctuate the film are standard-definition DV: flat, noisy, blue-green, with the accidental beauty of home video where auto white balance and compression do the grading. For Fujifilm shooters, the two recipes are really two philosophies — one embraces the warmth and texture of analogue, the other deliberately mimics the limits of cheap digital.
Aftersun alternates between two distinct textures that represent two ways of remembering. The 35mm holiday scenes are warm, soft and overexposed — the look of memory as you wish it had been. The DV camcorder footage is flat, noisy and cool — the look of memory as it was actually recorded. The tension between them is the film's visual argument.
Poolside, the hotel room, the beach. Natural sunlight provides all the warmth; Oke lets highlights blow freely and keeps shadows open. Grain is visible and part of the image, not an artefact to suppress. Colours lean warm but never saturated — peach, gold, pale blue water. It looks like a physical print fading in a shoebox.
Recipe: Poolside, 35mm ↓Sophie's recordings of Calum: close-up, intimate, visually rough. The resolution is low, noise is dense, auto white balance drifts toward blue-green. These sequences feel like found footage — raw, ungraded, and haunted by what the camcorder captured without Sophie knowing it mattered.
Recipe: Camcorder Memory ↓The rave and nightclub sequences exist in near-total darkness punctuated by flashes of coloured light. Figures appear and disappear, faces are lit for a fraction of a second. There is no consistent palette — only bursts against black.
Aftersun's 35mm sequences are meant to look like film — visible grain, imperfect exposure, slight softness at the edges. A recipe that removes noise and maximises sharpness works against the entire visual idea. The imperfections are not flaws to fix; they're what make the image feel like a memory fading at the corners. Lean into high grain and low noise reduction rather than fighting your camera's tendency toward cleanness.
The recipe handles colour and tone. These handle what a recipe can't.
A light mist filter blooms highlights and softens contrast — the haze a pastel recipe alone can only hint at.
Bounce low sun back into faces. The gold side adds the honeyed fill these warm recipes are built around.
Rent or stream it tonight, then pause on a frame and shoot it.
The disc carries far more image detail than a stream — worth it for a film you study.
Nostalgic Neg for the sun-drenched 35mm holiday scenes — its warm tones and natural grain handling fit perfectly. Eterna for the DV camcorder look, because its flat, desaturated profile mimics the limited dynamic range of consumer video.
Gregory Oke. He and director Charlotte Wells chose to shoot the holiday scenes on 35mm film to give them a physical, textured warmth that digital capture would have smoothed away.
All settings work on X-Trans IV and X-Trans V bodies such as the X-T5, X-S20, X100VI and X-T4. The Camcorder Memory recipe works on any body with Eterna. The Poolside recipe uses Nostalgic Neg, available on X-Trans V cameras; older bodies can substitute Astia/Soft with strong grain.
You can get close. The Camcorder Memory recipe uses low sharpness, heavy grain, flat dynamic range and a cool white balance to approximate the feel. Shooting at high ISO adds real sensor noise that blends with the grain effect. For the closest match, crop to 4:3 aspect ratio in post.