About 5 years ago I was helping my parents clean out my childhood home when I came across a collection of VHS tapes. With no VHS deck in their house, I loaded the tapes into my car and brought them back to work where I had access to a deck. Most of the tapes were…

A while back we sold off one of our last pieces of telecine equipment – the Cintel Ursa Diamond. I was sad to see it go, even though it hadn’t been touched in years. I spent a lot of time learning my craft on that machine. What used to be a high end piece of…

Color grading (and post production in general) is an all-encompassing job.  It requires lots of time, dedication, and an obsessive drive in order to move forward in your career.  Each job, day after day, is just as important as the last.  It doesn’t matter how great yesterday’s session went, you have to prove yourself again…

2018 was an insanely busy year for me.  My normal work was consistent, but on top of that, I was tasked with the responsibility of coloring dailies for three large productions (a 35 day shoot feature, a 55 day shoot episodic, and a 25 day shoot pilot).  That’s about half of the year.  Most facilities…

One of the most common questions I get when it comes to color grading is “How do I become a colorist?”.  It’s a tough industry to break into and a lot of people are curious how to get their foot in the door.  Almost all the colorists I know didn’t start out as colorists –…

Nowadays I’m finding more and more color sessions are unsupervised rather than the traditional means of clients/agencies sitting in and driving the session.  Sure, supervised work still happens frequently, but I’ve definitely seen a shift in the last couple of years.  Turnarounds are tight, deadlines are looming, and agency creatives have so many responsibilities that…

I recently came across this post from Little Black Book and really enjoyed it.  It hits close to home and echoes my sentiments on a project that I just wrapped.  Over the last couple of months I have been doing an exciting campaign with NASCAR and Trident Post Production.  So far we have completed over…

The natural progression of a career as a colorist is to always reach for the next big job.  To try and catch the carrot dangling in front of you.  Higher profile work that challenges you both professional and artistically.  The idea being that the work snowballs and leads to more work on that particular level,…

When starting out as a Colorist one thing that is never really discussed is how to handle yourself in front of clients.  It’s easy to color on your own time without supervision.  You can pretty much do whatever you want – try different techniques, listen to your favorite type of music, go at your own…

While watching television the other day, I saw a commercial pop up that I graded over six (!!!) years ago for a local health insurance company.  At first, I was pretty shocked to see it since I graded it so long ago, but then, as I tend to do, I immediately started to analyze the…

When asked about the most important element of production in terms of how it effects me in the grading suite I always say lighting.  I can do a lot with the captured image, but I can’t make something out of nothing.  Using proper lighting (either to effect contrast or color) gives the image the intended…

I saw this spot for MoneySuperMarket over the weekend and absolutely loved it.  As a child of the 80’s, this hits on so many levels for me.  It’s quirky, weird, clever, and effective.  There’s no branding in the spot, but people will no doubt remember the product.  It’s pretty impressive advertising, actually.  Take a minute…

I haven’t gotten the chance to see Dunkirk yet, but I plan on checking it out later this week in 70mm.  It’s not very often that we’re given the chance to view movies in this manner, so I want to make sure that I take advantage of the opportunity. For me, grading film is a…

The Defiant Ones is a new series from HBO that highlights the careers of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre.  Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, both men had a drastic influence on the music that surrounded me, so I was naturally interested in this series. While watching, I couldn’t help but draw…

The other day I came across this article and thought it would be a good one to share on my blog.  I have been working in ACES regularly for the last 8 months.  Not really by choice, but necessity.  Since last November I have processed dailies for three features, and each one required the footage to…