Fun in the Snow With Polaris' 2015 Lineup

In an honor of the "dumping" of snow received by the brave residents of Western New York last week, I thought I'd post a fun piece form this past year that I colored for clients "The Factory" and Polaris. Directed by Adam Brummond this piece features the new Polaris 2015 snowmobile lineup amidst some fantastic mountain backdrops captured with both the Phantom Flex and Red Epic cameras in some "oh-so smooth" slow motion photography. Western New Yorkers could've used a few of these bad boys last week battling the elements!

The grade for this was inspired by the product line of the snowmobiles themselves. Our color scheme: black, white, and red, with a hint of blue in the shadows to contrast with the saturated red tones of the snowmobiles. Simple in concept, this color scheme is always difficult to pull off well, as mother nature always give you a much broader palette to work with in location photography (ie greens in foliage, browns in the terrain, blues in the sky, etc). We controlled things with secondary keys and plenty of power windows to try and hold the palette for most of our shots. But occasionally we let some others shine through when they just looked to good to kill (hey, sometimes you gotta roll with the punches and let a concept or color scheme "evolve" a little bit to prevent monotony from taking hold). My favorite part about this look... notice how things aren't quite totally black and white with the bold reds? The slight shift towards a deep blue in the shadows and mids gives things some extra "color contrast" to play against the reds. This was an evolution of a similar concept that I used a few years ago for a Yokohama Tire Commercial I did with Bandito Brothers in Culver City.

But with that look, we left things mainly black and white. For the Polaris look, I wanted to push the color contrast a bit further and so I went with the blue/black/white look which contrasts the Reds of the snowmobile even further than just black and white (remember, look at the color wheel, black and white resides in the center with no chroma, while the color blue lies opposite red on the wheel, thereby creating a larger inherent color contrast for the viewer). I was really pleased with how this project came out. This is what can happen when a production executes on a concept soundly from pre-production all the way through post, and then has the guts to to push it even further when it comes down to finishing time. You'd be surprised at how many people "wimp out" at this point and go conservative with a look. Kudos to Adam and his team for going aggressive all the way to the finish line!

Anatomy of a Grade - Episode 12 - Bringing Dimension to an Overcast Day

Shooting daytime exteriors is always a dicey game especially in the world of independent production where budgets are tight and extra crew and equipment are often hard to come by. When clouds start to suddenly roll into a scene and everything becomes gray and overcast, the cinematographer is presented with the unfortunate reality that production demands: "we gotta shoot now, but it can't look flat!" Luckily for the 21st century DP the colorist "has his back" in this particular situation and there's quite a bit we can do to an overcast scene to give it more dimension, color, and contrast.

This particular shot was done for a feature on an Arri Alexa camera and provided me with a broad dynamic range of detail to push and pull the image around and morph it into something completely different (and hopefully more visually interesting). This is not the most complicated of grades, but sometimes the best solutions aren't the most complicated. You'll see that a colorist can do quite a bit with a simple primary color correction and little help from the simple "vignette". Enjoy!

"Man From Reno" wins Jury Award for best Narrative Film at the LA Film Festival

Earlier this year I had the privilege of working on the Japanese/American murder/mystery film "Man From Reno" directed by Dave Boyle, and shot by DP Richard Wong. This film was a favorite of mine as Dave and Richard had a strong vision for the film coming in to the grading session. They wanted a desaturated/low-con look with "silky" blacks and "creamy pastel" tones. Using the Sony F5 and a very unique style of exposing for the Slog2 gamma profile on set, Richard and Dave had developed a very solid image to start with that didn't take a lot of "goosing" in post so to speak to get it into this dark, yet extremely "creamy and soft" world. Our biggest challenge was getting things DARK, while still keeping detail and information in the shadows. Using some luma keys and a lot of soft clipping and rolling off of the bottom end allowed us to keep things dark, yet still retain all that wonderful shadow detail that was inherently there in the footage.

It was a pleasure to work on this film, and the jury at the LA Film Festival awarded Man From Reno with its jury prize for Best Narrative Film. A short clip from the film is above, and be sure to be on the lookout for Man from Reno in theaters very soon as well!

Anatomy of a Grade - Episode 11 - Keepin' It Consistent and Grading for the Bigger Picture

In this episode of Anatomy of a Grade I decided to take a look at more a "grading concept" than an actual technique. Often times I find myself in the color suite with a client who is unsure of what they want out of a specific shot or scene. I'll usually show them a very basic primary grade at first to get the wheels turning inside our heads around what's possible with the footage and where its ideal "natural balance" lies. Often times, just adding a bit of contrast and balancing out some overall color casts can greatly enhance an image and garner that "wow" from the client couch that all colorists secretly relish - and sometimes, that's it, that's all a shot needs. It looks "better", you've done your job as a colorist by enhancing the image in front of you and satisfying the client's desires - mission accomplished. But sometimes just making an image "look better" can be missing the bigger picture. Often times, in long form content, one has to step back and take a look at the visual design of the entire piece as a whole and ask the question, "Is this right for the movie? Or, more specifically, is this right for this scene or this character or this point in the story?" Is simply "making it better" the "right" grade or correction for a shot? The answer quite often is, no, it may not be. Although you've made a shot look better by enhancing it, you may have "missed the boat" on the overall visual scheme and arc of the project in its entirety. And this is the difference between "Color Correction" and "Color Grading" in my book.

Simple color correction brings out the full visual potential of an image and balances out any impurities or imperfections that might exist in the original photography. Color grading, however, adds an intentional color/contrast bias or "look" to a shot or scene based on an overall visual design and scheme for an entire film or piece of work. Often times the "right" grade is very different from even the most "visually pleasing" grade. The "right" grade should still look good, but it needs to "fit" with the rest of the movie or piece in terms of its palette and feel. Now, this is of course completely subjective between you and the filmmaker, but I often times find that when I'm stuck on how to grade a particular shot or scene its most likely because I've become a bit myopic in my view and I'm not looking at the shot or scene from the perspective of the whole film. Usually the "right" grade for a shot is staring you right in the face and can be as clear as day once you have a better grasp of where the whole film is going visually.

In this particular example, from the feature film "The Scribbler", the "right" grade for the shot was based on keeping things consistent chromatically across the entire film. Once I was able to bring in the right color palette, the shot felt much more intentional in its appearance and design. The answer here was to grade for color consistency to keep a coherent visual feel from scene to scene. That was the answer this time at least...

The Mad Hatter

Here's a spot that I graded a few months ago with Director Bruno Miotto for Hogan Rebel's "Dream, Believe, and Create" instadiary series. Shot by DP Benjamin Kitchens, on the Red Epic, the piece is a poetic and whimsical look at hatter Nick Fouquet and his process in creating custom hats in Venice California. Part fashion showcase, part doc, part music video, this piece was a true joy to color as it is all about pure visual poetry. The look we created in the grading suite can best be described as "vintage, low-con, fashion" (or at least that's what I call it). I found myself creating false flares, and reducing contrast wherever possible to better accentuate the vintage feel of the piece and the overall softness of the original photography. I also found myself using a few different selective keys to pump a bit of blue into the shadows, some magenta into the mids, and some dull yellow in the highlights to give everything a clear and consistent color tonality while keeping overall saturation relatively low. What evolved was a look that is full of soft pastels, silky smooth skin tones, and very soft blacks. I love it when directors want to push the envelope and embrace a strong look. In this particular case the original photography lent itself purposefully to this direction and the subject matter fit perfectly with the visual tone. What more could a colorist ask for?

Grading "Rich Hill" for Sundance 2014

As a colorist I send up seeing A LOT of content throughout the year. Movies, commercials, music videos, short films, PSA's, web spots... you name it - I grade it. Unfortunately because a colorist has the unique position of being on a project for such a comparatively short period of time than other crew positions, that means that we go through many projects in a relatively short span of time. And sometimes... its very easy to become immune to the content of what you're actually grading. In many ways you become a bit more callously engaged with the content your grading... you look at it as 1 and 0's, pixels, bits of data that need to be molded into visual uniformity... you stop seeing things as unique stories and instead view them as well... "just another pretty picture to make better." As a result I sometimes find myself needing to step back and re-watch many of the feature films that I grade to "re-ground" myself in the emotional arch of the story and the characters and get a better feel for the mood and tone of the story that I'm trying enhance visually. For some films this can be a difficult task... as watching and re-watching sometimes less than exciting material can just become... well tedious. However, very rarely, a colorist is offered a true gem... a film that is so emotionally stirring and visceral that one can't help but want to watch the film again and again to live in the world of its characters one more time. These are rare treats, and I have to say they don't come around often. But this year I had the privilege of working on a few films that were just that, and Rich Hill was one of my personal favorite.

Rich Hill, which is in competition this year at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in the Documentary category, tells the stories of 3 youths growing up in the rural landscape of Rich Hill, Missouri, a small forgotten town that has experienced its share of economic hardship throughout the years. Directors Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos both grew up in Rich Hill and decided that they needed to tell the often times forgotten story of the effects of urban poverty on today's youth. The film that Andrew and Tracy have pieced together over more than 2 years worth of filming is one of incredible intimacy with families that desperately want their stories to be heard. Poignant in both its narrative structure and its hauntingly beautiful yet painful visuals, Rich Hill was film that left off the screen and into my heart for two weeks in November as we graded the final cut. Check out this clip from the Sundance Film Festival's website as Andrew and Tracy talk about their film:



Shot on Red's Scarlet camera, Rich Hill posed a number of unique challenges from a colorist's perspective as much of the footage was very free-form in nature using only available lighting and single camera coverage to cover what often becomes very visually complex scenes spanning huge lengths of time. Often the footage was shot at very low light levels in the interiors of many of the film's locations which really played havoc with the colorimetry of the camera and led to some very unique grading tasks in the DI suite. This was a film where the color grade needed to be subtle and refined as the movie itself was already such a powerful vehicle both visually and narratively. My job was to make everything seamless, and as clean as possible. Whether it was reducing noise in a low-light interior or counteracting the effects of an untreated fluorescent light dominating a scene, I tried to make Rich Hill flow seamlessly from shot to shot and more importantly scene to scene. Ultimately I was very pleased with the grade that Tracy, Andrew, and I came up with huddled in our little theater in Santa Monica for two weeks. Having watched Rich Hill about 20 times now I can honestly say that it is one of my favorite films of 2014, not just from a coloring perspective but as a fantastic piece of film-making plain and simple. Rich Hill was truly a privilege to be a part of.