CHAPTER 11

Miscellaneous Wisdom

Consider this chapter to be like the bonus track on a CD from your favorite band. It wasn’t in the plans for the original book, but I had many great little nuggets of information left over that didn’t otherwise fit into the book but that I really wanted to share.

There’s not a great way to tie them all together, so I’ll just share them in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way. I hope you find them influencing your corrections in important ways.

Starting Off

Bob Festa describes how he approaches a shot: “When I throw up a shot, the first thing I do, before I talk to anybody, is kind of peer into the corners of the negative and look for my visual signposts; my references in the shot that I look for. I’m actually looking for handles in the film like, ‘What would I bring forward? What would I drop back? Is there a white light reference in the shot? Would I sniff around and try to find that and try to find a reference to create a quick dynamic image that we can start to talk with? Basically, I look for signposts that point to balance and white, then I also look for traditional photographic techniques—stuff I can either bring up or bring back. Getting the blacks to a malleable area and getting the whites to a malleable area. When I first put up a shot and get it balanced, I use the blacks and whites almost like a throttle on a motorcycle. Kind of revving the engine to see what you’ve got. I use the master gains and master blacks to get a feel for how it behaves.”

I give Festa my camera focusing analogy. “I think that’s true,” he agrees. “You’re looking for the sweet spot. And the only way to find that is to go too far. That’s probably true for color correction in general. You really have to push it around to somewhere you don’t want to go to find out where you do want to go. I think that’s a good statement.

“Then I can look into the neg and look for things that I can bring to life. So I look at the ratio of foreground and background. But in addition to balancing, I’m also looking at adding value.

“I like to show my commercial clients a whole range of opportunities based on that. The most classic thing I like to do is show three or four different opportunities based on either warmer, cooler exposures, more or less dynamic range, more or less contrast. And then we start getting very, very specific using the classic photographic techniques of the day—dodging and burning—and actually creating the look that’s based on that.”

Festa continues, “What I like to do is show people some choices. If you give them one, two, or three different choices, they can actually point their finger up at the screen and say, ‘I like A, B, or C,’ instead of being very general about ‘Where do you think you guys want to go from here?’ I also like to look at the work picture, just to see what these people are used to looking at. Whether it’s right or wrong in my mind, they may have fallen in love with it and not even know it to some extent. So I’ll give them an option that might have some relationship to the work picture. That makes the dialog a little easier, I think. I think initially I tell them that this is going to be very general, for starters. And it’s very broad-stroke based. And once you get dialed in through a series of 1, 2, 3. After a while you get into a very close place. Then the brushstrokes become much more fine and more dynamic, I think.”

Communicating with Clients

Festa continues with a discussion on communicating with clients: “It wasn’t so much techniques or tools that helped me communicate more with my clients, but I actually started listening. I would actually not say a damn word, but I would tell people, ‘Before we get started, tell me in 20 words or less what today’s theme is going to be.’ I’d rather let them spill their guts for 20 words or 20 minutes and then turn around and deliver the goods, because then I have a good idea about what their perception is and what their ambitions are for the session. So if anything, I’ve become a good listener in my old age. Also, you give them a choice. Work like an eye doctor. Show them A, B, or C and before you know it, you’ve worked your way into something that’s really in focus. And not only have you listened to them, but you’ve shown them and they’ve made the decisions as you’ve worked your way down into it. So how can they not be happy?”

Chris Pepperman extends this conversation: “Typically, the way I work when I color correct is, I’m one of those guys who verbally expresses or talks out loud what I’m doing. A lot of my clients actually like that because as I’m doing it, I’m talking my way through it and explaining to them what I’m doing. That’s a habit that I picked up very early in the business when I was working with guys like Nick Dantone and Howie Birch, who were the principal owners of Manhattan Transfer, and I spent years assisting those guys. I always found it to be a very good tool. I consider myself not to be a technical colorist. There are guys out there who are really technically inclined. Chris Ryan is one of them. He knows these systems inside and out.”

Pep continues, “There are two aspects to color correction. One is being able to emulate the aesthetic look or direction that the DP or director is expressing to you and that’s essentially your primary objective, right? That’s what you want to do. Somebody comes in and they have a visual idea of what they want and you try to give them that. The other one is being able to have the ‘room savvy,’ and what I mean by that is being able to communicate effectively with the client. It’s a personality thing. I try to be personable.”

Having hung out in a session with one of Pep’s clients, I agree: “People like to hang with you.”

“Exactly. And I feel that’s one of my strong points—why people like to come here. You definitely have to have talent, technical-wise, to be able to interpret what they want visually. But you also have to have the personality to sit in a room with an A-type personality or a B-type personality, understand what they want, give it to them, and all along keep them comfortable.”

Company 3’s Stefan Sonnenfeld agrees that the interpersonal side is critical: “I think this business is trickier than most people think,” states Sonnenfeld. “I say half the people who are doing this really struggle to get what they end up with, because it does not come naturally, and there are technicians so to speak who know how to work the knobs but have a very tough time translating either their own thoughts to the screen or somebody else’s thoughts to the screen or a mixture of the two, which is why some people just take forever to get something.”

I ask Sonnenfeld if being able to communicate in the language or with the terminology of a DP is important. He answers, “I do not need that kind of specificity. Some people do come in and say, ‘Tell me what I should say.’ It does not matter. There are people that I work with, like Michael Mann, who give me an emotional rundown of a narrative. Then he says, ‘Okay, go.’ Here is the story I am trying to tell, here is the emotion that is trying to be shown. Johnny is really angry and feeling betrayed in this scene. It is really just a question sometimes about experience and sometimes being more social.

“I just think there are technicians who just are not somebody you would want to spend time with sometimes. If a guy has no sense of style or just looks like the guy out of the Hangover movie in terms of how they dress. Do you want that guy? And if you do not gel with that, how are you ever going to work with that person? If you cannot feel comfortable in the room speaking with that person, then how are you going to collaborate together? A lot of it is social and a lot is understanding others. Part of it also is cultural. I grew up in Europe and went to boarding school and I have been all around the world, I used to speak another language, and I am the first American-born in my family, so I also can empathize and kind of relate to the European crowd. They tell me that I am the first person that they have ever met who can understand what they’re thinking. I have traveled in Europe and around the world and that is a huge part of learning. The other part is that I have been fortunate to work with a lot of great people, and every time you work with a person who is great, you are always learning. I have just a whole bag of experience behind me that I have learned from others that I have embellished myself.”

As an editor and colorist, I have always believed that the best editors and colorists are a balance of the technical, the social, and the creative. I pose this thought to Sonnenfeld. “There are some technically inept colorists that I know who are pretty successful,” he asserts, “The dirty secret of our business is that there are a lot of people who do not really know some of the stuff that they should. From that point of view, I think everybody should have a strong (technical) foundation—and I do—because I worked my way up. I think experience is a huge part of it. The creative collaborative is the majority of it. So, for me, it is really coming to an understanding of what people want. I would say that is the most important thing. Part of it is also trying something and pushing yourself more than you would think. What happens is this inspires you to do different things.”

I point out my sidebar from Chapter 1 on the similarities in terms between colorists and musicians and ask for his feedback. “People realize how much [color] impacts the movie, and it is the same way with music. It brings out these emotions in people much more so than color. It is a visceral emotional appeal. It is much more obvious with music. You put on a song and you start to experience all these different feelings, whereas color is a little bit more hidden, but at the same time it does the same stuff. You almost notice it more when it is wrong or not working then when it is actually right and fantastic. Being able to evoke emotion and feeling from people is what it is all about.”

Encore’s Pankaj Bajpai thinks that the most important communication tool he has is visual. Bajpai elaborates, “For me, it’s not so much ‘talk’ as to be able to show options. The toolsets that I have been drawn to are the ones that typically allow you to show, because a picture is worth a thousand words. So instead of saying, ‘Hey, this will look really contrasting. This will look great. I will crush the blacks or goose it up.’ There are all these terminologies that I’m sure you have heard, but there is really no substitute for showing it. It’s like you see that in the context of the images that you’re working with, so for me to be able to very quickly display what it is, even if it’s not completely finessed, to get the sense or an idea, and that’s how I come to a common understanding of what we’re doing.

“The truth of it is that the skill of coloring is about 50 percent of what you do. Navigating when people are not around and keeping people’s creative visions and eventually making it all homogenous and whole so that everybody says, ‘Yeah,’ and they’re getting what they want, is the trick in the episodic world. I think a very huge chunk of it is people management. Being able to take ideas, sometimes on the same page or sometimes a very contrary idea and then somehow coming up with a solution that works and being able to cut through the esoteric-ness of it all and then coming up with a solution that is artistic, that you know you can maintain, specifically in episodic.”

The Future of Color Correction

I ask Festa about the trend away from telecine color correction—in which the image that is being manipulated is coming directly from the film—toward corrections done from flat data transfers on central servers or from flat transfers to D5 or some other tape. The episodic world of color correction has already turned towards this workflow, as have many digital intermediate workflows. The TV spot world seems to be the sole holdout, and I wonder if spots will join the rest of industry in this regard. (This question was asked back in 2005. Since then spot work has indeed gone file-based.) As Festa is definitely a veteran of the industry, I expect some resistance from him on this point, but he surprises me.

“God, I sure hope so,” Festa exclaims. “I really don’t know what it’s going to take. I really think it’s going to be an application like the Color app, where people are exposed to it on a fundamental, early level. The youngsters who are familiar with Final Cut … today’s runners or assistant editors, they’re all familiar with Final Cut—maybe it’ll seed the industry at an early age and these people will all be influenced early on that there’s no reason to pay big money and spend an inordinate amount of time slinging film. I think it’s like anything else, if you look at everything from the Beta to VHS revolution to compressed delivery systems like DirecTV, we’re always selling out in little steps, and quite frankly, I’d rather have the flexibility and the speed to make contributions that are possibly not quite the same quality but are equally satisfying on a more artistic level.”

Trying to understand his point, I ask, “Because you’d do more color correcting than waiting for the film to get set up on the telecine?”

“Yes. The way I see it, I’ve only got so much patience left and I’d rather spend it color correcting something in context than threading film up. I think we’re really witnessing the Avid-ization of telecine, where hopefully color decisions and color correction as we know it can be a lot more interactive and face to face and project-based as opposed to service bureau–based. Quite frankly, I’d be much happier if I was working on a per-project basis, face to face, much more interlocked with my client as opposed to just acting as a service bureau. I’m excited about the future, because I think that’s what it’s going to be,” concludes Festa.

Festa also discusses the changes in acquisition formats in recent years, “What’s become more and more important in digital acquisition is texture: 80 percent of my work is Alexa, 10 percent is RED, and 10 percent is film. Digital acquisition is clean; there’s no traditional film grain. I have a library of grain, roll out, flash frames or I could have picked a stock, high speed or low speed or 16mm or Super 8mm. Eight out of the ten jobs I do with Alexa; I spill in a little bit of grain and it creates a less antiseptic look, sometimes putting it in the highlights or the blacks, depending on whether it’s underexposed or overexposed.”

This change in acquisition formats and in the traditional color correction tools for colorists is illustrated in an informal poll taken by Warren Eagles, an Australian colorist and founder of the International Colorists Academy, which does color correction training. Warren and I do a video tutorial on the DVD for the book. Warren walks through some of the powerful ways to exploit the node graph in Resolve. Warren’s poll was done before Adobe acquired and integrated Speedgrade into Production

Premium. Total percentage is over 100% because some colorists use multiple systems. His results are as follows:

Of the 80 respondents worldwide on the day of the poll in late 2011:

• 40 percent were grading on Resolve

• 17 percent were grading on Film Master

• 13 percent were grading on Baselight

• 7 percent were grading on Color

• 7 percent were grading on Lustre

• 5 percent were grading on Scratch

• 3 percent were grading on DaVinci 2K

• 3 percent were grading on Pablo

• 3 percent were grading on Avid DS

• 3 percent were grading on Pandora

• 3 percent were grading on Pogle

• Resolve, Lustre, and Film Master were the primary US systems.

• Nearly all of the Baselight users were in Europe and Britain.

• Most of the Color users were in South America.

The footage being graded came from RED/EPIC (~20%), Alexa (~18%), followed closely by Canon DSLR footage, XDCAM, and film (~15% each). The rest included various flavors of SD and compressed HD video.

Taking It to Extremes

David Mullen, ASC, explains how he likes to communicate with colorists. “When I see them trying to get a certain color, I say, ‘Just go overboard.’ Show me beyond what we’re talking about, because when you’re fiddling with something subtle, it’s sometimes a problem that you’re not quite seeing the effect you want. It’s better if you just overcrank it for a moment and then pull it back down.”

This is similar advice to Festa’s adage: “You don’t know if you don’t go.”

Festa extends the analogy, “I use it like a motorcycle, I mean I want to rev this up a little bit and see where the blacks are going to take me or rev the whites up and see where they go. Just constantly pushing things and sniffing around. I probe for the extremes, always seeing where the image is going to either: (a) fall apart or (b) come to life. Then always going back and looking at the original to see what the original intent was.”

The Importance of Color Contrast

Pete Jannotta explains that the traditional way to think of contrast is certainly not the only way. “Luminance contrast is important, but color contrast is just as important.”

Jannotta is examining a shot that he’s trying to tweak. “Before, when I was looking at it, I wasn’t feeling the color contrast was right. It was too much in one part of the palette. It looked kind of brown, so it needs a little blue and green back into it. I’ve taken too much green out of it.”

“This is a real common thing that I do all the time,” explains Jannotta. “What did I have to start with? So: ‘Am I ruining anything?’ ‘Am I taking away something that I want to retain?’ I’m always looking for that.”

Maintaining a Look

Neal Kassner talks about one of his biggest challenges. “My show—48 Hours—has to match itself from one segment to the next and the characters reappear all the way through, even though the same source reels are used by as many as six different editors working on different Avids. The first time I correct a character, I grab a reference of it, and each time that character appears, even in the same segment, I’ll reference back. Because I’ve found that when they’re shooting, it’s not unusual for the camera guy to adjust the iris. So the same character, even in the same setting may be a little darker or a little brighter than the first time I saw him. So I want to keep it consistent all the way through.”

Encore’s Bajpai agrees: “It’s no good to take one frame and make it look super good and go wow and then do that over 5 years on 65 episodes so you can come up with something that’s super good but then has to fit into your ability to repeat it again and again, indoors, outdoors, day, night, multiple storylines. That’s always challenging with a new show is where you set that.”

The other challenge, according to Bajpai, is access to decision makers and a revolving door of characters involved with any given episodic series. “DP’s can’t be here (in the color suite),” states Bajpai. “It could be the executive producers that take over. Then how do you balance all of that with a director who is there for only a single episode and then there’s another director. There is a lot of variation in the input, but then at the end of the day, the show can’t be one thing one week and the next thing another week and the next thing another week. It has to be consistent. Plus, with TV episodics, you have ten pages [to shoot in a day] and whether it goes bad, you’re going to shoot those ten pages any which way you can because you’re on these tight deadlines, tight budgets, and tight schedules. On a feature, nine times out of ten, you would to be able to go back and do a reshoot. But with episodic, it’s ‘move on, move on, move on,’ so in that sense, a lot of the things we end up doing in here are basically fixing production issues. Scripts change in the middle of editing and a scene goes away and suddenly a scene that was shot in the day now has to play as night. On a feature, you would probably go back and reshoot it. On a commercial, you’re shooting on a two day thing and you’re done, you’re moving on to a whole new thing, so what color for episodic is, is a whole other animal, and the duties and responsibilities of being a colorist on an episodic show is being able to navigate that.”

Looking at Real Life for Inspiration

Neal Kassner tries to look at real life for inspiration in the color suite: “One of the things I find helpful to do is look at life as objectively as you can, he says. You need to look around. You have a white barn in the middle of a field. At noon it’s going to be white. Late afternoon, it’s still going to be a white barn, but it’s not going to look white to your eye. Your brain is going to filter what your eye sees. In news, that’s a kind of fine line that I walk. Do I make it a white barn in the afternoon and destroy the overall look and feel? Or do I maintain that? And what I often end up doing is sort of splitting the difference. There’s a way in the DaVinci to put in two color corrections and mix between them.”

Smoke

As Leffel prepares to work on the Artbeats image of the boxer, he discusses what he considers to be the bane of the colorist. “This shot’s got all the bad things colorists hate, like smoke. God knows I hate smoke. Photographers love it, but I hate it. Light doesn’t travel predictably through it. So when you filter a light source—especially if you mix incandescent or mix practicals in a lighting scenario, like right here—you’ve got this green light coming from maybe a practical, maybe a lighting source and you’ve got this cleaner source over here and if you were to walk through there his skin and his face and his body would change color because smoke dissipates the light quite a bit, so it quite often corrupts whatever it is that you’re trying to do. And most of these color correctors are set up with hue, saturation, and luminance, and the smoke affects HSL in a way that’s really unpredictable, and color correctors have a really hard time with it—which makes you have a really hard time with it,” Leffel concludes.

Keeping Butts in the Seats

In the end, the colorists that make the most money are the ones that keep the butts in the seats. In other words: new clients coming in the door and old clients coming back.

Chris Pepperman describes what he thinks delivers that desired result. “Clients respond to colorists who work quickly. Colorists who get them what they want and stay within their budget and deadline. I assess what I have: I look at the rough cut. I look at the film. I look how it’s shot and I say, ‘This isn’t going to take as long,’ or ‘This might take more time.’ But I typically always run quicker than slower. Because I’m the kind of guy who, once I get an image the way I like it, I’m gone. I’m not dicking with it. If you like it and you’re happy with it, I’m moving on. I’m not going to teeter around with it any more. I go to the next scene. And then, depending on the kind of client you are and what you like, because all my clients are different, I tend to move quickly, and therefore, instead of doing the job in eight hours, I’ve done it in five and they’re still getting what they want. I want to get it done, because if something goes wrong, now we’re ten hours into a project. My eyes are tired. I’m compromising the look of my project the longer I’m in the room, the more frustrating it becomes for the client. For me, once I like the image and they like the image, we’re moving! If that takes five minutes, then it takes five minutes. I’d rather always have the extra time in the back end of the session to say, you know what, I wasn’t happy with this shot, let’s go back and tweak it, rather than get to the clock and have five shots still to go and then you’ve got to rush through them. And that’s something I learned in New York, working under the gun with agencies just kind of lined up at your door, waiting to come in, four or five a day, because you can really get yourself in a tizzy if you’re slowing down and it’s five o’clock and there are still clients out there waiting.”

And for Festa, keeping butts in the seats is what it’s all about, businesswise. “Here’s the deal,” Festa begins, “I’ve learned a long time ago that I color and image enhance and color correct for maximum reemployment. We have an expression: ‘time for the mortgage payment.’ So it doesn’t matter what I think, so much as what the client thinks. So I’m all ears in the session, especially early in the session—I listen to everybody in the room, but just between you and I and the book, I probably weight my hearing more towards my repeat client, the people I’m going to work with, the people I know are coming back. And I listen to the client and as much as I’d like to turn this into the green cyan kind of thing, I really like to listen to the client a lot. If they think it needs to be a study in neutral or cold steel or something, goddamn it, that’s the direction it’s going to go whether it’s going to work or not because we’re timing for maximum reemployment.

“We don’t work in a vacuum; there’s always somebody here with an opinion or who was there on location who certainly has an opinion, and I think the film should do the same thing. It shouldn’t just be a witness; I think every shot should have an informed opinion, a direction, something it’s trying to say. With a documentary, you might want to step aside and not leave a mark on the film, but hopefully you can be an objective colorist and make an informed approach without leaving footprints; you never want to leave your signature.”

Books of Note

Here’s a short list of books about color and color correction in my library.

Of course, my previous book with Jaime Fowler, Color Correction for Digital Video would be at the top of the list! This book is now in its second edition and the title has changed to:

• Color Correction for Video by Stephen Hullfish and Jaime Fowler, Focal Press, 2008, ISBN-10: 0240810783, ISBN-13: 978-0240810782.

Also:

• Apple Pro Training Series: Encyclopedia of Color Correction—Field Techniques Using Final Cut Pro by Alexis Van Hurkman, 2006, ISBN-10: 0321432312, ISBN-13: 978-0321432315.

• The Art of Color—The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color by Johannes Itten, John Wiley and Sons, 1961, ISBN 0-471-28928-0.

• Color Correction Handbook: Professional Techniques for Video and Cinema by Alexis Van Hurkman, 2010, ISBN-10: 0321713117, ISBN-13: 978-0321713117.

• Color, Light, Sight Sense: An Elementary Theory of Color in Pictures by Moritz Zwimpfer, Schiffer Publishing, 1985, ISBN 0-88740-139-2.

• Designer’s Color Manual: The Complete Guide to Color Theory and Application by Tom Fraser and Adam Banks, Chronicle Books, 2004, ISBN-10: 0-8118-4210-X.

• Digital Color Management by Edward J. Giorgianni and Thomas E. Madden (color scientists at Kodak), Addison Wesley, 1998, ISBN-10: 0-201-63426-0.

• If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling by Patti Bellantoni, Focal Press, 2005, ISBN-10: 0-240-80688-3.

• Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color by Leatrice Eiseman, Grafix Press, 2000, ISBN-10: 0-9666383-2-8.

• Photoshop Color Correction: The Essential Guide to Color Quality for Digital Images by Michael Kieran, Peachpit Press, 2003, ISBN-10: 0-321-12401-4.

• The Visual Story: Seeing the Structure of Film, TV, and New Media by Bruce Block, Focal Press, 2001, ISBN-13: 978-0-240-80467-5.

Color Correction Training on DVD

• Class on Demand, Basic and Advanced Training for Apple Color. Hosted by Steve Hullfish and Bob Sliga.

• Class on Demand Total Training for DaVinci Resolve. Hosted by Steve Hullfish and Bob Sliga.

• Fxphd’s Resolve Fundamentals with Warren Eagles (http://www.fxphd.com).

Conclusion

I hope this glimpse into the worlds of some of these great colorists inspires you to dig deeper and delve into the world of color correction with renewed confidence.

Getting to meet and watch these talented men and women was really a treat, and I’ve been excited throughout the nearly decade-long journey of writing and researching this book to bring their experience and wisdom to you through this book.

Happy coloring!