Never wonder, “What on earth were we thinking with all that magenta?” again.
Sometimes a color grade, whether it’s good or bad, can be like a pair of colored lenses. Confused?
A scientific study showed that subjects who wore colored contact lenses for four hours a day eventually saw the world as if the lenses were perfectly clear. Even weirder, after several weeks of wearing the colored lenses, their color perception became affected even when they took them off; they all began to select a different “pure yellow” to the one they had selected before wearing the contacts.
Looking at the same shot, scene, or film for hours at a time can work much the same way. It makes your brain rebalance images to the point where you no longer can tell what you’re even looking at. There's a whole branch of science called psychophysics devoted to phenomena like this.
So why do so many post houses offer hourly or day rates that force the director and colorist to spend 8-10 straight hours in the dark, rushing through material and making important decisions about your film without any time to “sleep on it”? Don’t we have this thing now called the internet?
Sometimes you can even tell that you’re no longer seeing your own work accurately, but you’re paying by the hour… and the colorist is fully booked starting tomorrow.
There’s no time to watch another movie for reference. It can even feel like throwing away cash just to walk outside, recalibrate your eyes, and come back to your film only to wonder, “what on earth were we thinking with all that magenta?”
That’s why I offer an all-encompassing package with unlimited revisions, so we always see your work objectively.
Your average colorist at a certain level probably has the calibrated reference display and other gear needed to get a highly accurate rendering of your movie as pixels on a screen. So do I. Like them, I stick to a dark, standardized viewing environment, and I’ve scored 100% on a color blindness test (meaning I see all colors).
All of that is important; it means you can trust that I’m always evaluating the most accurate representation of your film.
But those things aren’t what makes me different. The mind is what really creates the images we see, and I make sure to keep that calibrated as well. That means you walk away with no regrets.
Any filmmaker who works with me gets my full attention, and I only work with one director at a time on feature-length projects.
I’m that colorist who will actually find movies in your genre, setting, or time period, and watch them whenever the work is getting stuck. How does your character feel about doctors? I’ll get inside their head so I know whether to make that hospital look clean and clinical, or fluorescent sickly green.
That’s the part about color grading I actually love most—which is why I’ve won three “best short screenplay” awards, won three “best short comedy” awards for a film I wrote and directed, and had my film called “sharp-witted and literary” by NoBudge.
If you need a colorist who understands narrative storytelling, rather than just knowing all the buttons in DaVinci Resolve, that’s me. And if there’s something only you as the director could possibly understand, I’ll be sure to ask, even if it means getting touchy-feely.
