Now with music videos!

There have been a lot of changes and activity since my last entry. One big, positive development was having the opportunity to color a bunch of music videos in the last year. Those are embedded on a new page that can be reached in the navigation on the top corner of the page.

Most of the videos have been through Riveting Entertainment, a production and management company here in Los Angeles. They had reached out to me last summer, looking for a colorist for as-needed, in house work. It's a great gig. The work is fun, the people are cool and the money is good. I just wish they made more! The videos always look great, showing a lot of talent on set and in their staff post production department. 

It would be hard to choose my favorite video from the Riveting sessions. Christina Milian's "Like Me" may be, objectively, the best looking. It's stylish, with great cinematography and production design. Snoop Dogg showing up is a big plus, too. Cal Scruby's "Michael Bay" has great attitude, a cool, gritty feel and, of course, he blows up a car in the LA river. The two Melanie Fiona songs, "Bite the Bullet" and "I Tried," are sublime studies in the contrast of light & shadow, black & white. Wax's "This One's On Me" may be my favorite song from this bunch. His rhymes are fast & clever and the chorus is catchy. It exudes optimism. The video, directed by actor Ryan Phillippe, is colorful & optimistic and features tasteful & effective use of a drone.

Triptyq's "Murphy" is lush & beautiful, largely due to the location--an old castle in who knows where. Each room had a unique feel, character and color to it. Zonnique ("Nun For Free") glows in her close-ups. The video is super sleek, hip-hop in all the right ways.

I've had some other music videos outside of Riveting. Andy Allo's "Don't Ever Say" is a beautiful song & video. The choreography & the dancers express the sadness in the lyrics. It's beautifully shot (by DP Bryan Koss, who is always great to work with) and was a fun challenge to color. The Bird and The Bee's "Love Letter To Japan" was one of my early freelance jobs, for Sunset Post in Hollywood. It's a cool, trippy song to go along with the cool, trippy video.

I also helped out with color on Kings of Leon's "Use Somebody." I did not include that on my website because I don't want to give the impression it was all me--in truth, legendary director Sophie Muller did most of the work herself. She found herself not quite able to get the black & white portions to look how she wanted, and that's what I came in to do. It was still a career high point to work with her (not to mention having Garbage's Shirley Manson hang out in the room for a while).

Coming together...

Turns out moving takes a lot out of you. Between keeping up with various projects, taking care of my kids & just plain living life, this is taking a while.  

But here we are at this point--three coats of grey paint... 

And now with the tape removed.  

Next up, to cover the window, then move all my stuff and get set up. Any more suggestions? 

Moving!

Within a few weeks my family and I will be relocating, in LA, to a new home. In addition to a better place for us to live it allows me a much better space for my home color suite. 

 

Before. Plain, off-white.  

Taped up with a drop cloth.  

It was at this point I realized I didn't have the rolling part of my paint roller. Handle? Yup. Brush attachment? Yup. Flat grey paint? Yup. But no rolling part.  

Back to it in a few days. Work calls.  

Where, exactly?

I go back & forth a lot about my options as a freelance colorist. Working from home, working in a small facility, working in a large company.  

At home, I have the freedom of making my own hours, an easy commute, low-to-nonexistent overhead costs and the comfort of not needing to wear pants unless I have a client over. The downside is a thoroughly unprofessional atmosphere that can reflect on me no matter the quality of my work, plus the need to invest in equipment maintenance and upgrades. 

A large facility has state of the art equipment, dedicated support staffs and many creature comforts that discerning filmmakers may value when they are about to spend a lot of time over days or weeks in a dark room with me. An obvious downsides is the cost-big facities generally have to charge more, or have to rush out smaller jobs so their rooms won't be busy when better paying jobs come along. Additionally, most of these places already have their guys and no one seems in much of a hurry to retire. The only ways for me to get a foot in the door are to take a support staff job & sneak in during off hours to work on my client projects, or to have enough of a client base that the company feels confident in investing in my ability to generate business. 

I know in good, but I'm self-aware enough to also know that I'm not there yet.  

Which brings me to the idea of a small-to-midsize facility. On the one hand, a place like this will generally have higher end equipment than I can afford plus a more professional and comfortable atmosphere. The downside is the workload can be variable (see: the feast or famine post from before) and the jobs are smaller, lower profile. 

The indie film world is struggling, I'll be honest about that. But it's happening nonetheless. I'm happy that I am starting an ongoing relationship with HotPixel Post ( http://hotpixelpost.com/). The color bay there is awfully good and I'm looking forward to doing a lot of work with them in the months and, with luck, years ahead. 

Please feel free to check them out and, if you happen to be a filmmaker, let's talk about your next film's post needs. HotPixel can do it all.  

Feast/famine, rain/pour

I have a pretty good status quo. For the most part, I work on short films & independent features which, while made with love, care and often legitimately respectable skill, are made by people who, like me, often have other priorities than just the movie. Day jobs to pay the bills, families to whom they're responsible. 

I am no different. My wife has a demanding career so our kids are primarily my responsibility during the day. I carpool to school and other activities with my in-laws, and most of my clients understand that while their film is hugely important to me and the dedication I put in to working on it is never in question, my time must be flexible, up to being offered a high enough daily/hourly rate or the project's short term, hard deadlines. 

Long story short, if a client is coming to work with me in my home office, it's because they don't want to pay the cost of someone who'll be dedicating 8, 10, 12 hour days to get the project done FAST, or the project must be completed in a very short time frame, period.

I will be that guy when I have to be, and am grateful for the opportunity to do so.

I may start freelancing with HotPixel, a great boutique production/post company here in Los Angeles. Working there would be a "drop everything and dedicate myself to their project" situation.

Today, I was notified that I may have work with them this week. Still waiting to be see if a) the project pans out, b) if it's something I'm actually able to do because--my kids are starting a new after school program which is shaking up our routine, I have jury duty next week (the "call the night before to see if you need to come in the next day" deal), I will be out of town the following week to visit my parents back east and while I still have The Church to attend to I'm on hold today because we're having our house re-carpeted. 

I can go weeks or months with nothing compelling to occupy my days, and other times everything hits all at once.  

Makes you long for a steady, boring day job. 

Glyph

Things I've learned from using a client's Glyph external hard drive:

1. High quality =/= good for my needs.  

2. Fancy casing =/= adequate internal components.  

3. USB3 won't help a drive that's not powerful enough.  

4. DNxHR runs perfectly well, when playing off of a drive made for what we do.  

DNxHR conundrum

I know I'm not alone in being very excited that Avid finally opened up to 2k & 4k workflows, and thought their new proprietary codec was an exciting thing. In my experience, I have generally left the finishing to editors but, of course, that hasn't been possible with Avid-cut projects that wanted UHD renders. 

This has been problematic on my current project, The Church by Dom Frank. This independent supernatural horror film was shot primarily with a Red Epic but had multiple reshoots on a variety of cameras in the Red family. Superstar editor Ed Marx transcoded all the footage to DNxHD for editing and has been attempting to online the footage up to 4k DNxHR for color correction. 

When doing so, he is faced with days of time-killing errors & crashes. When onlining to 2k DNxHR, no issues whatsoever. It's an odd thing.  

Ultimately, the plan has been to master the film in 2k, and any shots that require post-zooms & repositions can be delivered to me in the original r3d, so we are going with a mostly-2k based round trip from his Avid to my DaVinci Resolve. 

The question is if the DNxHR codec itself has some quirks to it that Avid will be smoothing out--typical anytime anything new is introduced--or if the issue is on our end due to the various cameras with various versions of Red all mixed together. 

Either way, I'm happy to see what I can do with DNxHR 444 footage transcoded from r3d.  

New Website!

Welcome to my new site. After years of sub-par design I decided to give Squarespace a try. I hope to add a bit more flash as I continue to work with the template, and to use this blog to occasionally discuss the projects I'm working on and my thoughts on the business and art of color correction.

Thanks for taking a look.