Hi,
I can’t believe this year is almost over. I just finished a series of 6 films with Steven Seagal. Now I have time to catch up with Warren and Kevin and see what’s happening with the ICA. Last summer, before things got busy, I started to put a class together dealing with being an On-Set Colourist. As I’m really a finishing Colourist, the opportunity of working on-set sounded very interesting and it was great to see how those beautiful images we deal with in post come about. It’s quite something to actually see how the cameras are configured, how the lighting is created and of course what happens after they yell “action”. Being on-set with a 50 calibre machine gun and grenade launcher is a blast, ha ha.
On the work side I had to bring my experience of colour correction and colour management to the set. It’s a challenge to find a dark room to work in to apply a base grade and get the on-set monitors looking half decent in the ambient light. Since we worked all summer we had to deal with the daylight and late sunsets. I ended up in the camera truck with lots of curtains. Next go round will involve air conditioning (30 degrees C in a truck isn’t that much fun).
Being the keeper of the colour management pipeline involved calibrating the monitors on set and in post, talking to the DOP and 1st Assistant Camera person for camera information and creating iPad dailies. It wasn’t an easy task as we were on the road 8 days out of 14. With 14 hour days it made for some interesting times.
Doing the initial grading gave post and the post grading an idea of what the DOP was going for. We were doing 80 to 90 set-ups a day and believe me that’s a lot of footage to deal with. To say I had to keep my head on straight is an understatement.
For this year I’ve designed a mobile digital processing truck with all the creature comforts I went without last summer. For the processing gear I’m using a Cinetal Davio and hi-res LCD display. I’m looking forward to using Red’s new colour science and have started to buy gear for the Epic and can’t wait. In a few weeks I’m going to do some training on Arri’s Alexa and get my workflows designed and tested with my associate in the UK.
I’ll be doing some grading on finished short films this year but I’m having so much fun grading on-set I think I’ll stay with this for awhile and see how it goes.
I’m working on the On-set Colourist class for the next few weeks and am excited to see the new Colourist training facility at Roush Media and see what Keith and the gang have designed and built. Please watch for an announcement in the next few weeks and I hope you’ll sign up for the class.
Take care and all the best for 2011!
Lorne
