The international colorist

I value as a very interesting experience working as a colorist for clients from other cultures: it enriches the difference in perceptions and makes you aware of what seems to be common in human taste. My job is to “beautify” an image (making it compliant with Broadcast or DCI standards is a plus that I give) and ultimately there are no mathematical laws that guarantee you will always get something that is beautiful for everyone.

With Arab clients I have learned that the color “GOLD” is not yellow, but a color of its own with deep religious and cultural implications. Outside of gold, deep green like the gardens of Eden is desirable even if to them the faces look like they are sown with grass.

With Chinese customers I have understood that an excessively white image was seen as something close to mourning and death.

With Dominican clients I have learned that Eskimos may have 42 words for snow but they fall short compared to the 142 words they use here to define different skin tones (and “white” starts veryyyyyyyy early on the Dominican scale). I usually answer them that white is milk, salt and plastered walls, I personally consider myself more “piggy pink” than white….

With Indian clients I have come to understand that there is such a thing as an “English-European color” and that this is uncompromisingly good….. Faces are beautiful as long as they are pale, nothing, nothing, not even a crumb of saturation on the skin.

With American clients I discovered that going off broadcast signal means burning in hell and losing a job.

With Japanese clients I was made to realize that if they give me a photo reference, it is not to be a creative inspiration and first step in a conversation, it is to LITERALLY match each and every color on the scale.

With Spanish clients I have found that a colorist’s job is to operate 20% of the time and try to get paid 80% of the time.

All this digression is to present a list of tips that I believe work quite well when working with any client, regardless of the shared cultural background (or not).

YOYI’S RECOMMENDATIONS ON COLORIST WORK

First and foremost, if you keep this one you can almost forget the rest: YOU MUST HAVE YOUR OWN CRITERIA ABOUT COLOR. Effectively you can consider your job is to serve a client’s orders and almost almost behave like a robotic middleman. Do that and you will be treated (and abandoned) as the machine you pretend to be. A colorist is another kind of mammal, he is a person who works manipulating the image more often than his client and therefore is presupposed the ability to have “judgment” and advise on the best result to aspire to with the image they bring. You don’t impose, you listen to the requests they make, if they give you exact guidelines (make me a mask, increase the saturation, etc…) you comply with them, but you are also the guide that avoids getting lost in the swampy fields of post-production, and whenever you see it clear to give a solution use these words:“if I may suggest, maybe you would like to try X or Y processes”.

Do that enough times (and succeed in the suggestions) and I assure you that the client will trust you so much that he will ask you to correct with you 1 or 2 shots to establish the criteria and then leave you to work alone (secret: most people -including DPs- are bored by being on sale)… Note, this is not desirable either, because the correction requires an ultimate criteria about what constitutes “nice” which brings me to the next point…

DEMAND/DEMAND/IMPLAY/SUPLY (in decreasing scale) that there is only one “voice” that considers your work valid, trying to correct color with a DP/DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/AGENCY only to have the AGENCY/PRODUCER/DIRECTOR/DP come and demand to go in the opposite direction is a very frustrating job. Get healthy and find out sooner rather than later who has enough power to set the criteria for “GOOD & GOOD”. A little trick for this is to think “who is paying for your day?”.

That said, in the event that you have the good fortune to work with a DP in the room, because it has been established that ultimately their criteria is the only valid one (rare): the relationship of a DP with a colorist is like that of a parishioner with his confessor, they use the room to seek salvation for their sins, not to be whipped for their mistakes, so give them a jovial, lively and saving conversation: do not sound judgmental, omit comments of the type (“this is dark/badly balanced/FEO”). In the end, the one who speaks well of your work and your best ally is him/her, so make them consider you their ally in the face of chaos and pain.

Enunciate aloud each of the steps you are taking, as if you were the crew of a submarine or an operating system in “VERBOSE” mode: “Sir, I am now raising the saturation / applying a circular mask / selecting a secondary / comparing with the uncorrected image, etc…”. This has several advantages: first, by letting you know each of your manipulation steps the client will instinctively stop looking over your shoulder and blowing your neck to know exactly what you play; second, you prevent him from getting distracted (very frequent) and you get him to follow your reasoning and he can ask you to go back quickly steps you have taken (“what you have done before the mask, please let me see the image without it”) and ultimately collaborate and reach a harmonious relationship.

Don’t work more than 30 minutes at a time. Seriously, don’t do it. If you are lucky enough to be a smoker like me, you already have the perfect excuse to be able to air yourself, otherwise you can always pull coffees-juices-kitkats. When you go out and come back in, don’t immediately start working on a new plan, but rather review what you’ve done in the last half hour.

Do not look at a still frame for more than 25 seconds at a time. From that moment on, your eyes are deceiving you like a fool. To avoid this it is useful to imagine yourself as a JEDI who has been put the blinding helmet in the test of the flying ball and let yourself be carried away by what YOU think is the image. Feel the strength, how the colors are playing with each other, what is happening with the light when you change the temperature or what consequences varying the ratio of RED to BLUE has on the saturation (those of you who have attended my classes will remember how much I like to quote the YING-YANG or the RGB seesaw). When you have internalized it counterbalance it with what the RGB PARADE and vectorscope tell you and THEN look at the image. quickly correct it and hit PLAY.

This brings me to the next point, often ignored, DO NOT ALLOW YOUR CLIENT TO SEE A MONITOR WHERE THERE IS A STATIC PHOTOGRAM!!!!!!!. They also lose their ability to perceive color if they are exposed to the same image for too long and you need to be able to trust the feedback they give you on your work. I usually “suggest” that they don’t look at the monitor until they have finished working and I usually tell them when it is convenient to do so and when it is not. If they give me a problem, I talk to them about ophthalmology, the color loading system of the human eye and other gobbledygook I had to learn at the time and they rarely insist after listening to me.

In the room, it will sound fussy and excessive but I guarantee it is not: try to wear gray-black clothes. This is because many times you are in the client’s path of vision next to the monitor and I have already tested several times that the color you are wearing is the one that immediately disappears from the client’s perception due to a contagion effect. It makes no sense to set up a room with indirect light, gray walls or directly off lights, so that you break that cordon sanitaire with your clothes. Laugh all you want and call me an exaggerator but my experience tells me that this is VERY real.

Ok. This concludes my first article written from the Caribbean, specifically from the Dominican Republic; Malandrines, know that I’m here for a season motivated by a job as a Mystika operator, and despite what may pass through your head here is not all paradisiacal beaches, coconut trees, bachata and hot mulatas…. there are also color rooms!!!!! (Resolve, Scratch and Mystika).