Color Talk with Tom Parish Tom Parish

Kevin talks the issue every entrepreneur has of finding the value of their product idea and the challenge of demonstrating value to a client to create product tracking. How can you do this quickly?

Up next is a conversation with Robb Jacobson about the lives of people who are affected, both by birth and by injury, both drastically and unknowingly with some form of color blindness.

Robb is a story producer and a filmmaker who is partially color blind. One day it hit him - In our society, we cherish our visual field, but we also demand it to be understood uniformly. Policemen, firemen, pilots, army men, coast guard, railroad workers, electricians, astronauts, artists, and many more occupations won't allow for any inconsistency in color determination. Visit TomParish.com for more details.

Ezra Venetos is a film producer in Austin Texas many of us know locally for his successful indie films. I ask Ezra to talk about what makes him unique in his approach to producing films. We discuss the central theme I've been exploring in this mini-series "have we unconsciously evolved ourselves into a bad habit of thinking production quality is related to how much 4k or 5k gear you budget to rent or own? And more importantly what needs to change.

Think about it - what could you learn from a distributor, really? For me it was a stretch. if you're like me and you assume distributors are gatekeepers then it's difficult to get over the mind talk running in your head that a distributor is out to get you in some way. Or at best just someone you have to pay along the way.

Clearly this isn't the case but then there are those horror stories we've all heard over the years. Has this changed with the growing video on demand (VOD) marketplace evolving so quickly? You might be surprised what you learn from Linda Nelson of IndieRights.com during this 60 minutes of non-stop high-intensity flow of ideas to help you be more successful with your film. Learn more about this interview and color grading at www.TomParish.com

Up next is a conversation with Andie Grace VP of Acquisitions and Head CheerLeder at Devolver Digital Films - a film distributor in San Francisco. Why a film distributor? Turns out they have similar problems that as a colorist in helping a filmmaker be more successful.

In the next conversation of this mini-series on "What Can a Colorist Learn from a ...?" I speak with Ellie Ann Fenton, a Director of Photography in Los Angeles.

Lucky for me she was in Austin working on a film. She called asking if she could bring the scriptwriter, the editor, and others on the team over to the studio to see some test clips on the large screen. Needless to say, I was delighted.

We all met and talked about the feeling of the movie and how light and color will be used. This led to a technical conversation over what color space to shoot in with the Sony F55 and what LUTs to use. Then we did some testing with DaVinci Resolve. As the colorist for the project, I was thankful to have an opportunity to contribute early in the process as this will lead, I believe, to a more creative look because there will be fewer color correction issues.

During this interview Ellie and I discuss how the cost of digital filmmaking has dropped dramatically (even 4k productions are doable), so what is the secret to doing this well with tighter budgets? What makes one indie production stand out over others when all are using the same gear and software in post?

Surely it’s not just about more gear, or higher-resolution cameras, or finding cheaper actors or better scripts. Why not leverage the creative flow across the entire digital workflow production and post process, including inputs from distribution? How about expanding the creative uses of color and light in the process of telling stories? Bottom line – you want to spend less money fixing problems in digital filmmaking and get more emotional impact out of a budget all the way through the distribution step. Great gear without creative collaboration yields average, at best, results. Average is over.

So listen in and let me know about your experiences around the collaboration process.