Red Car launched its new concept “Look Center” last week in Santa Monica. And with it, company founder Larry Bridges initiated some radical new ideas–particularly about the future of the color correction process.
The Look Center is essentially a place where commercial clients can go during prepro to establish and set a desired look, and to create a look up table (LUT) that will help communicate the desired look on set and throughout postproduction. In other words, look at this as the creation of a color decision list, as in editorial there is an edit decision list.
Bridges related that this new initiative is based on two revolutions in the industry occurring simultaneously. The first is the development and use of digital cinematography tools and techniques. The second is the emergence of desktop color correction–a part of the Digital Intermediate (DI) process.
“It’s completely necessary,” Bridges said of the new service. “If you are using a data camera, you cannot rely on labs… When you shoot data, there is no consistent gamma, so you can’t evaluate exposure in a consistent fashion.”
He added that importantly, this is also about opening up the creative process, as this would “help a production company and director to create proprietary looks that differentiate them in the market.”
With the launch of the new service, Red Car’s Santa Monica facility now offers software-based nonlinear color correction services as an alternative to going out of house to a telecine bay to complete color grading. In a nut shell, the launch of the Look Center is the introduction of nonlinear desktop color correction services at Red Car, which according to plans will be extended into Red Car’s offices in other cities such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Dallas.
Chris Homel–who has been with Red Car for eight years as a compositor/designer–takes on the staff role of “color artist.” He and others including freelance colorist Jeff Olm will be working with clients in the new setup, which employs new desktop color and DI-style workflow tools including Discreet Lustre and Assimilate’s Scratch.
As part of this effort, Bridges is also rethinking the traditional role of the colorist and the color correction workflow. “There is no ‘colorist’ anymore,” he asserted. “There is a look artist whose responsibilities including finishing, compositing and color design– The days of the multimillion dollar color correction suite are going away.”
This nonlinear color correction process can be used with film or digitally-lensed images. But Bridges predicted that commercial cinematography will go digital. “I think production companies are going to be shooting digitally, and they may be caught by surprise,” he said. “Agencies will see the cost savings– and there is a whole class of young filmmakers who work with digital, with no prejudice toward film. I also think it’s going to become trendy.”
Bridges concluded, “I think in five years digital will be accepted and it will be an exception to shoot film.” In the meantime, he has started to introduce the capabilities of the “Look Center” to commercial clients.