Dining With The Dean

This is the first free weekend I've had in over three months. My last 13 weekends were spent grading "Dining With The Dean," a show produced by LENZ-works Productions for BYUtv. As nice as it was to spend all day Saturday playing with my sons, I missed the frenzy of notching, grading, rendering, and assembling 800+ edits for a Monday morning delivery. Luckily, the Dean has been picked up for a second season, so I have that to look forward to some time in the not too distant future!

Working with LENZ-works was a pleasure from start to finish. They were the type of client every Colorist hopes for at the beginning of every project.

Color in its Infancy

Not the program or even the telecine process. I mean Color film itself. I saw this on another website and wanted to post it here for posterity. What an incredible window into the past... I appreciate the artistry of black and white film but there's something so present about color. I think we take it for granted because it's so commonplace now (though I remember the excitement I felt all week as a kid, waiting for our first color TV to be delivered).

I've never been lost in an old black and white film the way I've experienced with a beautifully shot color production. Seeing these old clips jars that feeling loose again because they represent a time and place where the pictures aren't supposed to be color. See for yourself:



Here's a blog post that gives more background on this incredible find: A Thousand Words

Welcome to Lakeview Post

Lakeview Post is the brainchild of a colorist who spent many years haunting telecine bays in Hollywood (along with Universal City and Burbank), Manhattan, and even Provo, UT. Through a series of events that don't really matter he found himself living far away from any practical post production employment opportunities (though he did commute from Utah Valley to Hollywood for a year and a half). One day he took his kids to a local park to allow them to scream and run to their heart's content while he watched and pondered what he would do next. Truth be told, he really missed sitting in a dark room and making pretty pictures...

As his kids swung from the jungle gym a thought crossed his mind. He immediately dismissed it but it wasn't about to give up so easily, so that thought hovered at the edges of his brain for weeks as he explored what 'grown up' job he might be able to survive. As luck would have it, that idea came bounding into his head once again a few weeks later as he was reading about a program that Apple had integrated into its Final Cut Studio after acquiring a company called Silicon Color. That program, originally called Final Touch, was renamed Apple Color.

At that point a flood of like ideas entered the mind of our colorist and he started plotting. Buying a Mac and a software suite is one thing, but a colorist needs a lot more than that before he can properly grade any piece of film or video (or file, as it were). So plans were laid out, lists were made, a room was painted (18% Gray, of course) and he began buying the tools he would need to open an honest to goodness color correction bay in the basement of his home right here in Utah Valley.

This blog represents the culmination of that stage and the beginning of the next; opening the doors, getting out there, and servicing our clients: Independent film makers, TV spot producers, marketing firms, and anyone else that might have a need for quality color grading at an affordable price. Of course, if you haven't guessed; that colorist is me.

As things progress and we take on projects, I'll use this blog to highlight the quirks, the fun, the successes, and the challenges that come while taking a crazy idea and making it a reality. I'll also add bits of information and trivia about those parts of film making that make this such a fun thing to be involved in. I guess you could say I'm even worse than a film nerd, I'm a TV and film post production nerd!