Watch: An Ode to Colorists and Their Often Underappreciated Art Form
Have you hugged your colorist today? After watching this video, you might want to.
Every role in a film production is important to the success of the project, from the director to the cinematographer to the PA getting your coffee, but there are plenty of professionals that don't get enough recognition for the tremendous amount of work they do. In this video, Sareesh Sudhakaran of wolfcrow highlights the oftentimes overlooked job done by talented colorists, exploring the many ways these talented artists can add to a film's visual aesthetic, make a narrative more dynamic, and even hide any mistakes a director or DP might've made.
If you acknowledge and give credit to a film's colorist, that's really awesome because a lot of people don't. To be fair, casual movie-goers may not even know that this role exists, and even if they do, they probably don't know what it takes to design and apply a grade to an entire feature-length film.
But the filmmaking community knows—or at least we should know. This is was kind of the very passionate point Sudhakaran made in the video, that even though the job of a digital colorist is relatively new, it has yet to be given its own category at the Academy Awards despite contributing so much artistically to the medium. Not that receiving such accolades is any indication of one's own importance or capabilities, but I have to agree with Sudhakaran—considering how much a colorist can add to the look and meaning of a film, it does make sense.
It's certainly an interesting argument and regardless of which side of it you find yourself, feel free to share your thoughts down in the comments.
Source: wolfcrow
