By Alyssa Heater

Ready to step up your color game? postPerspective dives deep with two veteran colorists to learn their tips and tricks for creating an impactful grade.

First, we sit down with Royal Muster’s Roslyn Di Sisto, the go-to colorist for Taylor Swift’s music videos — including the latest, Karma — to learn about her approach to grading both short-form and long-form, how time management is key, and how knowledge of multiple grading systems is the ace up her sleeve.

Next, we chat with Color Collective founder Alex Bickel about his approach, the importance of being involved in a project at the pre-pro stage and what advice he would give to up-and-coming artists in the industry.

Royal Muster‘s Roslyn DiSisto

Roslyn DiSisto

What inspired you to become a colorist? Tell us a bit about your career path.
I started in film studies and quickly discovered that I was more interested in the post world than the production world. I landed a job as an assistant editor at a post house in Melbourne, Australia, where I’m from originally. Most of the ads in those days were still shot on film, and part of my role was to attend the telecine one-light sessions where I sat with a colorist for hours absorbing their process, which I was totally dazzled by. After a number of these sessions, I then became hyper-focused on becoming a colorist. I started as a color assistant working under an incredible colorist Edel Rafferty, and then moved my way up over the years, grading my little heart out and learning everything I could from her.

You have graded very iconic music videos, like Drake’s Hotline Bling and Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero and Karma. Tell us what that collaboration process looks like. Do the artists themselves provide input in the way these videos look?
Every collaboration process has a bit of a different flavor. Ultimately, it’s a very collaborative process. My job is to bring the creative team’s vision to life. Based on my experience, the artists themselves often aren’t involved in the initial look exploration, but they are brought into the mix once the director, DP and I are happy with where it’s at.

What does the schedule typically look like for a music video?
As a colorist, we have to adapt to different post pipelines. Often, we have to think on our feet because things change, and schedules move. With Karma specifically, because it was such a heavy CG job, the decision was made to begin VFX work first, and my color work was executed in tandem

The VFX team at Parliament put so much work into Karma, working through all the environments and the matte painting scenes. There were a lot of live-action elements, but there was also a lot of post work. The team would send me WIPs and I would update and keep establishing the look over a period of time. As elements of the VFX would come through and get updated, we would have to pivot here and there in color, depending on what had changed. It gave us the opportunity to come back at it with fresh eyes and you don’t always have that opportunity in the short-form world. I really loved this way of working; it was magic to see it all come to life. The video itself is pretty. It’s like fairy floss — so colorful and so many different worlds. It was right up my alley.

What software do you use for grading?
I started my career on Resolve, then switched to FilmLight Baselight for seven years while working in Toronto. I returned to Resolve when I started at Royal Muster in January of this year. It’s such an asset for a colorist to be able to work across both platforms. It’s nice to dip in and out when you need to and have the knowledge to be able to grade using different software. I like them both for very different reasons.

As you mentioned, each experience is so different, but in general, how does grading short-form content, like music videos, differ from grading a feature or series?
My bread and butter is short form: commercials and music videos. I often only get an opportunity to work on a long-form piece once or twice a year because I’m so booked up with short-form projects. I love when I do get those opportunities, because the pacing is quite different. You have to be a little less focused on details up front and use broader strokes. Ultimately, no matter what the length of the piece is, you are looking for the same things every time — to produce the best image possible. The choices or the tools in which I use to get there are a little different depending on the time allocated.

How do you use color to convey tone or mood? In regard to the Karma video, did you take a different approach when grading the various environments?
There was certainly a different approach for every scene. For instance, the storybook scene where she is walking down the yellow brick road, we really wanted to emulate old film stock and make it feel very 1950s. We explored a lot of options with grain textures and tonality. We wanted things to feel vibrant, pastel and whimsical. It was a lot of fun.

What other projects do you have on the horizon that you can talk about?
I just started an amazing feature. There are around 180 scenes with approximately 120 looks. In terms of the volume of looks, it is one of the biggest projects I’ve worked on. The film is a visually striking piece, and I have been given a lot of creative freedom. I’m looking forward to getting into this one.

Color Collective’s Alex Bickel 

Alex Bickel

You have had a long career as a colorist. What led you to pursue this field and ultimately start Color Collective?
I went to a film school for screenwriting. When I got to New York City, I was trying to figure out how to make a living, so I started in commercial color correction in 2005 as a way to support my writing habit… and I fell in love with color correction. It was such a fun, Zen task, getting to hang out with smart, interesting artists and listen to music and craft imagery.

But, again, I thought this was just something I would do until I could break into screenwriting. That all changed for me when I started grading feature films. I realized how much I could contribute to telling the story through the craft color grading. Pretty quickly, I started collaborating with people who were better writers than I was ever going to be. To be able to help them tell their stories, and have it connect with audiences around the world…. that was the kind of collaboration that led to complete creative fulfillment on my end. I never looked back after that.

Have you always been working under the Color Collective name?
I started out grading commercials with an amazing company that is no longer around called Outside Editorial. They gave me my first shot. This was long before DaVinci was affordable and accessible, so I was using Apple Color, which was a free color grading software. I then bounced around and worked at a few big color houses. I started Color Collective when Blackmagic changed the game and DaVinci Resolve became what it is now — it runs on a Mac, and cost of entry was around $1K (instead of $600K). When that happened, I saw an opportunity to start my own shop.

We were founded in 2012 and are now an eight-person team. We have stayed relatively small on purpose so we can remain selective about the types of projects we take on and so we can deliver the same level of personal attention to each project. Last spring, we completed construction new 5,000-square-foot studio within Nomad in New York City. We have a 4K DI theater and three color bays. It’s a comfortable and awesome place to be. In fact, when everyone else was fighting for a hybrid work schedule during the pandemic, my team was fighting to get back in-person. I’m super proud that they all love to come to work together and hang out.

In addition to being a one-stop shop in New York City, you also collaborate on major projects based out of LA and beyond. What tools and software do you use to facilitate remote collaboration?
We have an amazing ongoing collaboration with Picture Shop in LA. They’re excellent partners when our films require an LA-based finish, or the scale of a larger facility.

Our backbone for remote streaming is the Colorfront Streaming Server. I have found this to be by far the best platform because it allows us to work in whatever color space and resolution we want, and it will flip on the fly to the various color spaces that our collaborators need to be in. I might be in my theater working in 4K DCI XYZ because I like to work in the same color space as the final DCP, but my DP is on-set and needs to be on an iPad Pro in SDR. Colorfront is great because everything can happen in tandem. You don’t have to route 10 signals using 10 devices. And the color science is amazing.

When you work on a new project, how early in the production process are you typically looped in?
Our contribution to the look of the film definitely starts during preproduction. One of the things that makes Color Collective unique is our focus on color science, and how to use it to advance the story. We have an amazing color scientist that we work with to craft unique looks for each project, and that really does need to happen in preproduction to get the full benefit. I always read the script and am using my one small part of the filmmaking process to help tell the story and connect with the audience. So the DP, director and I are in communication early on.

Ideally, you get two or three rounds of testing. It’s important to have material during the LUT-building process that represents the film. This means stand-ins whose skin tone accurately represents the range of key talent, in addition to the style and contrast ratio of the lighting and key elements from the production design that will be in the final film. Crafting a unique LUT for the story can’t be done in isolation.

It’s also important to note, it’s just as important to do this on projects shooting on film.

In the old days, you had so many film stocks to choose from, and that was a big part of the look development for a film. Now, almost all film jobs are Vision 3, but with color science, we’re able to really tailor the response of that negative for each project.  The goal is always for the dailies to capture as much of the spirit of what the director and DP are chasing because we’ve already done all the leg work front.

How do you handle tight deadlines and maintain your sanity when you’re juggling multiple projects at once?
We have a fantastic production team: Alek Rost and Claudia Guevara. They are great at maximizing all the colorists’ schedules and balancing our client’s needs and shifting schedules.

We have three colorists at Color Collective. In addition to myself, we’ve got Mike Howell (who’s been with us since the very beginning) and Alex Jimenez (who’s been with us since 2016). All three of us are constantly moving between advertising, episodic and feature films. I personally love the variation and the opportunity if affords me to experiment in one world and apply those techniques in another.

As we have become involved in larger projects, and our filmmaker collaborators that we’ve grown up with have become more established, we have been able to ask for more time in the grade. On most films, we now spend two and a half or three weeks on the hero grade, plus more time for the various downstream deliverables: HDR, etc. It’s nice to have room to play. It’s not that you can’t do a movie in two weeks, it’s just that when the budget and story support it, it’s always better to have more time to experiment. You’re not just banging it out and you have time to explore.

How do you approach setting a look for a project? Other than you and the DP, are there any other key collaborators who are involved? Or are you pretty much given creative freedom?
Typically, it’s a four-way conversation: the DP, the colorist, the director and our color scientist. It always starts with the script and then expands to film references, paintings, photographs or emotional statements about how the audience should feel. It is also important to involve your other departments, such as production design and costume dept. Whenever possible, it’s ideal to have material from real locations, costumes, fabrics and paint colors that they are exploring.

At the end of the day, we’re crafting an image, but the color comes from what is on-screen. I think it’s a mistake to think that you can craft a strong, visually arresting image using color correction alone. It’s absolutely needs to be in conversation with every dept. It’s all collaborative.

We took this approach for the recent Netflix series Beef. I have been collaborating with cinematographer Larkin Seiple [read our interview with him on Beef] for a long time. The images that he crafts are so visceral, unique and gripping right out of the camera. We do a ton of the work during preproduction to craft help achieve this on the day.

This project was set in LA, with a ton of heat from the blaring sun. It’s a stressful story, so we leaned into that with the LUT. We added a real ruddiness to the characters’ skin and allowed the highlights to run away from us a bit. I’m proud of how light-struck the final product feels. You can really feel the heat. Another fun part of that collaboration was working with Alex Jimenez on the project. I did the first episode myself, but then most of the rest of the series was with Jimenez in the hot seat.

What advice would you give to someone who is just starting out as a colorist? Having all this knowledge now from years of experience, is there anything you wish you’d known before you started in this industry?
I do think both multitasking and organization are really important. What’s interesting about our industry is that it attracts so many creative people and, often times, creative people lack the organizational skills to become productive. One of the ways I’ve stayed organized is by building a team with type-A producers that excel in organization.

I also think the only way to get really good at coloring is to do it a lot. One of the great things about Resolve is it’s essentially free. The same tool we use on a 150-million-dollar film is basically free for a student to explore on their laptop. Through repetition and experience, you will come up with your own perspective about what you like, what kind of images resonate with you, and you’ll develop your own process from there.

There isn’t just one right way to color correct. Everyone’s process is different. I’ve found a process that works for me, which is to approach most images from the skin tone out… But I’m sure most of the colorists that I admire have a completely different process from mine.

I think the only way to discover your own process is to do it over and over again, make the mistakes and try something different the next time. There really isn’t a shortcut for it.

By any means necessary, just start making images and using the tools that are accessible to you to make those images.

What are some best practices that you would like to share? What things that have really worked out for you in the color grading process?
For me, it’s always about human connection/faces. So I’ll often approach a scene from the hero closeups and build out from there. I think about a grade from skin tone out, so I’m trying to create that spark and a complex skin tone, then I mold the environment from there to direct the eye as needed. I’m not suggesting this will work for everyone or every story, but it is kind of the approach that has worked for me the most over the years.

Any interesting projects you have on the horizon that you’re able to mention?
I’m excited about a bunch of upcoming projects. We have another collaboration with Larkin Seiple from director Jon Watts, an Apple+ film called Wolfs. Then there is an amazing adaptation of The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, directed by RaMell Ross and shot by Jomo Fray. I believe that film is really going to connect with people when they see it. The entire visual language of the film and with RaMell’s unique vision, you can’t look away. It definitely stays with you.

Alyssa Heater is a writer and marketer in the entertainment industry. When not writing, you can find her front row at heavy metal shows or remodeling her cabin in the San Gabriel Mountains.