Black Coffee, Bright Pixels, and Broken OLEDs: A Cup with Joey D'Anna

In our second episode of the season, I sit down for a fascinating chat with fellow podcast host and lead colorist of DC Color, Joey D’Anna.

Our conversation begins with Joey’s strong opinions on coffee preparation, followed by a quick overview of his journey to becoming a colorist. We then dive into the power of HDR and how new display technology can completely changed the creative approach to grading - or not. 

Finally, we delve into the tech behind WOLED panels, used in the popular LG C and G series displays—and, most importantly, why they aren’t ideal as “reference” displays, even when professionally calibrated.

Grab your favorite cup of coffee and enjoy this awesome conversation!

Guest Links:
IG - https://www.instagram.com/danna_joey/
Website - https://www.joeydanna.tv/
The Offset Podcast - https://dccolor.com/podcast/
IMDB - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3539316/

PixelTools
Modern Color Grading Tools and Presets for DaVinci Resolve 

PixelTools
Modern Color Grading Tools and Presets for DaVinci Resolve

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Matt Wallach: 0:00

It's all about working with people who you respect and who respect you, and that exists at every level of production and every level in this industry. I think there's this slight misunderstanding People think that that only exists at the tippy top, and that's hardly the case. And you find that at films with $300 million budgets. You find that on films with $50 million budgets. You find that with films that have less than a half a million dollars, it's at every level. It's a music, videos, commercials. Film budget does not equal quality. There are good people at all levels and just because a film has no money doesn't mean that oh, this producer is out to screw you and you know no one here is got their heart in it and, like you were saying, the projects that are more concerned about the bottom line than the people are very much there. But it's really important, I think, especially in a creative field, to maintain that outlook and that optimism of you know, just wanting to partner with the people who want to do good work and work with good people.

Jason Bowdach: 1:02

Welcome to Color and Coffee, a podcast that's focused on the craft of color and the artists behind it. I'm your host, Jason Bowdach, and each episode, we'll sit down with some of the most talented artists in the industry and have a casual chat from one artist to another. We'll share their stories, their insights, their tips and, of course, their beverage of choice. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, join us for some great color discussion. Sit back, grab your mug. You're listening to Color and Coffee. Hi, I'm Jason Bowdach and welcome to this episode of Color and Coffee. Today, I have with you Matt Wallach from Company 3. He's graded such films as no Time to Die, Don't Look Up, and the recent Salt Burn. Welcome to the show, Matt, Thanks for having me, Jason. Now, first and foremost, I have to ask you what is, for the show, the most important question what are you drinking today?

Matt Wallach: 2:01

It was a tough one this morning. This heat wave kind of caught me off guard and I didn't have any cold brew in the fridge, so I ended up whipping up an espresso tonic this morning to enjoy and try and stay cool. What is an espresso tonic?

Jason Bowdach: 2:15

That's a new one to me.

Matt Wallach: 2:16

It's exactly what it sounds like it's just espresso and tonic water. It's a breakfast cocktail. That's a really. It mixes a lot better than it sounds. The quinine and the espresso complement each other really well. You put in a little, you know, orange peel or lemon peel, and you get a little tartness to it and it's a nice yeah, that is a really interesting like it's a very refreshing summer, easy drinking, sit outside kind of beverage.

Jason Bowdach: 2:45

So, for those that are unaware, we have a sudden heat wave in LA. I think we're breaking. We're going to break triple digits today. So I am lucky enough to be drinking my vanilla cold brew which I'm on the second day of my breezy cold brew today, but I'm definitely going to have to try that espresso tonic. That sounds amazingly refreshing. Very much is. Yeah, excellent, excellent choice. So let's jump in. You have an incredible resume and, in fact, it's quite different than a lot of the people that we've talked to on the show. If I'm not mistaken, you originally started in dailies, is that correct?

Matt Wallach: 3:20

I did, and before that even camera department. Before I made the jump over I was a DIT for a minute and fell in love with color there and got into dailies. But yeah, it's been a really kind of unconventional journey, super interesting to kind of forge this path and get all the experiences that I had on the way to becoming a finishing colorist.

Jason Bowdach: 3:41

Before I jump into my partial obsession with Sulfur and the Reds in that film, I'd like to hear a little bit more about how you transitioned from a dailies to final colorist and also how you got into dailies, because, as far as I'm aware, that's a very sort of almost unicorn path, is it not?

Matt Wallach: 3:58

Yeah, you know it is very unusual and I've always kind of, you know, coming into the industry and through production there's, you know, kind of had the mentality of there's no right way but lots of wrong ways to get something done. I came out of film school. I wanted to be a DP. Grading was not really a craft that was as widely known and was not nearly as accessible then as it is today, and so I came into the industry right as digital really was taking a foothold. It was right around the launch of the Alexa. I double majored in college in still photography and film production and a lot of what I learned in digital image processing came from my stills background, because stills had gone digital, you know, prior to to motion. So I learned a lot about handling and manipulating raw and dynamic range and, and, you know, just digital post-processing through that, which kind of gave me a foundation for color grading that I didn't even realize at the time. So I got into the industry, you know, played the game, climbed the ladder, started as a PA, you know, worked my way to second ACing and got really interested in being a DIT, you know, being a computer nerd and being, you know, wanting to get closer to the action and really interact with cinematographers and learn from them. That seemed like a perfect thing to do.

Jason Bowdach: 5:29

Especially with your background. Understanding the cameras, I know at that time cinematographers were not as comfortable with those new cameras and so they were looking for I'll call them like advocates or teammates to help them with that transition.

Matt Wallach: 5:41

Exactly them with that transition, exactly and, and, and you know, really being able to help, having done the transition already from learning to still photography, learning on film and then moving to digital, learning digital and experience that on my own. And it is a different animal and stills than it is in in motion, for sure, but the, the principles of imaging remain the same and, um, you know the way that film reacts versus how a sensor reacts is the same, regardless of its still promotion. So, you know, coming equipped with that knowledge was super helpful in you know, getting established as a DIT and building those relationships and you know, gaining, you know, partnerships and trust from cinematographers who I would then work with. And in the process, I really fell in love with the color side, being new to this world, of understanding what a log profile was and really you know what the capabilities of that way versus stills. When you shoot raw, everything's kind of linear based. So wrapping my head around that and understanding how to work with that on set, you know the computer nerd in me was, you know, really enjoying the color science side of it and the color grading side of it on set and I got on the bigger sets and I just would see they don't teach you about politics in film school. Bigger issues and bigger and bigger. You know more and more people, more and more producers, more and more personalities and you know, in my naive, 20 something year old head I was like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. So, you know, at the same time, loving color was just like a light bulb went off and I was like maybe there's something here. And I had been in touch with friends at post houses and I hadn't gotten an opportunity through Tyler Roth at Company 3 Chicago at the time. It was before he was out here in LA. We had known each other for a while and gone back and he called me and said, hey, there's a show, a big feature coming through town and we're going to process the dailies out of our shop and we're looking for some team to do the dailies. Would you be interested in talking about that? And so that was my end with E-Film and Company 3's then dailies platform EC3. So I assisted on the dailies for that which was Divergent. I was going to ask which film that was. Yeah, Adaptation.

Jason Bowdach: 8:00

Neil Berger, if I remember correctly, was the director on that.

Matt Wallach: 8:03

Correct. Yeah, Alwyn Kuchler was the DP that shot in Chicago. That was the summer of 2000.

Jason Bowdach: 8:12

That's where you're from right, so your first dailies is from where you're from and working as a local, I joined 600.

Matt Wallach: 8:23

And I was working between Chicago and LA, with LA being my secondary market, as they called it. So I went home to Chicago for the summer and figured, hey, I'll do this show for three months and if it works out that's awesome, and if I like this, I'll keep pursuing color and posts, and if I don't, then back to DITing I go. And here we are.

Jason Bowdach: 8:46

I was going to say I look at your IMDb and that is the first of many, many large films. And just to quote a couple of the DPs that you've worked with Lina Sandgren, who you work with regularly now, roger Deakins, hoya Van Hoytma, roger Elswit so you've worked with the best of the best for Daily's Color.

Matt Wallach: 9:14

Yeah, you know, it was just a dream come true and such a treat to be working with a facility that handles all of these massive projects and has all of these clients coming through and has such an incredible roster of talent that draws, you know, these films to work there. So I went off of Divergent I was again assisting on that one and then we went almost immediately, like a month later, I dove right into Fast and Furious 7, which was a really crazy production.

Jason Bowdach: 9:39

I was going to say that's massive, like not even a small step up. That's like several levels, yeah, and still assisting on that.

Matt Wallach: 9:45

But it got to the point where they were shooting that's massive, like not even a small step up, that's like several levels. Yeah, and you know still assisting on that. But it got to the point where they were shooting so much footage that I ended up grading the dailies for all the second unit because it was just. You know they're just, we didn't have enough hours in the day. This was before and I was grading the second unit dailies, you know, before all of the Before the Paul tragedy yeah, Before Paul passed away and then we shut down for months and then we came back and finished the film and the amount of footage that was captured to get the film over the finish line is To this day I've never seen the way that they did VFX references for that with five or six Alexas all rolling at 120 frames a second every day, the terabytes and terabytes of data that we had, and still we built a bit of a team for the dailies on that one once we came back because there was so much to do. This was before we had LTO robots, so I was just manually doing all of these backups. It was a very Wild West thing that we just had to throw together and make happen, because what else can you do?

Jason Bowdach: 11:20

I can only imagine, hearing some of the details, that that was astronomically challenging, especially jumping from a lower not that Divergent is a lower, I would guess a 60-some million dollar budget film and the Fast movies are 200 plus always who she has been for a shoot.

Matt Wallach: 11:34

She's the reason that I'm where I am now. She's always kind of championed me and pushed me forward and give me a lot of opportunities where, with all of the work that we were doing on Fast 7, it was kind of crazy. And then all of a sudden she calls me and is like hey, there's this little, you know, comparable to Fast 7. It's a little film I'm shooting in New Mexico and they there are little budget constraints so they don't have the ability to bring out a dailies assist and a dailies colorist. They need one person who can do it all. They're not going to shoot a lot of footage a day. How do you feel about it? I'm like, cool, that sounds great, sign me up. And that was Sicario. That was my just really quietly being like yeah, hey, roger Deakins is shooting this, which was an incredible experience, and I learned as a colorist so much just from working with Roger and James foundationally how DPs look at an image, what they expect to see when they walk into a grading suite.

Jason Bowdach: 12:50

I have to ask, because I listened to their show quite a bit If you had to say one or two things that you took away from that job, what would you say? That you walked away?

Matt Wallach: 12:57

with Precision was the big one. I think as a colorist that was the big skill. I honed on that and on everything. Working with Roger, where his eye is so unbelievably trained just to the slightest shift in color that you know we would be in the room and he would ask for a quarter point of yellow. And it's just the first time he said that. I was like really Like that's so tiny, like that. And then you do it and I'm like holy shit, holy shit, that's yeah, that's it Bang on Exactly. He knows his images so well and his recall is just absolutely incredible, from set to coming into dailies at lunch the next day to have a look at something. It's really you know. So the takeaway was just really honing my eye and then learning to see things the way that he sees them, because as a colorist, I think that's our most valuable skill is we work with so many different cinematographers, directors, filmmakers, and they all see the world differently. So it's. It's such a. When you think about it, it's a really strange thing to have to be able to you know, if you're working on two projects, three projects in a day to be able to just blink and all of a sudden see things the way that the other filmmakers that you're working with see them. So you know, working with Roger really helped me build that foundation.

Jason Bowdach: 14:15

Here's a challenging question because I, like this, is something that we spent our entire career doing. Is this trying to learn the skill of being able to sort of understand our client, in this case the DP, because they're they're usually more technical than the director and sort of work in sync with them. If you were to give people listening one tip in terms of trying to connect with a cinematographer and get more aligned with them in what you're describing, what could you suggest for people that are perhaps not feeling aligned with their client or DP and want to get more aligned?

Matt Wallach: 14:53

That's a tough one because I also find it depends so much on the capacity in which you're working with someone, in that it's so much harder to get on the same wavelength with a client when you're not in the same room. So in today's environment of doing all these sessions remotely or, you know, doing a grade and submitting a render for review and putting on a frame io and getting notes and trying to interpret, that is so much more difficult than having someone sitting there in the room with you and you know the ability to interpret things is so much easier and so much faster and so much less frustrating for everybody to just have that instantaneous response. So I really deeply value being in the same space as your client if that's possible, and I know that not everybody can do that. But even if you're in the same city and grading in your office or you don't have a proper grading base set up and you're grading from home, meet with your client lunch or a coffee or something before the job and just feel each other out and get on the same page. Because if you can't do that in the room, naturally like you're really missing something in the creative process. So I think that that real human connection is is such a overlooked part of what we do?

Jason Bowdach: 16:10

I'm working on a grade right now and it's it's hard to read between the comments on frame IO and see what, what is the, what is their face look like, or what does the mouth look like, or how is their twisting? Essentially reading, the room is what it is. So that's an incredible. Tip is try to get in person at all if you can. If you're having problems with that.

Matt Wallach: 16:32

We've all been in a position where you're like cool, we're good, everyone seems happy. You send out your render, you get notes back, you make some okay okay, these are reasonable. You make some adjustments and then you send out again and you get more notes and four or five revisions later you're just kind of going nuts because you're like you know that if everyone was in the room with you, you would have had all of this done in 15 minutes.

Jason Bowdach: 16:58

You would have a conversation and be like what's the deal?

Matt Wallach: 17:00

Yeah, exactly, and instead of that, now it's a three-day thing between wrangling everybody and everybody giving their notes and sending feedback and you sending out another version, and it can be frustrating.

Jason Bowdach: 17:11

So I think that that physical presence has become undervalued, that's really, really an important tip I think that's an awesome one especially is to try and lean back on the in-person experience if you're having any problems at all. I think a lot of us have quickly gone to remote and at a loss to some of the client experience. I'll call it.

Matt Wallach: 17:34

Even if that's just like you know, the closest you can get is like hopping on a FaceTime and talking about it Like there's so much to be gained from that.

Jason Bowdach: 17:42

Humans are much better at grasping communication visually than they are through, through text, even though social media has tried to teach us otherwise. I want to continue on, because some of my favorite parts of your career are still coming up, and it's how did you get associated working with lenis?

Matt Wallach: 17:58

so I was for the longest time I was in a position of being pretty like. Permalamp is a phrase I I like to toss around where you know I was always working for um efilms dailies department. As soon as I started with them, I never went anywhere else. They kept me constantly busy, busy. You know, I for for it took like four years for me to finally be like I need to stop paying my local 600 dues. I shouldn't be a member of this anymore. I'm not going back to this, but uh. But they kept me consistently busy and part of that was the freelancer in me. You know, every three, four weeks before photography would end on a project, I would call up my dailies producer or you know daily sales or whoever, and I would say what's on the docket. Further, like what's what, what's coming up next, show me the list and and, and I kind of in a friendly way it was just like if you guys want to keep me around, put me on this, this, this or this, and I would look through the list of projects and be like these are the projects I would really love to work on. So one of those one year was Joy, the David O Russell film. Big fan of David O Russell's filmography, really. This was following American Hustle and I loved American Hustle. I said I would love to do this one. I love his films. I had never met Linus before this, but I knew that Linus had shot Hustle and I thought it looked gorgeous and yeah. So I got onto Joy, had a meeting and you know a lot of films. You know, sometimes before photography starts, when you know the DP comes in for camera tests and sits down with the DI colorist you know, depending on the film jobs, especially because it's a bit of a different animal, the DS colorist I would go and just kind of sit in and be a fly on the wall on the camera tests just to kind of understand what was going on before we kind of dove into photography because you're not getting CDLs, you just got to guess, you got the show lot and everything else is up to you, that's okay, that's interesting.

Jason Bowdach: 20:22

You know what it's so funny? Because I'm just not used to that grading style.

Matt Wallach: 20:26

Yeah. So you know I love film. I love still to this day. I film daily. They're some of the most fun I've ever had, because every morning is like Christmas morning. You're the first person to see the footage. You just you're just like you turn the stills over to the DP and it's just super exciting because you're like look what you did yesterday, look how gorgeous this is, because they everyone only has like an idea of what they shot.

Jason Bowdach: 20:50

They've been watching on the video monitor but they've never really seen what it looks like. They've got the video. Tap the tap, excuse me.

Matt Wallach: 20:55

Yeah, this nebulous concept of what was captured yesterday. So to be able to present that is really fun. It's very cool and there's a reference to it that you don't get with digital, because everyone's like, oh, this is what we got here, so we got the LUT and we got the CDLs and this is what we're seeing on set. So it is comparatively. It is you know, it's, you know there's less risk, it's less surprising.

Jason Bowdach: 21:20

I can see how you describe it as Christmas morning. It's sort of like opening up a gift every day.

Matt Wallach: 21:23

Yeah, exactly, and so on, joy, it was 20 to 40,000 feet of Christmas presents every day. It was a lot of film and it was a really tough job. We did some really beautiful stuff and Linus and I just hit it off really well after sitting in on those camera tests. And then we did some dailies tests and we were off to the races. But we had a really kind of unique approach to grading the dailies on joy, where we started with a black and white grade and then we resaturated, um, because lenis and and david were very inspired by older black and white films, so they okay, I mean, this was like let's try and nail the contrast and then we'll do, you know, let's do the luminance and then we'll do the chroma. And that was kind of how we did the dailies for that whole show, um, which we haven't done since. It was just for that one, because that was just how, you know, it was just an interesting way to look at it, it was kind of an experiment all the way through. So we we hit it off on that one and we got really into a rhythm of a system where, because it's film, I would kind of do a pass. Lenis would give me some vague notes sometimes, or other times he'd be like let me know, where do you think this should go? So he gave me a lot of freedom with the grade to kind of start and figure out where things should land, and we would go back and forth. I'd send him stills, I'd upload them and he had a at this time. This was in a world before the iPad Pro, so he had an iPad with a viewing app that we had calibrated with a probe that we sent out with him and he would look at stills on set and then he would, you know, text notes back and forth between takes, and I'd go and do another crack at it, make any revisions to scenes that needed revision, you know, and we'd go back and forth on the dailies grade and really just dial things in and go from there. So our entire relationship of how we work kind of started with that and this method of working which you know we did on and on through. We did joy, and then we did lala land, yeah, and then we did um battle the sexes, and we did first man, and we did this exact same approach with our dailies all the way through, each and every one of them, and it got to the point where he said, hey, we're putting all this work into the dailies and it's a thing where finishing colorists will maybe come up with a different approach or want to kind of diverge from that a little bit. And you're coming into this project and wanting to put your mark on it and Linus was starting to think why can't you just do both? Why can't you also do the finish? We can do the dailies and we can use the CDLs as our. You know we put so much effort into them that we don't want to throw them away, so let's use them as our starting point. And kind of dailies are kind of pre-DI and you know we adjust things as needed as the scenes cut together and go from there. And we talked about this for a long time and we tried to make it happen on Battle of the Sexes actually. But I did not have enough credits in finishing. The studio was not super comfortable, I was untested, unproven and I totally understood that. But that lit a fire under my butt to really start making time to do more finishing projects. Because I had been so deep in dailies that I just, like you know, I was traveling. I was all over the world doing dailies and here back in LA I was working crazy hours and just I didn't have time to do stuff. So I started taking on trying to figure out with the team at eFilm and stuff. I was like I really want to push into finishing and the ask from and stuff I was like I really want to push into finishing and the ask from Linus on Battle of the Sexes really helped with my ability to get our team behind me and help me kind of build the credits that I needed to be able to handle finishing on larger projects when opportunities arose. So I dove into finishing AFI thesis films and I started finishing sorts for organizations like Project Involve and some independent features came in and I got some of those independent features and any low-budget favor jobs that came in that were for a friend of a friend or someone at the company and I just happily would take anything that came, just so I could build up a resume, build up a reel and get the credits needed to be able to make those jobs. And then one day Linus called me and said hey, I booked a job. I talked to the producers they are totally cool with you doing the dailies and the DI, let's go. I was like cool, what is it? And he goes it's Bond, James Bond. So here we are.

Jason Bowdach: 25:51

Time to die baby.

Matt Wallach: 25:56

So James Bond. So here we are Time to die, baby. So that was a tremendous surprise and such an incredible experience. I've done a lot of large films and I have never seen a film that big that has let the filmmakers work with such creative autonomy. It was really amazing to see how much of a well-oiled machine it was but at the same time see Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson and Greg Wilson all giving Linus and Carrie this acknowledgement of like we hired you for a reason. So the fact that Linus was like this is my guy and I know he can do it and they're like great was just tremendous and I think speaks volumes of creatively, what that franchise has achieved.

Jason Bowdach: 26:41

I want to point something out here, because there's something about your story that I think is really sort of a unique sort of tale that used to happen a lot more in Hollywood, but it's not really happening now, and it's that you've come up through your career because others that have seen your work have liked it, have said I want to work with him. They have continued to like work with you and then they have advocated for you when they have moved along. I don't necessarily see that as common. Now it almost feels like every production is a new bridge that is being built from scratch, and I feel like what you've described is sort of like the old Hollywood, where DP's continue or directors continue to work with DP's. Dp's had their teams and this goes through all other departments to where there was a I don't know, maybe an unofficial network, and when they started to move up, they brought their team with them and I do feel like that fell apart a little bit. What are your thoughts on that?

Matt Wallach: 27:41

This all to me. There are certain DPs and I think, a lot of the, like you're saying, old Hollywood, a lot of the older, the crew that has been around for a while and the creatives who have been around the block. They've got their crew, they've got their team. When any of the big names shoot their movies, they call their guys and their guys call their guys and the gang gets back together. And that is, I think, in modern production. It feels a little I don't know if lost is the word, but it does feel like that tradition has kind of teetered out a little bit and feels like it kind of all came with the death of film. To me, and you know, in talking about working with film, when you work with film and I noticed this on set because I did a bit of loading also in my early camera days there's a almost a reverence among the entire crew when a production shoots on 1635, 6570, even, the larger the format, the more respect it seems to get. But on set, yeah, there's just this it's a different environment because you can't just go again and go again and go again and reload and hop a new mag in and in five seconds you're ready to shoot again. The culture surrounding digital is different and the expectations have shifted because of it. And I think part of that is because of you don't have this magical role of celluloid that you every night just cross your fingers and hope that it looks okay when you see it the next day. With digital, you just it's there and you know and it's quick and it's. You turn it over and you keep moving and I think that that has kind of caused a significant culture shift in the industry and embracing the new technologies around it. And there's a lot of great that has come from it from a technological side obviously, putting cameras in places that you could never have dreamed of putting cameras before, and all sorts of innovation surrounding it. Everyone's moving at and you know just the the understanding that this is a craft and it takes time and it takes attention and energy and everyone has to just be focused and be. You can't phone it in when you're shooting on film and and I think that's part of it is when you're shooting on film and you know that it requires so much of your energy and attention, you have to surround yourself with the people around you who you know are capable of giving it that energy and attention. So I think a part of it is I've been fortunate to work with a lot of film and I've also been fortunate to come up with a lot of cinematographers who came up working that way and who continue to work that way with digital. But that is not the common way to work nowadays, as in production, everyone's still you know, you've got your crew and it's still crazy on set that everyone is still going to try and get their people on board. But there's something to be said about how the culture shifted as we moved into digital capture.

Jason Bowdach: 30:44

I think that there's a little bit and I don't have anything, obviously, to prove this sort of how you describe the. It's a sort of undescribable nature. There's a little bit of a film magic, if I'm going to call it that. I sort of feel it is like everybody gathers around because it's difficult to describe. And you've talked about being a little bit of a computer nerd. I'm a huge computer nerd, so for me digital is really easy to understand. One plus one equals two. It's really. Here's the file. The file equals this. You put a LUT on it. It's very specific, everything works or it doesn't work, whereas film is a little, like you said, nebulous. You see it through the one tap. Hopefully it works out, and I'm sort of hoping that we can get a little bit back. You mentioned DPs that came up in the film age and still treat digital sort of like film. I love productions that do that and people that sort of act like that in that mentality, because we see productions be less specific about. I don't really care where my talent is coming from, it can be, in LA or New York or India or who cares which is the exact opposite of what you're talking about, which is I have a really specific team because I trust them and I don't need to watch or manage them, as opposed to I don't really care where my talent is, as long as it's cheap and affordable and it fits on the bill. It's this sort of mix in the middle of where do we fit?

Matt Wallach: 32:04

As you know, you work with all sorts of clients and you have the dream clients, you have the ones who you get along with, and then you also see eye-to-eye creative who also just do beautiful work, and so I'm very, very fortunate to have that and that kind of collaborator in quite a few clients really, and it's just, you know, it's a really fantastic and a very privileged place to be, I know, as an artist, to be able to have this kind of work and be able to work with this caliber of talent and be, you know, among that caliber of talent as well at Company 3. It does exist at all levels and I think that is a big thing. I've always kept in mind when I was getting started and working on, when I was starting finishing stuff and working on the shorts, and when I was working in production and working on reality pilots and just you know whatever, like you always have to.

Jason Bowdach: 32:55

just, we all started somewhere.

Matt Wallach: 33:00

Yeah, we all started somewhere, but you always have to keep an eye out that, even among those like I worked with a fantastic dp on these reality pilots who you know I then went on to, he bumped me up and had me operating b camera on some shorts and stuff it's all about finding those people and working with people who you respect and who respect you, and that exists at every level of production and every level in this industry and people you know. I think there's this slight misunderstanding. People think that that only exists at the tippy top, and that's hardly the case. And you find that at films with $300 million budgets. You find that on films with $300 million budgets. You find that on films with $50 million budgets, you find that with films that have less than a half a million dollars, it's at every level. Budget does not equal quality. Obviously, everyone needs to make a living, but there are good people at all levels and just because a film has no money doesn't mean that, oh, this producer is out to screw you and you know, no one here has got their heart in it. And those people exist and it's unfortunate and they exist in our industry and every industry. But, like you were saying, the projects that are more concerned about the bottom line than the people are very much there. But it's really important, I think, especially in a creative field, to maintain that outlook and that optimism of you know, just wanting to partner with the people who want to do good work and work with good people, and you need to seek it out. It's not just going to come to you. You have to put out the work and put out in not a catch-22 kind of way, but just always putting your best foot forward and always representing yourself and never falsifying who you are as an artist just in order to book a job, because that will ultimately frustrate you, frustrate the client and be a bit of a pockmark for everybody that you would have rather avoided. So you just need to keep your best foot forward and put yourself out there at face value.

Jason Bowdach: 35:00

You're looking for people that can feel like you, and it sounds like what you're suggesting is that to look for those. No matter what budget level you're looking at, look for future collaborators, whether it's a director, producer, dp. Look for these people that share these values that you have and eventually they may work themselves up. Maybe they're not currently at the higher budget level now, but somebody has to work their way up to the higher budget levels in the future. If you look at where a lot of these films came from, obviously Roger Deakins has been working at this level for a while, but the director of Saltburn she's brand new. This is her second film. Yeah, emerald Fennell for a while, but the director of Saltburn she's brand new. This is her second film. Emerald Fennell, emerald Fennell. So obviously talent comes literally bursting through the door all the time. So you just need to look, as you're suggesting, for new collaborators that share the creative values that you have. If I'm understanding what you're suggesting, Absolutely.

Matt Wallach: 35:54

I mean, there's a film I did a couple of years ago that I worked on because a friend of mine from college who is a commercial producer like short form commercial music videos, that sort of thing reached out and said, hey, I've got a DP I've done a lot of work with who. I told him that you did no Time to Die and that he should reach out. He shot a feature. You know, she connected us. So this DP, dylan Schneider, reached out to me about his feature, the Crusades, which was a real low-budget feature about a boy school in Chicago. He was like Dylan was like I got nothing to lose. This guy did James Bond, but hey, I'm going to reach out to him and see. And we chatted and you know I'm a Chicago guy, so we hit it off on that. And he was like would you have any interest in doing the feature? And I was like, show me a cut, let's see what's going on. And I looked at it and it's beautiful, he's a super talented DP. And it was peak COVID, when the work was really slow, nothing was going happening, and so leverage that and we made it happen and he's a really good friend now and we've done a lot of work together commercial stuff, fashion stuff, music videos, narrative so yeah, it's just always. You always have to be the lookout for those people and be just open to that, because you never know when a job like that's going to come along where you're like. This is, this is good people, this is good craft. It doesn't matter if it's not a huge feature.

Jason Bowdach: 37:19

That's amazing, and it sounds like you've earned not only a friend, but a collaborator that you're going to continue working with along both of your careers, which is amazing.

Matt Wallach: 37:26

Yeah, absolutely.

Jason Bowdach: 37:27

As a colorist, working with somebody for the first time is always a little challenging. You have to figure out what they mean. What do they mean when they say cooler or warmer? So when you're working with somebody over and over again, it just becomes easier and easier to work with them on each further production. So it's always nice when you get these established relationships where it's like, hey, let's do this again?

Matt Wallach: 37:48

Absolutely no. It is so nice and part of what makes the Saltburn. We did the Saltburn DI. It was two weeks, it was a quick DI. Saltburn we did the Saltburn DI. It was two weeks, it was a quick DI, it was real easy. But Linus and I have worked together for 10 years now so we have a shorthand and Saltburn was the first one where I actually was not able to been in contact with the dailies colorist over at Company 3 London, deutchin Margevsky, who has done a lot of dailies for Linus when he shot stuff over there. I was on Blade Runner when Linus shot Nutcracker, so Deutchin did the dailies on Nutcracker out there and Deutchin also. There's a film we have coming up next year that we're going to be in DI in the summer, but they filmed this past summer and Deutchin also handled all the dailies on that. So Deutchin and Linus have had a relationship and Deutchin also understands how Linus likes to work and so I was in touch with Deutchin and in touch with Linus and we had just a shared stills album that we were just all able to access. So I was supervising dailies remotely but Deutchen was the boots on the ground who was handling everything and so his, you know, on Saltburn it was, we still ran it the way that we run it with with Linus's dailies, because we put so much work into that. So Deutchen's CDLs are, you know, node one, and everything else we're building on top of and there's a couple scenes that we had to completely re-engineer for the sake of just making the color work the way that we wanted it to, and obviously some stuff to rebalance in context. But again, everything is we were able to work so quickly because lenis, you guys are speaking the same language already yeah, and lenis just knows exactly what he's after when he's exposing his film. Deutsch and lenis are on the same page and we get in the room and we're all on the same page and ready to go. So it's a quick DI because we're able at this point to just be decisive and everyone understands the image before we start the finish, a couple questions about Saltburn.

Jason Bowdach: 39:46

I do want to point out that is why these two-week DIs work. A lot of people hear things oh, it's a seven-day DI, 10-day DI, two-week DI. These short di's work because there is perfect sync between production and post color. You guys have been either working together or, as you've described, you guys are perfectly in sync so that when the film arrives for final color there's not hiccups over conform or vfx. Literally, you guys are handing off the baton and running at the exact same speed.

Matt Wallach: 40:15

There's always hiccups over VFX, but the pandemic just decimated the VFX industry and everything is backed up and VFX are always delayed. And Assault Burn is one of the few shows I've done since 2021 where we haven't had to shut down for a couple of weeks and wait for VFX stragglers to roll in. It's just what happens now. Everything with VFX stragglers to roll in, it's just what happens now. Everything with VFX is typically all the VFX vendors are backlogged and they're understaffed and everything just gets delivered a little later than you initially anticipate. So I always encourage, especially on smaller budget shows. now, sorry to get sidetracked, but I always encourage let's wait for VFX before we start DI, because it's always gonna take them longer than you think it is minor sidetrack but I think that's really interesting.

Jason Bowdach: 41:02

On the lower budget side I, when I have films I'm almost used to waiting, but I hadn't thought that post covid that that had such an effect on uh higher. And obviously if you have half the film is vfx, you're gonna expect to be waiting and swapping those off. But that's very interesting to hear that VFX as an industry has essentially moved into a delayed state.

Matt Wallach: 41:24

I mean, that's my read on it. I don't know whether that is the case or not, but I do know a lot of from firsthand. I have a lot of friends who were in the VFX industry that had to move on to other work or got laid off because of the pandemic. And it's just, it's a tough thing to recover from. People got used to being home, working from home, and it's hard with especially on the bigger shows with high security stuff to have the infrastructure to be able to do that.

Jason Bowdach: 41:49

I'm going to take what you said and say it may be worth slightly re-engineering your workflows in terms of doing what you say, of trying to suggest to clients that we do bring in and wait for your VFX first. I think that's actually an amazing suggestion that actually I think I'm going to do for my workflows until the VFX industry can sort of even itself out a little bit. That's a great suggestion for everybody who's been having their productions thrown off by VFX a little bit more than they have in the past couple of years, because I certainly have. I have to ask you a couple of questions about Saltburn and really sort of film in general, because I'm sure myself and a lot of people are listening We've maybe graded film I don't know a couple of times, but you're in it all the time. So the question that I want to ask you is if you were to compare sort of film and digital, how would you really compare these when you're grading them? Like the feel of grading Digital?

Matt Wallach: 42:41

obviously is out of the box. It's kind of more neutral and just there. For all of the reasons of being able to monitor it having a DIT, you know, having you know, looking at it through your LUT, knowing where your exposure is landing From an exposure standpoint, digital is usually just it's there and it's good. And it's much more straightforward. Film it's more fun, all of the like. The intangibles. You have the organic nature of it and the physical processing and you know if the bath is a slightly different temperature one day than the next day that's going to affect exposure. And if you're shooting on different, different stocks you have to balance the contrast and saturation between the. You know the 250d and 500t. And are you doing push processing or pull processing? Does the film have an inherent slight tint to it from push or pull processing at the lab that you have to balance out? It's not that you wrestle with film more to get it into place, but it takes a little more wrangling than just looking at it and being like, oh, I'm just gonna compensate for the ND filter and then I can put a little creative grade on here and boom, digital you're done. There's a little more brain engagement that goes into grading film. That kind of ties into what I was saying earlier, just about the slowing down and the reverence and that mentality shift that you have to take for a film, where you have to be more thoughtful about it and you can't just be like a great to take one ripple, the great, across every take in your dailies and then just check and make sure there's no exposure shift and be like these are all consistent. We're good when all of a sudden they reload the camera and the next roll of films from a different batch and the next roll of film is from a different batch and it's a little more magenta. So you take the magenta out but now your shadows are a little more green. You have to compensate for that and so there's just so much more thought that has to go into film and that makes it so much more enjoyable for me and it just I don't know the way that my eye works and I think this like oh oh, you know the old mantra just balance, for the skin tones is from the is is absolutely color grading 101. But like when film, when you get the skin tones nailed, you're like I get it now. Film just captures skin so beautifully and there's it, there's. There's something about it that digital can't ever get. No matter how lovely of a print emulation lot you have or whatever color science you're doing under the hood, the organic nature, the stacked rgb layers of film do capture light in such a way that it looks incredible compared to digital when you're working with film.

Jason Bowdach: 45:13

What type of color management are you using, because you are still doing both for SDR and HDR.

Matt Wallach: 45:19

Correct. So the way that I've always worked and that we work at E-Film, company 3, and, I would imagine, many of the bigger posthouses, because of the workflows just required in finishing shows, the scale that we work on, we work in camera native color space. I prefer to. I I mean we do aces shows. There are shows that do aces, that are, you know, a lot of very vfx driven shows will do an aces pipeline but I prefer to work camera native color space and then we have a show lot that handles our it's, our output, transform a it's, our display, transform it's, everything all in one. And that way we have a rec 7 and 9 version that's used for dailies that goes to set, you know, and a digital production so the dit can monitor with it on set. Editorial has it baked into their dailies. Vfx has distributed it so they can see vfx with cdl values correctly when they're when they're working and then theatrical for the di we have a P3 version.

Jason Bowdach: 46:20

So it's all LUT-based color management essentially.

Matt Wallach: 46:23

It is all LUT-based, and then we do our trims for whatever other delivery formats we have after our hero format.

Jason Bowdach: 46:32

So usually, obviously, if it's a digital camera, we have the math from the manufacturer, but when you're shooting on film, what is the camera?

Matt Wallach: 46:40

native color space. So we scan everything to Cineon Log.

Jason Bowdach: 46:44

Oh, okay, so Codex.

Matt Wallach: 46:46

Cineon Log. Yeah, all of our film scans are Codex Cineon Log. We have 4K Scanity scanners in-house that we use for all of our film jobs. So we scanned. Once we used to work with, you know, back in back in the day, pre-scanity, pre, when 4k releases were much less common we we had, we had an array of airy scanners that were all color matched and calibrated and we would do a 2k single flash scan for dailies and then rehang the nag and do a 2K double flash or a 4K double flash for DI on the selects. Once we would get those EDLs in for the cut or for pulls or for anything.

Jason Bowdach: 47:24

But now you do a scan once, a 4K scan once.

Matt Wallach: 47:28

Yeah, 4k scan once has been our usual dailies workflow. It works great, and we just archive everything to LTO and then the neg can get vaulted and never hung again, unless there's something we find that is not right, Really wrong.

Jason Bowdach: 47:40

Yeah, I mean a lot of people are I'll call it confused because film can be very nebulous. There's no mathematical, but in this case there is. Cineon log has been around for quite a long time. Once you guys scan it, it goes from being nebulous in film to a very specific, measurable standard.

Matt Wallach: 47:57

From a computational standpoint, from a strictly this is image processing standpoint as soon as we scan it, it's the same as if it was an Alexa, if it was a RED, if it was a Venice it is. We've got DPX frames or EXRs and we work the same way that we would work with log footage from any other camera.

Jason Bowdach: 48:16

That's an interesting pipeline to know about in that it's just as reliable as any other digital camera. That's. We've got the pipelines now that are reliable, that you can do SDR and HDR with film. Digital makes no difference.

Matt Wallach: 48:29

Yeah, absolutely Once you. Once you scan it, as long as you have a, you know, high quality scan, you treat it the same same thing.

Jason Bowdach: 48:43

So I the reason that I asked that question is there is a uh, a misnomer going around that uh, you have to scan things multiple times because of a lot of the remasters going on, or you have to.

Matt Wallach: 48:48

There there's a lot of misinformation things that are being remastered now that are, you know, say, films from the 70s or 80s. You have to keep in mind that all that exists of those are maybe what's been going around might be a hd scan print or something like you don't have. You know so. So anything that's being remastered to 4k, you have to scan it again, because 4k didn't exist 20 years ago when they scanned it digitally the first time. It there is that element to it, um, where you know remasters. You have to do that and then you will have to grade it and you just have to. If it's a film where the filmmaker is around and is attached to it and is supervising it, then maybe they'll supervise the grade and they will maybe make some creative choices that are different, because they weren't able to make those creative choices. They weren't technically possible when they initially did the film. If the filmmaker's not involved, it might just be. Here's a reference. Make it look as close to this as you can. It's interesting restoration work. I would love to do more of it, but because you don't really have, you just kind of have to find a way to reverse engineer what was done in the past, cause it's not, there's, no, there's no's no software, there's no, there's no project file to go back to and look at, like whatever it was doesn't exist and you just have to eyeball it and figure it out, which is really fun problem solving. But yeah, I mean, if you're scanning something now, you just scan it 4k and don't hurry about it. Just you, just, you always. Just, if you spent the money to shoot on film, it would behoove you to get the highest quality possible scan so that you have something that is as future-proofed as possible, because if you're not especially if you're, you know shooting projects on your own and you're not a studio and you don't have climate controlled vaults and there's no guarantee that that neg is going to be great if you try to rehang it in 15 years and try and scan it and whatever the current viewing technology is.

Jason Bowdach: 50:39

So just Scan it right and be done.

Matt Wallach: 50:40

Yeah, scan it right and be done.

Jason Bowdach: 50:42

Otherwise, we might be in the same shape 30, 50 years from now as we are with a lot of these films from the 70s and 80s where we're problem solving to get the best version of it.

Matt Wallach: 50:50

Absolutely. I mean still 30, 50 years from now. I'm sure that you know colorists then are going to be facing the same problems, though, and being like you know what's Resolve going to look like in 30 years? You're not going to be, you're always. You know, restoration work is so interesting because you're always kind of Reinventing the wheel. Yeah, being like, how do I get here, how do I figure it? You know.

Jason Bowdach: 51:10

It's fascinating. That could be a whole nother conversation and I don't want to keep you for too long. But if people want to learn more about you, if they want to follow you on social media, where can we find you?

Matt Wallach: 51:21

Find me on Instagram. Uh, captain, cinema, just all lowercase, no spaces, no underscores, no dots, no nothing. And that's really I try not to be the only social media I'm really active on. I feel like I'm getting old because I'm just like losing tolerance for it. But yeah, find me there. I'm always happy to chat, answer questions. I think the biggest, the most important thing is there are no stupid questions, especially when it comes to color grading. Have to to what you're saying earlier about, you know, working with clients for the first time and figuring out what they mean when they say they want it warmer, they want it colder, like you have to interpret that and figure it out and, and you know, sometimes you have to be like what do you mean? Which is, when you think about it, it's a stupid question, but it's. You know it's not because everyone has a different interpretation of what anything is. Color is such a subjective thing. So if anybody has questions about color grading, I'm always happy to talk shop and there are no stupid questions.

Jason Bowdach: 52:19

Fantastic. Well, I will have all of Matt's links in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I've been Jason Bowdach for Color and Coffee and we will see you guys in the next episode. Happy grading, everybody. Thanks for having me, and that's a wrap. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, youtube and your podcast app of choice. Search for at Color and Coffee or at Color and Coffee Podcast, and join the conversation. If you're using Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please leave a review. Huge thanks to FSI and Pixel Tools for sponsoring the show Until the next episode.