Diving Deep: Underwater Color Grading and Social Media Savvy with Jake Pierrelee

0:00:01 - Jake Pierrelee
I don't care too much about the following. I don't care too much about the likes or anything. They're a byproduct, most of the time, of me putting that care, that effort into what I post. 

0:00:24 - Jason Bowdach
 Oh, okay, discussion, strap in. Grab your mug. You're listening to Color and Coffee. I'm so excited to welcome today to this episode Jake Pierli. He is a Louisiana based DP, he's a colorist and he is a trainer. So welcome to this episode, jake, so happy to have you. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. So, first and most importantly, the clearly the most important question of the episode what are you drinking today All? 

0:01:26 - Jake Pierrelee
right, that was the one question I wasn't prepared for. We've just got the Ghost. Let's see what flavor is this one? It's a Ghost energy drink. I've kind of been on these for a while. It's a sour watermelon or heads flavor And it is definitely, definitely pronounced. My wife hates these, but they're my favorites. 

0:01:44 - Jason Bowdach
Well, when you need something to get you through the day, that definitely sounds like it's going to get you there. 

0:01:48 - Jake Pierrelee
It's a good kick. a lot of focus, So keeps me dialed in. 

0:01:52 - Jason Bowdach
Man, that thing would melt my stomach. Power to you, man. 

0:01:55 - Jake Pierrelee
They're intense Yeah. 

0:01:57 - Jason Bowdach
I bet I got the. I'm going to sip it on the traditional Starbucks Blonde espresso here with a little bit of almond milk. Doesn't too crazy, but That's a good call. That's a good call, so I'm really excited to have you on the podcast here. I've been a follow of yours on Instagram for quite a while And I've really been a follow of your work. A couple of things that have popped out to me is your incredible use of strong hues, especially like a teal orange kind of look. But before I even sort of jump into your work, i'd like to hear a little bit more about your background. How did you get started as a colorist? How'd you get started as a DP? Really like, how did you get into this business? We all sort of fall into our roles as colorists, so I'd love to hear a little bit more about how'd you become a colorist. 

0:02:39 - Jake Pierrelee
Yeah, i think one interesting characteristic from all the colorists I've heard from is that no one actually like started off seeking out to be a colorist. They started off in one role and it kind of transitioned in some way or form. And for me, living in Louisiana, there's not a lot of big projects around here, there's not a lot of bigger agencies, there's nobody shooting you know high dollar commercials, music videos or films, at least not anymore in my area. But growing up I was always shooting my own videos and editing them, just doing every step of the process, and I consistently found myself really, really enjoying the process of taking log footage as I started shooting with more and more high-end cameras and turning that into a linear, viewable image that had its own style. I love just the visual art of storytelling through color. 

And then once I discovered that that was, you know, its own role that I could pursue remotely and I could start working with people that I looked up to that were in LA or Chicago, new York, across the world. One of my first remote clients was in Australia And that concept not only just, i mean blew my mind and got me really, really excited for the opportunity to work on bigger projects. I just loved doing it, and so I started working on my skills as a colorist getting more professionally dialed in, i guess you could say, and started building up a client list and a group of kind of interested parties that I could go to I start working with as a beginner And of course that's continually grown and every art today. 

Yeah, so it's been a fun process, brick by brick, building that house, but it's been a blast. 

0:04:19 - Jason Bowdach
That is fantastic, man. I love to hear when people literally find things that they love and then they dive into that deeper. So one of the things that I am curious about is you're both a DP and a colorist. Did you get into being a cinematographer first and then you were interested in coloring your own material, or did you get into photographing afterwards? 

0:04:43 - Jake Pierrelee
So, starting off, i mean I shot a lot of my own stuff growing up, me and a good friend of mine who I still work with today. We grew up together, basically just brothers, and the stuff we shot obviously started off real bad and over time continued to get better, ended up doing a few paid jobs out of high school and it was enough interest and enough passion I was good enough to wear out of high school going into college. I was able to turn it into a business where I was shooting commercials, event and recap videos, a lot of the same stuff that any young videographer, dp, is working on. And so, yes, at the first that was all shooting my own stuff And then it worked more into the YouTube space. I met a friend of mine by the name of Gavin who had a very small YouTube channel based on the car scene A lot of drag racing and stuff And I had the idea that we could take the content he was creating for a smart audience and mixing my skill set with a we'll call it a underprivileged market when it comes to videography. There wasn't a lot of great visual storytelling in the car YouTube space. I thought we could blend those two passions and make something really interesting. From there we started going way over the top in cinematography, even if it was bad starting off And just using that visual storytelling techniques to deliver content. That was based around taking cars out, racing them, breaking them and then fixing them, and so that was where I really got to start being more creative and actually putting my work in front of a bigger audience. That channel grew to I think it was well over 600,000, 750,000 subscribers by the time I left And that was when I started kind of refocus on the cinematography storytelling aspect of things from a freelance standpoint and starting a business that would work on commercial projects, doing more documentary style work and hopefully commercials. 

But then COVID hit And that was when I kind of had to shift gears. I'd already been doing color for a while, but not so much remotely or not so much for other clients necessarily, and so through COVID I started to transition having to work remotely because we couldn't go anywhere, and yeah, honestly I think a lot of it to that initial two week lockdown that we had, forcing me to transition and kind of retarget what my business goals were and reevaluate how can I make this sustainable? And of course, remote work was the answer there, but it wasn't just remote, it was also that. You know it's my favorite part of the process was always coloring And so, yeah, the two, just really the situation and my skill set, my desires, all kind of blended together to kind of blame me in this position as a freelance colorist. 

0:07:23 - Jason Bowdach
Yeah, man, i can completely understand your story there. It sounds pretty similar to my own, where I had to make some big decisions about I was doing something in my free time and sort of wandered into being a colorist and then eventually decided this was my favorite part of the process as well and had to make that big decision of is this something I want to do permanently. So I can completely understand and congratulations to taking that big initiative during the pandemic and deciding to this was going to be something you're going to do seriously because it clearly has worked out quite well for you based off your social media. 

0:07:59 - Jake Pierrelee
Yeah, i mean it's something that I can't take too much credit for, because I was not necessarily forced into that position, but it was a result of variables around me and I've been very blessed to have met the people that I've met with, to have been given the opportunities by the people that have given me opportunities and help me make a name for myself in that industry and build somewhat of a reputation that lends itself to be trusted by bigger, more I guess, well-rounded individuals, entities and agencies, and so it's been a lot of kind of resume building. 

0:08:31 - Jason Bowdach
Absolutely. Let's talk about some of your approaches to social media, because that's one of the things that originally impressed me about you your Instagram account and encouraged me to bring you on the show is I wanted to talk to you about your social media strategies. I'll be perfectly honest, i'm just blown away by your Instagram. As a colorist who has been in the business before Instagram really sort of took hold and has sort of watched it essentially become our resume, i'll be perfectly honest, it's overwhelming sometimes to see people on Instagram and to see so much great work. So, to talk to somebody who is doing quite well on Instagram, i'd love to hear sort of some of your strategies or some of the way that you approach your own social media. 

0:09:18 - Jake Pierrelee
Yeah, well, there's a couple sides to it and I think my answer is probably going to lend itself to be a little bit paradoxical, and what I mean by that is I care about Instagram, i care what the content looks like, i care what kind of image I put out about my work and the type of work I do, the style I guess you can say possess and that goes into my work. But I also don't care too much about the following. I don't care too much about the likes or anything. They're a byproduct, most of the time, of me putting that care, that effort, into what I post. I'm not going crazy over algorithms and everything. There's certain trends I'll try and hop on every now and then, but only when I think it's entertaining or fun to do it. So it's not super disciplined, if I'm being honest. 

But I always have been able to kind of recognize trends, figure out and kind of just predictable, figuring out what's going to work, what may not work, and sometimes I'm surprised by a lot of times the stuff I put out that I think is gonna do really well just doesn't, and then stuff that I didn't expect to do well at all just blows up, and I think that comes from repetition, just constantly putting out more media, sharing as much as you can, learning that way what works and what doesn't, but especially with the way something has gone over the past several years, it rewards consistency. It rewards multiple posts over a consistent period of time, and I think you have to have 100 posts to have one that blows up. And so that's something I don't do very well. I don't post a ton. I don't post very consistently. 

I've kind of gotten to the point where I just post when I want to, and that's what I think has been most sustainable for me, because through it all it has to be sustainable. Same thing as a diet if you're trying to lose weight or gain weight, whatever your goal is, you have to do something that's consistent if you want to maintain that desirable outcome. And social media is the same way. You can get burnt out really quickly. You can really mess with your head when you're just going after a certain number of likes and if you don't get that number, you feel like you failed, your work isn't good enough. So I try to maintain a healthy balance and a healthy respect for what it is and what it isn't. So that's kind of my outlook on it. 

0:11:31 - Jason Bowdach
That's a great way of looking at it. Is it something that you're doing per project? Are you scheduling something per week to just sort of sit down and pump out some stuff, or it's just you know what? I'm gonna sit down and do some content now. 

0:11:46 - Jake Pierrelee
I think my schedule's so unpredictable unpredictable just, with deadlines either shifting or moving or, you know, meetings falling here and there, and then I decide to shoot content that goes on a different channel for whatever reason. I just filled the gaps. I think it's. one thing I'm trying to adopt now is more productive procrastination. So if I get bored with a certain project here, i don't wanna start on something else. I'll take that time and say, okay, what can I do to still be productive in this time where I'm putting off doing something else? 

So that may be organizing a post, figuring out what the I don't know. the next kind of real trend would be or finding a good audio to use, and a lot of times it just comes from scrolling and I'll hear a certain sound or see a certain reel and think, oh, i could kind of adopt that and manipulate it a little bit to fit my genre, my niche, and try and create something that way. A lot of times it's just spontaneous ideas. I'll have the idea, go find the media I need to fit it and then figure out how to post it. 

0:12:46 - Jason Bowdach
I love that Productive procrastination, attempting to use your own negative tendencies towards a positive goal. 

0:12:54 - Jake Pierrelee
That's a great creative. I'm a big procrastinator too, so I can hopefully be pretty productive through that. 

0:12:59 - Jason Bowdach
Or at least attempt to use those tendencies towards a positive end, which is clearly what you're doing, instead of sitting around and watching YouTube or Netflix or whatever streaming service you are attuned to to the end of the day, exactly. One of the other topics that I wanted to jump on now is you have not only a company, but you run a couple of different things. What you have? a color grading course, you have a shop. You're quite a busy guy. So what are you planning right now? What are your goals going forward right now? 

0:13:33 - Jake Pierrelee
Yeah, i mean right now. You mentioned the course. That's one of the things I'm still trying to dial in. We've got a good group of members and students already, so I'm trying to make sure I devote enough attention to those students that are already there and answering their questions. Just before our call, we had a 30 minute call I just had with another student who was asking me questions that were kind of specific And he was messaging me And I said, hey, let's go ahead and hop on a call, we'll answer it that way Just ways that I think if I've been able to get a mentor that could just directly answer my questions, in a lot of way that did. 

That's something that's invaluable, because so many times I'm sure you've experienced this and I still experience it now where I'm working through a problem and I need a solution, that I can't just search on YouTube or Google and find the answer to whether it's just because it's so nuanced that that information is not out there or if the solutions I found aren't working. It's so much just of a stress relief to be able to ask someone that you know, respect and trust and get the answer that way. So that's one of the things I'm spending a lot of free time on right now is better designing the course, taking questions that I get frequently, building them into new tutorials and lessons there, of course, through YouTube as well not that everything is kind of split up into a course versus YouTube material. It's just that usually in the course I go a lot more in depth because I could have more foreknowledge presented for the topic, because we're following a linear train of thought, so there can be a little bit more preliminary information that can be added to those types of lessons. So there's the advantage there. But it's not really so much of a gatekeeping tactic But one big area of what I'm working on. 

I do have the shop where you can purchase digital downloads and some merchandise that I thought was cool and I designed that a few years ago. But that's really easy. Once you build a product and launch it, it kind of runs itself. I don't really do much promotion with that. I think there's a couple of videos on my channel where I talk about the product itself and show you if you want to use it. Here's how. But that's fairly minimal. And then the other big chunk of my time of course is working on actual color projects through clients. 

0:15:31 - Jason Bowdach
So one of the projects that we were talking about recently was a really, really great piece from a company called Coral Gardeners, and we were talking about it offline And I'd like for you to talk about it a little bit. It's a really interesting piece that you told me about. It has a lot of mixed material. You want to talk about it a little bit. 

0:15:51 - Jake Pierrelee
Yeah, it's definitely got a lot of mixed material. A lot of the best footage was from Raikimoto. This was shot, i want to say, coming up on two years ago now And it just made its way into the post-production stage, i think, starting in well, for me at least November last year. It's in November 2022. And that's when I first got my hands on it. It's a very cool piece focusing on the Coral Gardeners. It's directed and kind of hosted by Sam Potter, directed by Drew Longest, and it's a really fun piece that I got to work on. 

Telling that story And what was, i think, one of the more interesting aspects of my role in that film that Sam really had a role in directing. 

No-transcript, obviously, it all looked the same, but we needed it to feel more upset, feel more bland, bleached and kind of dead, because we're showcasing the stark difference between all this liveliness around the waters there, but then, when you go underneath and you see all the death and the destruction of these just dead, basically bleached corals, we needed that to feel different. We wanted to highlight how contrasted those two environments were. So we spent a lot of time and the first draft I sent him he was like cool, but it's not enough. It needs to feel more dead, and so that did come out in the final pass. But it was really cool because that was a project that, aside from just building a good look for the piece as a whole, really pushed me to work on my storytelling devices when it came to working with groups, working with shared nodes and really figuring out what a certain scene needs to make it feel the way the director wants the audience to feel. 

0:17:36 - Jason Bowdach
Isn't it amazing when we can take all of those toys and finally put it towards a narrative purpose? 

0:17:42 - Jake Pierrelee
Yeah, because Resolve gives you all these different tools and sometimes it's overwhelming. I only need a few of these, but every now and then there's a certain instance where you have to have that certain tool that's way down in the menus and you need to know how to use it, how to utilize it in your workflow, to take advantage of it, because it really does come in handy when its purpose is actually finally needed. So, yeah, it was really fun getting to experiment and test different tools that aren't that I'm not jumping to that often finding new ways to use new tools that, like I said, don't use a lot, and I love being pushed creatively to get to that level where I'm having to experiment more and it's not just immediately jumping to a certain tool. I'm having to think before actually going to it. And then, yeah, like you mentioned, it was a massive mixed media project. Just due to the circumstances of the timeline of that post-production process, we didn't have the opportunity to send over all the raw files with an XML, have everything conformed that way. So we just did a bacon blade, basically a ProRes Quad 4, got everything conformed that way. 

But of course, if you're familiar with that process, you don't necessarily know which camera all the different clips are coming from. And so we had, i think, five or six different cameras all in all, and we knew three or four of them. Yeah, we knew four of the cameras. There was one or two that were kind of a toss up just because of where everyone was at the time, how much of a scramble it was. At a certain point We couldn't get that information, so I just had to kind of build in my own and work from there. So obviously no project is perfect. Everyone comes to their own challenges to overcome, and I think as a colorist your job is to make sure nobody else feels the burden of those challenges. They kind of take that stress off of everyone else, and sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. 

0:19:30 - Jason Bowdach
So that actually leads me to a great question. So when you get in this situation and you have, as you mentioned, three or four different cameras that you were able to get the information for, and then you have this one that you just don't have any information for And I know a lot of colorists that would say you know what, I can't work with this, Or there's nothing I'm going to be able to do How do you deal with the client in that situation? 

0:19:50 - Jake Pierrelee
Well, i mean, if you look at it this way, there's certain times where I mean what? if you're working on a documentary for Netflix and there's some archival footage that's being brought in from who knows where, if you don't know where that footage is from, you have two options. You can build your own contrast and saturation, which is probably going to be technically inaccurate, but you can get to a desirable outcome. Or you can just throw your hands up in the air and say I can't figure it out, equip. So I think the right decision is pretty easy to make there And there's no reason not to go that route. 

If it's one or the other, obviously the option to choose is to figure out how to build your own contrast there, and it helps having a little bit of a technical background, understanding of color spaces and how to kind of build your own transform. Whether it's technically accurate or mildly inaccurate, that's okay if you're getting a good enough outcome. At the end of the day, that's all that matters. And sometimes, like I said, that's all you can do. You can try and go down the pipeline, figure out who shot it and do some investigative research if you can, but again, that's not always an option for a number of different reasons, that may not be possible. Yeah, like I said, you got to do what you got to do. 

0:20:58 - Jason Bowdach
Yeah, and then when you get into the situations where you don't know, hopefully you have access to communities like yours like the colors, blueprint, mixing, light, lift, gamma, gain and then you can reach out and bring in the community to help you with stuff like that Exactly. 

0:21:11 - Jake Pierrelee
Yeah, Like thanks. 

0:21:14 - Jason Bowdach
Absolutely. One of the things I did want to ask you because you caught my curiosity is what did you end up doing with some of that Coral footage to get it looking more bleached? 

0:21:24 - Jake Pierrelee
The first step I did was try and work with just improper input transforms and find one that got me close. Of course I just experimented with it to see if we could, because I was given a hint at what it was. I tried it out and I constantly was noticing some improper hues there and some mistreatment of the highlights and shadows. I was able to find out that wasn't it. I built my own through a custom curve and playing with the RGB mixer just a little bit to shift the primaries around and add in saturation that way, which I don't think anybody will ever notice, for the most part If me. going back at it, there's a bunch of things I wish I could have changed and continue to refine, make a little bit better. I think most people will never notice. That's not an excuse to be more relaxed about it, but it is, at the end of the day, the truth of the situation. There's only so much you can do in certain scenarios and you just have to do the best you can. 

0:22:26 - Jason Bowdach
I'll admit that I don't think I ever look back at a job, especially at the Node Tree, and go. I would have done that differently, especially the more time that passes. I looked at it and I can't tell which shots are the ones that are technically improperly transformed. It does look great Then. The one other thing that I wanted to dig in the weeds a little bit is to get that coral looking more sad, as you were calling it. What did you end up relying on? 

0:22:53 - Jake Pierrelee
Let's see. I think part of it was Color Boost. Then there's actually a third-party plugin I use that has an option for basically it's a Bleach Bypass. look, i blended a Bleach Bypass with a few different saturation tools as well as actually the Color Warper, which is not a tool I go to very often, but in certain instances, when you're talking about underwater footage, there's a pretty strong shift to blue. I locked down some of the blue channels and then took a radius of saturation and desaturated it at all. I just brought it all in but locked the blues off so they wouldn't be affected too much because I didn't want to desaturate the blues. The goal was for it to feel blue and desaturated, to keep the underwater feeling and also so as to not take away the color from the water so much that it felt jarring from happier underwater footage to the desaturated, bleached underwater footage. 

0:23:53 - Jason Bowdach
You wanted a bleached, monochromatic water. 

0:23:55 - Jake Pierrelee
Yes, at first I thought it was going to be too much, but the director Sam said he loved it. We actually took it even further after the first pass that I sent him. 

0:24:03 - Jason Bowdach
Got a level when the client takes your look that you thought was a 10. It says 12,. 

0:24:07 - Jake Pierrelee
please It doesn't happen very often, but I was really excited in this case. That was the way we wanted to go with it. 

0:24:13 - Jason Bowdach
Well, it's a beautiful piece and it's on a really, really interesting subject matter. We'll definitely have a link in the notes for everybody that wants to take a look at it. I definitely recommend that you view this incredible YouTube video on Carl Gardner's Jake where, if people wanted to find you on Instagram, on YouTube, where can we find and learn more about you? If we wanted to learn more about your color grading course, learn more about your work in general? 

0:24:34 - Jake Pierrelee
So Instagram it's pretty simple. The handle is JVKE, Jake, but the A is a V, And then on YouTube, same thing JVKEP, So last name's purely. So YouTube, they already have the JVKE taken, So I didn't get lucky with that handle. But you can also just search Jake purely colorist or color grading tutorials on YouTube. You'll find it that way. But yeah, that's the main two channels I'm most active on And yeah, YouTube and Instagram are the main two. But not too much sense going and checking me out on Twitter. Haven't posted there in a few years. But if you're interested on Instagram and YouTube, that's where to find me. 

0:25:09 - Jason Bowdach
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today And for coloring coffee. I'm Jason Bodak and I will see you guys in the next episode. Have a good one and happy grading, And that's our show. Thank you so much to our guests, Jake, purely for coming on. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, YouTube or your podcast, Apple choice. If you're using Apple podcast or Spotify, please leave us a review. It helps us quite a bit. If you are looking for adventure resolve tools, please be sure to visit our sponsor, Pixel Tools. We'll see you guys in two weeks with another great interview. Be safe and happy grading. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page