Navigating the Craft of the Finishing Artist with Tashi Trieu

I think I've done really, really good work on something. I think this is as far as I can take it and they see it and they're like, okay, that's great, but like let's go more. And early on I felt like, oh, this is an indictment of your work, this isn't good enough. Oof, like I just expended all of my like emotional, mental energy to get to this point. You're saying we need to take it like double as far Now, far Now. 

It's like I understand how this works and I might still get something to the point where I'm happy with it, but ultimately, you know it's the filmmaker's film. If they think we need to go further, then we need to go further and it doesn't matter Like it doesn't matter if I took it to here and I was happy with it. It is not an indictment of me personally and it's understanding when to take things personally to roll with creative decisions or even creative indecisions. You know everyone can roll their eyes and say, well, yeah, like I had my version and then we went through all these iterative versions and then we went right back at my version. Lol, you know that's directors for you, but that's part of a process and if that has to happen, that's how it happens. 

0:01:00
Welcome to Color and Coffee, a podcast that's focused on the craft of color and the artist 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 and welcome to the second season of Color and Coffee. I know it's been a bit of a long break and a lot has certainly changed, at least in our industry. I'll start by saying I hope you're all doing okay and taking care of yourselves. Also, I'm excited to share that we have a brand new sponsor, flanders Scientific, or FSI for short. Be sure to give them some love and mention the podcast if you're purchasing anything. Huge thanks to them for sponsoring the show. 

For our first episode of season two, I am so excited to share with you an interview with a guest that I've been trying to get on the show for months. His name is Tashi True and he is one of the most talented colorists in Los Angeles. Tashi is the colorist on Avatar, the Way of Water, and has worked as a colorist or finishing artist on many high-profile projects, such as Bombshell, the Jungle Book, the Ragnarok and Stranger Things. On the commercial side, tashi has worked with brands such as Audi, coke, cadillac and Samsung. Here's my interview with Tashi Trieu.

 Thank you so much for joining us, tashi, thanks for having me. It's truly my pleasure. Now for the first and most important question of the show what are you drinking today? 

0:02:49
I'm drinking coffee. It's just a black coffee. I actually have it here. This is a new bag that I'm trying. I got this today. It's very sweet. It's a mild blend. Yeah, very smooth, awesome. 

0:03:05
I'm a big fan of mild, smooth coffee myself. My wife makes fun of me because I like really smooth, mild coffee. 

0:03:18
What's the name of that? This is a steady state. I haven't used them before, but they're from San Diego. What's your preferred coffee brewing method? 

0:03:23
I tend to use espresso. I have an espresso machine and then I just use a lot of almond milk, of course with a little bit of vanilla in there. 

0:03:30
What about yourself Using the Mocha Master right now? Just black coffee. 

0:03:34
I know a lot of people like their coffee black, but I really just can't get away from that smooth milk. But maybe one day I'll get over to the black coffee. It's way easier to prepare, for sure. 

0:03:44
Yeah, I think if you, if you have the right beans, the right grind, maybe the right machine, it's smooth that you know I used to react more to like the acidity of stuff and like, didn't really like I wasn't getting it quite right for a long time. You know I was doing French press for a while and realized, you know, I was under heating it. So, yeah, the grind size is probably wrong. There are all these different variables. So for us in the techie color world of things, I think that the variability and the experimental nature of the perfect coffee setup is something that we can all naturally gravitate towards. 

0:04:19
It's so funny. You know I've never put that two and two together, but it really is very similar the way that there is so many ways to both prepare your coffee and the way you can do a color grade. There's just so many variables, as you put it. 

0:04:30
Yeah, you can definitely obsess over the gear or the method, and everyone's got opinions on it and there's an infinite amount of conflicting resources about it and ultimately it kind of comes down to a subjective thing. So as much as we try to search for some sort of objective truth or you know perfect way to do it, it's going to come down to the individual and you can't make everybody happy. 

0:04:55
And taste, you and developing taste. You always start off with something that may not be the best and then, over time, as you start to expose yourself, you develop a better taste Absolutely and tastes change over time. So that's a perfect sort of segue into our topic. So tell us sort of a quick background of where you came from and how you got into color grading and being a finishing artist. 

0:05:19
Well, so, short story long, I learned the basics of visual effects working with my dad in Colorado. He ran a small motion graphics shop that had a Flame and I got my first exposure at like age 12 or 13 to Flame compositing. This was pre-batch, pre-node-based compositing in Flame, so it was all procedural, step-by-step desktop effects in Flame, learning just kind of the ins and outs of like green screen, paint, roto, that kind of stuff, and sort of worked my way backwards to online editorial where I was putting together small standard definition, you know promo videos, commercial type kind of stuff all off you know DigiBeta or Beta SP sources. And then during high school got a taste for production, got, you know, more interested in the camera side of stuff, still developing a bit of a taste for film language. And at that point, you know, I loved watching movies but still wasn't like kind of connecting the dots on like the narrative and like literary elements of telling a story in film. 

But I got interested enough that I went to film school at Chapman University in Orange California. I studied cinematography. I enjoyed a lot of aspects of that but I didn't think that a career onset was quite what I wanted to do with my life. And color is that perfect fusion of visual effects, techniques and tools that had then graduated to more accessible tools with, you know, the advent of faster computers, better storage, all that kind of stuff. With the advent of faster computers, better storage, all that kind of stuff, and thinking like a cinematographer, so blending the simple 2D composite techniques that I was used to doing on a single shot, but doing this now over hundreds or thousands of shots in a movie, and blending the experience I had and the lessons I learned through school and learning cinematography, the color is really a great fusion of those two passions. 

0:07:09
Really interesting. So while me and a lot of other people were diving around with MiniDV, you were already knee-deep in flame. That's amazing. 

0:07:17
Well, at the time MiniDV was pretty nascent. 

This would have been late 90s, very early 2000s, and I remember shooting on Mini mini DV but having no way to ingest it into a regular computer Like I remember having some kind of like pinnacle video capture card with like RCA inputs and having to play off of a mini DV camera or a hot like a digital eight camera and capture that into some sort of Premiere-esque platform, cutting that. But then it's like, ok, well, how do I get this back into something I can actually play back, in this case in like a high school classroom where, like, I'm going to showcase a weather report? 

0:07:56
I made. 

0:07:56
I always made everything way more complicated than it needed to be. You know, I was kind of shy. So rather than just practicing a Spanish class weather report and just getting up and just doing the report in like two minutes, spend days on making a fully produced weather report with a green screen and like graphics and all that kind of crap and I didn't learn any Spanish in the process, but boy was that like a thing to bring in a VHS tape and pop it in. And you know, now I'm on TV. 

0:08:27
It's so funny. I'm sure a lot of people listening can absolutely relate with that the fact that they're taking their desire to produce things on digital video and have allowed that to go into other areas of their life. I absolutely remember it was also for a Spanish class producing a VHS that did not help me with Spanish at all, so I absolutely feel you on that. So, moving into where you're working on today, you work on a lot of what I would call VFX heavy projects, projects that people might look at and get instantly overwhelmed. So you've worked on things like Avatar. You work on some commercials that are very intensive in terms of the type of color, the type of VFX, and I wanted to talk about that a little bit, because what I'm really interested in is how you approach these type of projects. Do you deal with them the same way you do every other projects? Do you approach them differently? 

0:09:21
I don't think the approach differs a whole lot. I mean, you're definitely dealing with identity lookbooks, any of the overarching design aesthetics that the brand and the agency have for maybe an entire year's worth of campaign. Those are things that are preset and decided well before you get in the mix. As a colorist, I think that working on many of the different films I've worked on has been a matter of me kind of fusing my sense like artistic sensibility with the filmmakers intention and supporting that. There's certainly going to be colorists out there who have a look, just like maybe a DP has a look or a title designer has a look, and like a visual identity where you could look at, you know, imagine like titles like Saul Bass. You can look at any Saul Bass title and know that's a Saul Bass title. But I think that we have to be a bit more of chameleons where we're coming in at the last step, the last creative step in the visual development of a film, and before that we have directors and cinematographers, production design, wardrobe lighting. Many people have been living with the film for months, if not years, longer than we have. So I think it would be inappropriate for me to try to prescribe a look to a film and say, well, no, no, let me take this over and decide what this should look like, or propose what this should look like. It really has to be a fusion of the director's creative intent and anything I can do to elevate that one step further. And understanding story, understanding character, beats understanding the narrative structure of a feature film or TV show, I think is really important. Like those are things that I don't ignore. I like to watch the episode or watch the film as early as I possibly can. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you know you get into a movie and the first thing you see is the last reel of the movie or the like the middle of the movie. I have no idea who these people are or what's going on. I don't have audio for some security reason or or they just haven't sent it yet and you're like, you know I'm going to make up the story as I go, but you watch something enough like the story becomes like that through line and I think that's really important. So, yeah, like long story short. 

I don't think that there's a significantly different technique I take to any of these, but it ultimately does come down to this is a collaboration. This is, you know, working with filmmakers who have varying different degrees of ability to express their creative intention. Some are very precise and can say exactly how blue they want something, or how red they want something, or how contrasty or what exactly the look that they're trying to go for, whether it's emulating something else or it's something entirely new on their own. But there are other people who just don't think that analytically and have to kind of explore it and speak in a different language, which you have to interpret a little bit, and have to kind of explore it and speak in a different language, which you have to interpret a little bit. 

So varying your communication skills between different types of directors, I think, is more of the challenge and that's something that comes with experience. I don't think there's really a shortcut to that. Early on in my career that was not something I was really great at, while I might've had like technical mastery over certain things and you know I knew the software, I knew the techniques behind it, getting the communication right or the way you would present something, and like easing frictions when someone isn't happy with something but they don't know why they're not happy with it. Understanding that, that's not a reflection on you, that's just a momentary unpleasantness that could be related to anything on you. That's just a momentary unpleasantness that could be related to anything and just knowing how to navigate that and just always be on a positive footing with it, that's something that's just developed for me through experience over the last decade. 

0:13:15
You touched on something that I wanted to go back to real quick, because I think it's something that's not really emphasized enough in our industry, and in other industries too, which is the development of the skill to work with clients when they don't quite know what they want and to not take it personally. It's interesting that you say that you, when you were starting your career, you had some trouble with this and you've slowly gotten better at it. Was there anything that you did particularly to develop that skill, or did it just slowly get better as you were working with more clients? Because I find that a lot of people, when they're trying to get into the profession of being a colorist, immediately jump to the software and the hardware, when it's actually the fact of working with clients and collaborating with people that may not speak the same language as you, which is the skill that needs to be worked on. 

0:14:01
The software and the hardware are the easy part. I mean, everyone can buy gear. So it's the same thing with cinematography. Money can buy more cameras, it can buy more lenses, it can buy more, more cool gear, but it doesn't buy ideas, it doesn't buy and it definitely doesn't buy experience. 

I started out in color very, very early. I was working in school and I had the abject luxury of operating a multi-million dollar film scanner and having a studio grade miniature digital intermediate in my university that I essentially got to do whatever I wanted with and use that on indie features, short films, hundreds of projects before I even graduated. So by the time I'm 21, I've got an IMDb resume of short films that have all gone through the same exact process, using the same exact hardware and software that would have been used at eFilm or Technicolor at that time. That's a tremendous leg up. I had the software and hardware advantage that a lot of other people at that time did not have. Maybe they were learning color in After Effects, maybe they were doing it in an NLE, they were doing stuff in Final Cut or maybe they had Apple Color. That was like a big deal at that time where it's like well, this is like a desktop product. This isn't a heavy iron big Linux machine thing where we have to have a SAN and we have to have $100,000 minimum investment to get this thing to turn on. Very different world. But while that gave me a technical leg up, I was no better prepared at like age 21 or 22 to be interacting with filmmakers and navigating that. Things are still hard. I'm still having to work like things aren't always coming naturally to me. So maybe I start by, you know, focusing on the small things first rather than the big picture items. And you know the approach to something might be more like difficult and complicated just because I don't have the experience at that time to have a simplistic or holistic approach to it. 

I remember, you know, like the first thing you do when you're rotoscoping something early on and you're rotoscoping a person is I'm going to draw a line around the whole person and then you're going to try to animate that and somehow keep that together over a conflict and that doesn't work at all and any experienced animator or rotoscope artist is going to tell you yeah, you break this down into simple shapes. You know you try to mimic like an IK movement style that actual humans you know, move with and suddenly things become easier. Or you realize, well, really quick roto shape and a quick key get the exact result. It's not fancy, it's not flashy and no one looking over your shoulder is going to be really all that impressed, but it's going to be a 10th, the time of doing a really complex, really beautiful roto work that you know the audience doesn't actually see. So understanding, like on a skill level, how to navigate things quickly and effectively is definitely a learned experience and, you know, a learned trait, not something that you can just muscle through on your own. And oftentimes it's in response to client or filmmaker demands. And that's where you might get yourself kind of pigeonholed into a inefficient workflow if you're not experienced In terms of the creative development side or working with them in a client capacity, communication wise. 

I remember falling into a lot of issues where I think I've done really really good work on something. I think like this is as far as I can take it and they see it and they're like, okay, that's great, but like let's go more. And early on I felt like oh, this is an indictment of your work, this isn't good enough, or like oof, like I just expended all of my, like emotional or mental energy to get to this point and you're saying we need to take it like double as far, like the exasperation that I could express at the time I'm sure it was, like it was not a conducive, positive, like oh, this is going to get me through the day, well, kind of thing. Now it's like I understand how this works and I might still get something to the point where I'm happy with it. But ultimately, you know it's the filmmaker's film. 

If they think we need to go further than we need to go further and it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter if I took it to here and I was happy with it. It is not an indictment of me personally and it's understanding when to take things personally or how to roll with creative decisions or even creative indecisions. You know everyone can roll their eyes and say, well, yeah, like I had my version and then we went through all these iterative versions and then we went right back at my version. Lol, you know that's directors for you, but that's part of a process and if that has to happen, that's how it happens. It's just part of the game. 

0:18:34
It's part of the workflow. I think what you really touched on here and it's something that personally has taken me years and I'm still in development of it is readdressing the notes, and when a note comes in, it's not darn. They rejected my work. It's I'm my work. What I feel is great is not perfect for them. It's not an alignment and it's not that the note is a rejection. It's just that you're trying to realign so that you're both looking at the same dot or the same target, I should say. 

0:19:02
Sure, and I mean it may be no fault of your own. The communication has to go two ways too. And if they can't communicate their creative intent to you in a way that is perfectly objectively reproducible, well then, like there is a degree of interpretation here, If they're not giving you CDLs, you can't say, hey, like someone told me exactly what color this should be and I nailed it. If they're giving you notes on, you know, the back of a napkin, and like you get those and you have to creatively interpret those. It's a two-way street and communication is a developing thing. And it's totally fine too for filmmakers to see something in context, you know, finally focus on the color, see it in a theater, see it on the big screen and have a change of heart about things. That's completely natural as well and just part of the creative process there. And that's why we have to be fast, that's why we rely on fast hardware, fast software, why we ourselves have to be just as nimble as those decisions might be, so that we can have this be a rolling, iterative process. The worst thing could be a filmmaker coming in and saying, oh, I have notes on these and saying, well, I need time to get back to you on all this. Like now we're back into like kind of answer print days where it's like, no, no, okay, like I'm gonna work, I'm gonna do a new version of it and you come back tomorrow and look at it. Like we strive for something more interactive, something more immediate, that this viewing could be the last viewing that they need and they can see this and say, okay, cool, this is no longer a problem. This is the way I want it to be. 

And filmmakers you know especially busy filmmakers with a lot of studio pressure behind them, Don't have infinite time just to sit with color. They can't work linearly like we might on A budget constrained indie production where you have to lock the cut, you have to go to sound, you have to go to picture. Visual effects is happening, but you know, everything happens in kind of a linear process. Effects is happening, but everything happens in kind of a linear process. That's just not the real nature of any studio film I've ever worked on. The cut is always in flux. There's no real such thing as picture lock, even all the way down, Even after maybe the edit room has wrapped and the cutting room has broken down, they might call someone in because we got a nudge of frame or something like that. That's always changing. 

Visual effects are always rolling in and with very rare exceptions are they ever to everybody's 100% satisfaction that you're going to have visual effects supervisors who really wish they could get one or two more versions in there, because everything could always be better. But you reach kind of a plateau and you know that we're going to have diminishing returns at this point. And hey, the movie has to come out because there's a release date and thankfully that release date requires that people finish things up and that means they have to let things go. But as part of that process at the end where, if there's a production problem, if there's any kind of delay in production or editorial needs more time, we're the cushion, we're that spring that gets compressed at the end the release date rarely moves. So we have to make up for that. 

And if that means visual effects are rushed because they were compounded by other issues the studio was dealing with on another film with the same vendor, all these things that are complex and out of everyone's control, Well, maybe, yeah, we're getting 2000 visual effects shots in the last week of the DI and saying we have to make these work, even if some of these are less than ideal. And you know that happened to me years and years ago on a film, and you know that meant that it carried over into home video, where in home video now, the visual effects supervisor is finally getting to dial in how these shots really should have looked. So you know it's it's an evolving thing. 

0:22:43
I think people misunderstand that when we get these headlines and variety where it's like the VFX aren't done, the film came out with unfinished VFX, when actually it's just the fact that artists want a little bit more time to get it where they want it to, as opposed to unfinished VFX. 

0:23:00
And I mean there's always criticism on trailers too, and I mean there's very rarely a trailer that has the final version of a visual effect shot. Maybe it's the best that was possible, then Maybe it's close to final effects shot Maybe it's the best that was possible, then Maybe it's close to final. It might even be a trailer specific version. It's very often that, like, creative changes are made specifically for a trailer version of a shot, and then of course you know you've got months before the movie comes out. Why wouldn't it continue to improve? 

0:23:28
Yeah, well, when you're working on that many shots, you have to split the work accordingly so that you don't have a single shot that sticks out, that everything looks fairly consistent. 

Yeah, you were touching on something that I think is really interesting and a lot of people don't buy into that, which is the idea of keeping changes interactive. A lot of people just immediately buy into let's send it over to visual effects and then they'll approve it when they have time and then it'll go through the pipeline. And I really love the fact of keeping things live and interactive because, one, it keeps the client in the room and, two, you can get their answer right there and get their feedback. And you seem to be not only a fan of that for narrative work, you seem to be a fan of that for commercial work as well. Tell me a little bit more about where that line is drawn, because obviously not everything is going to be done in the session during color. Where does that line get drawn for you when you can do something with the box that you're on versus this actually has to go out to a third party VFX vendor. 

0:24:26
That really ends up getting decided based on the complexity or the needs of the schedule and the budget. 

If it has to happen today, there's no time for it to go to another vendor, so it has to happen with me if that's within my wheelhouse to do Certainly there are a lot of things that I can do in color and comp that are more expensive for someone to do at the last minute and in the color session than if they were to spend the time and properly bid that out to visual effects vendors internationally. Like, if you're removing a reflection, that's not a really creative thing. That can be done kind of in a binary yes, no sort of setting with very talented paint artists anywhere in the world way cheaper than having me do it in the color session. But if you need it now, then we do it in color. And having the ability to say yes is what's changed, because I'm fine with it either way. If you say we're going to do all this stuff in advance because we've noticed all these issues, great, if you've got time and we can do it in color also great. I mean just from a business standpoint, that's more work that I can capture and that's great for me if I have the time and the capacity and the ability to do it. 

That didn't always used to be the case. We used to be limited to essentially color only in something like Resolve or when I used to work in Lustre, there was zero layer mixing capability we're not able to do any kind of 2D composites on the timeline whatsoever. So even doing a basic split screen, well that is a comp that has to go over to Flame, that has to go to Nuke. A comp that has to go over to flame, that has to go to nuke, it just has to go to somebody else on a different system completely. And resolve has progressively over the last decade gotten so much more multifaceted where, yeah, you can do simple comps on the color page. You can do, you know, simple removals, you can do simple beauty fixes, or you can hop over to fusion and you can do full paint, you can do full comp and that's really cool and, depending on the environment and the immediacy of what you're needing to do, maybe those are the right tools for you. 

And what I've experienced on some recent commercial campaigns which really treated the color session like the flame session that it would normally be, which would always be fully supervised by agency representatives, people who are experts on every detail of the car or the product, whichever it is, and the brand identity that they're going for. They're going to specifically supervise all of that, all of that work with typically a flame artist who's doing really really detailed pixel level adjustments, paint fixes, cleanup, accentuating sight lines on the product of the car and instead of doing it in that process where it's decoupled from color, we decided on this recent project let's just do this all in color and really push color to the limit of what can be done there. And I'd say that Resolve made it 95% of that way. I never had to deliver anything out to an external piece of software to facilitate that or rely on an external vendor. But there were many stumbling blocks that were just like a little bit uncomfortable and that just meant there are cases where this is gonna be a little complicated. 

Okay, client, I get the note. We've shown a proof of concept. I'm not going to waste your time supervising me, roto this or deal with the weird workaround I have to do to make the maths work correctly. I know what this needs to be. You've seen and approved the creative look for that. Let's move on, best utilize your time and then, once we're done with the session, I'll then continue and propagate that work. 

And that's a very common thing. It's all about managing the available time of the client. If they're happy to sit there and watch you roto, I mean that's their choice. But I'm sure that they have other things to do and, just like any narrative film, commercials also have to spend time on the mix. They have to look at visual effects. They have so many other things that they're working on. The filmmaker can't possibly just work with color 100% of the time because we don't have that luxury of a linear picture locked process where maybe there is no release date. On an indie short film you could say, hey, we're going to do color beginning of the month and then we're going to come back in a month after the mix is done and we're just going to. We're just going to keep going or we're going to take. It takes as long as it takes, because there is no release date. 

We have festival deadlines, but they accept works in progress and if those aren't for months, well I mean we just take the time we need to within the budget or schedule availability. There. When you have a release date, whether it's a commercial or a feature film, like everything has to happen all at once and you just don't have the luxury of taking all that time with the client, so you have to make up for that somewhere else. And that spring has to compress and you're there, you're that spring. 

0:29:09
So we have a couple examples that we'll be posting in the show notes of some of these promos that Tashi has been talking about. One of the things that I wanted to go into a little bit of detail for these Cadillac commercials was what were some of the things that were typical, like color grade versus VFX. Obviously, we have a lot of what looks like sky replacement. Honestly, the rest of it I can't even tell what was great and what was VFX. It is a very smooth promo. 

0:29:35
Well it's really all visual effects. You know all of the car exteriors. You know that's all CGI. Anything where there are humans interacting with the car, whether they're inside the car or they're standing next to the car, those are all shot on a volume. So there's nothing that is not a visual effect in those commercials. 

But there's a point where in visual effects and CGI you can only push things so far within a time constraint. When everything's a re-render or a new sim or a new change in model geometry, everything goes back to the drawing board. Everything has to be re-rendered, has to be re-comped. That's not necessarily something you can do as the clock is ticking down. Comp like that's not necessarily something you can do as the clock is ticking down. 

So, just like in feature visual effects, if it's something that we can do in color that assists and helps polish or sell this visual effect shot to the audience, we'll do that in color. If it has to, absolutely has to go back let's say it's full change in geometry then that has to go back to visual effects. But we really want to avoid piling more on them when they're already down to the wire to get everything in, and I'm so used to that and working in collaboration with visual effects supervisors, with VFX producers, knowing, like I, can't just reject everything and say, no, this has to be VFX. I'm here to be part of that solution. Be VFX, I'm here to be part of that solution. 

And it's not to say that VFX is incomplete or that it's got problems. But color is a component of this and maybe once you're in the final color, you start to see things that couldn't have been noticed in comp or you change your mind about things. Let's say, you go for kind of a flatter lo-fi look, but now you don't see the sight lines on the car as well. Well, maybe we roto that, we do a quick mask, we track that in and we add a little bit of local contrast just to help pop something that otherwise you know it's completely real, it's completely accurate to the car, but it's just an important detail that's kind of missed for whatever reason because of the lighting, because of the environment, you know, because of the grade, maybe. 

0:31:35
Yeah, they don't have the grade, so they're also looking on sRGB monitors probably. So we have also the actual whole color aspect too. 

0:31:43
Right, and that's you know such a hard thing too. And that's where I mean, currently Resolve is getting very close to this, but right now we can't view within the grade context. So I could hop back to the fusion page but I'm like at best I'm going to view in like a single LUT or some sort of color managed output while I'm doing the comp and then if I go back to the color page then I can view it in color context. That's still kind of a pain point there, but we're very close. I mean I don't think that that is something that is insurmountable and I mean, considering the progress that the software has had over the last decade going from a color only piece of software to having complete editorial and visual effects capability very little is outside the developer's capability. It just becomes an issue of again how does that fit into a development schedule? 

0:32:35
So I think a really good question for you, because it sounds like that you're a critical part of and this is why I think a lot of people have moved over to the term finishing artist because you're not just a colorist, you're a critical part of the finishing pipeline. You are fixing things all over the place to essentially get this out the door. You're doing color, but you're also doing some VFX shots. You're doing VFX fixes and you're essentially chaperoning this piece out the door, yeah and uh. 

0:33:04
You know, as the final creative officer on a film touching the picture, you're the last person there working with the director before it goes out to distribution. So anything that can be done like it has to be done with you or it has to be done by the time it gets to you, otherwise it just doesn't get done. So you're there representing the film as it looks at the finishing stage. Anything you can offer to elevate that or fix problems be part of the solution, whether that is doing paintwork, doing fixes in color or it's just being a very versatile, very fast colorist. That's got its advantage too, because if everything else takes a long time but you can work fast or your methodology is very quick, then that compressed spring is not going to pop and everything still comes out on time. 

0:33:54
One thing that I've heard you mention quite a bit in this interview is the fact that you are you mentioned the spring quite a bit but in the way that you've explained how you work, it sounds like you are physically getting in there and trying to act as that spring. You're trying to be there for the filmmaker during that final process, and they may know exactly what they want. They may not know exactly what you're wanting. You're there to help them figure that out. Essentially, how do you help them, especially on a larger film, something like Avatar, something like $200 million blockbusters? Certain directors know exactly what they want, certain don't. How do you help them? How do you direct that energy? Because you're in the, as you mentioned, you're in the final seat, so they're going to ask you questions. How do you help direct that energy? 

0:34:42
I think you have to be willing to explore. You know, I don't think that there's a yes, no answer to a lot of things, and sometimes people might ask you, like, what you think of something, and it can be kind of tough to answer when there are a multitude of great answers, great solutions. It's OK to say I don't have a really, really strong opinion on this one little thing. It's okay to do that, and I don't think it's productive to dig your heels in on something or try to sell it to the director and say oh no, no, no, you made the right decision, this is 100% right. Let's go for that and try to move on. I think it's it's worth it to have a discussion about what they're feeling, what they're reacting to, what is narratively important in that moment. If it's a technical thing, I think it's going to be really clear. If it's the shot bumps, for some reason it doesn't match. What's weird? What's weird about this? You can figure that out. I think that's easy. 

But if it's really a creative, tonal decision, there's so many factors to weigh in there, and so I think it's important to do less of the talking, maybe to ask questions back to them. 

I mean, in a sense it's a little bit of a therapy session. You're there to be a comfort. You're there to aid and help in making this a positive process. You know, at the end of a very difficult post-production process with a lot of stress, a lot of pressure, if you can make this a positive environment, if you can even make it a fun environment where you know they're doing something that's ultimately creative, like realistically, everything you show a director in the DI should be better looking than whatever they've seen to this point. 

So it's very rare that someone comes in and sees something and is in a bad mood because of that. Like it's like everything should be elevated. They should be having a good time doing this. I think that asking them questions about how they feel about it, how they came to this decision, and helping them workshop those things, I think that's, in short, I guess that's my take on it, but there's probably no right answer to that, because we're getting into the territory of mood and feelings and the emotions involved in things that can't really be distilled the same as something on a waveform or a vectorscope that bumps and is a technical issue that someone reacts to. 

0:36:56
Working with people is the hardest part of of our craft. It's the machines are much easier to learn about working with. It's actually working with different people and personalities that makes our craft both so interesting and so difficult sometimes. 

0:37:10
Yeah, and ultimately, at the end of the day, software has been democratized, cameras are democratized, but you walk around Hollywood and it's not everybody walking by you on the street has a 4K video camera in their pocket, but they're not all making a movie. So it turns out that, like, ideas really are the most important thing, and pencil and paper have always been dirt cheap, and we're still not drowning in like a plethora of incredibly good ideas and incredibly good scripts. It's still really hard to find something that is really really good. 

0:37:42
Very, very well said. So, as we start to wrap up with our time together, I wanted to ask you one more question, which was if you had to share a piece of advice with those listening with us that wanted to move forward in their career as a colorist, what would you share? 

0:37:58
Well, it's really about building relationships, whether it's with your peers, whether it's with potential customers, other filmmakers, finding creative partners. You know who maybe you're kind of simpatico with. You know people who have a shared aesthetic that you enjoy, that is inspiring to you, that doesn't feel like work necessarily, people who you can build relationships with over a long period of time. And this is an industry of attrition. You know people leave because they don't have the patience, because they don't think that their career is paying off nearly at the speed that they want it to. They compare it to careers in completely different industries where, yeah, very commonly, maybe 18 months into a job, you get a promotion, you get a title bump, you get some sort of equity in a company. Like it's just not the way that Hollywood works. This is an industry where trust is the most important factor, because there is no time for a director to fire the colorist, hire a new colorist, change the team up, like there's no time for that. So, like the decision of whoever like what, every, every step of the way, whether it's the cinematographer, the editor, the sound mixer, the colorist, like everybody has to be on the team and these decisions are so critical to getting the film done that a director has to hire someone who they trust and their producers and people who work for them. They have to hire people who they trust. So the only way trust is built is through time and experience. And, yeah, you have to know what you're doing, you have to have merit, you have to have technical skill. You have to still be able to deliver and I think that people who react negatively to nepotism or people who are, you know, maybe unfairly, have an advantage because they know somebody it's like well, they still have to deliver. Like, at the end of the day, they might get their foot in the door that way, but you still have to be good at what you do, and that's what I've been consistently good at is nurturing those relationships. You know, legitimate friendships that. I have no idea how it will pay off. I don't know if this person is going to give me a job, but this is someone who I find interesting. They're a mentor, they're somebody who I want to ask questions of. I want to genuinely learn from this person with no career connected or business connected gains there. That person might, two years from then, 10 years from then, turn into an opportunity and that's how I went from working in small boutiques doing indie films to working at Technicolor on big Marvel films, was through relationships that were genuine, friendships that nurtured into something where they could reliably recommend me, having not seen any of my work but just knowing me as a person, and say, tashi's the guy you should hire him for this. And then getting that call from someone and thinking, oh well, I'm going to have to audition for this or maybe there's like an interview process. They bring me in and they're like okay, so Jeff says you're the guy. So you know you're the guy, we need to hire you for this. 

Now, if I hadn't delivered and like, let's say, I screwed up along the way, well, I wouldn't be back for the next film. But that wasn't the case. Instead, you know I delivered, you know 110%, and that just only reinforces that trust. And trust is something that you can build up slowly over time or you can lose very quickly. So you know, I think that's ultimately the main currency of this industry, which is all relationships and it's all trust, and you can really only develop those with patience and by socializing, by communicating with other people. 

It's not something you develop, you know, on your own, on your laptop using the software. You got to have merit and you got to have skill. But you have to go out there and meet other filmmakers, people who do the same thing as you, people who do completely different things than you. Be interested, be curious, try everything in filmmaking and learn more about it. I know that my work as a colorist is informed by my limited understanding of how a mix stage operates and how the sound mix works. They're completely different but they're somewhat analogous. And having perspective over production and understanding what it's like to be there on set and what that work entails and everything from the camera house, I know how the cameras are prepped at the camera house. I've done that myself and work all the way through. Having that perspective has only helped better inform what I do as well, that's an incredible piece of advice. 

0:42:24
I love what you said Be interested, be curious. That's the best piece of advice I've heard in months, honestly. So thank you so much for sharing that with us. And if we wanted to find out more about you, learn more about you, where can we find you online? 

0:42:37
My website very rarely updated, but there's some info about me there. I have some resources there as well for filmmakers, mainly targeted towards independent filmmakers who are looking to build visual effects pipelines into their films, trying to emulate studio level workflows. So I have some free white papers and some additional online tools for very niche post-production operations. You can find all that at my website, which is just https://tashitrieu.com/. I'm out there, I'm around. 

0:43:09
Awesome. All of your info will be in the show notes. Thank you so much, Tashi, for joining us today. It's been truly a pleasure having you on, and thank you for starting the second season. Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure, and I'm Jason Bowdach for Color Coffee. We'll see you guys in two weeks for the next episode. Thanks for joining us and happy grading, and that's a wrap. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, youtube and your podcast app of choice. Search for at Color Coffee or at Color Coffee podcast and join the conversation. If you're using Spotify or Apple podcast, please leave a review. Huge thanks to FSI and pixel tools for sponsoring the show until the next episode.