Navigating the World of Documentary Color Grading with Evan Anthony, CSI

0:00:00 
I could teach anyone how to color correct, but can I teach you how to do it when you have a client that has a migraine or is angry or is mean, or is just found out they're getting divorced or is just in a shitty mood? It's dealing with the craziness. In the 90s I was literally dealing with doing music videos where rappers were coming in with Uzis and cocaine and I was like OK, leave the coke, put the gun in the limousine. You have to be able to understand and listen to what the client wants and even if the session is going great, sometimes they go oh, I want it more saturated, and you do that, and they go no, no, I just want it brighter. It's an interesting juggling that we do, but I do think that personality is 70% of the job. 

0:00:55
Welcome to Color and Coffee, a podcast that focuses on the craft of color grading and the artist behind it. I'm your host, Jason Bowdach, and each week we'll sit down with some of the most talented and creative colorists in the industry and have a casual chat from one colorist to another. We'll share their stories, their insights, their grading tips and, of course, their beverage of choice. Whether you're a seasoned colorist or just starting out in the industry, join us for some great color discussion. Strap in, grab your mug. You're listening to Color and Coffee. Welcome to another episode of Color and Coffee. I'm thrilled to have senior colorist Evan Anthony. He's worked on things such as the upcoming supermodels on point and leave no trace. Welcome to the show, Evan. Hey, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for coming on the show my pleasure. So the first and usually most important question that I ask every single guest what are you drinking today? 

0:01:54 
So I might be a unicorn in our industry especially. I do not drink any stimulants during the day, so I'm drinking water right now. I do have two espressos in the morning at home, and then I generally just drink water during the day, and I'm always good for a cocktail in the evening. 

0:02:15
That's fantastic. You are not the only one that was drinking water throughout the day. We have to stay hydrated, and also caffeine is very much of a diuretic, and so not only do we need to stay up and motivated for our work, we need to stay hydrated. I think that's probably one of the things that's not really touched upon is making sure that we stay properly hydrated and properly fed. So tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got into this and really how you became a colorist. 

0:02:43 
It's kind of an interesting story. I've told this many times because I do a lot of panels and I used to teach at NYU Tisch. I started in the business in early 90s I think 1990 or 1991 as a PA production system for Showtime Networks. I'm born and raised in New York City, so everything I'm about to say happened in New York and this is back in the linear tape days and the department I worked for was called Promo Mastering Update. They called it PM Update and it basically writers and producers would write and produce a promo for whatever movie was in the 90s or that Showtime bought. They would edit it and have it mixed and they would put it on their one inch Promo Master reel at the end with a log, and then it was my job to take those tapes into a session. At the time it was a facility called Unitel Video that's been gone for decades but it was one of the biggest ones in the city. 

I would take an audio track and tag it with Chiron an audio track and the programming department would say, okay, we want this film Monday at seven, tuesday at three, and I would just create the tags. There was an editor they called him Playbacks back then. But there was an assistant editor who ran the tapes and did the Chiron and that was my first foray into post production and that session went from eight o'clock in the morning to one in the afternoon every day. So it was a tough session starting at eight o'clock in the morning, especially considering, honestly, I kind of partied a little hard when I was 20 years old, especially in New York. I kind of did that and I always asked questions. I always, you know, I worked with some fun editors and I kind of I'm very good at watching something and learning about it just by watching. This is obviously pre-internet and I decided I wanted to be an editor At the time. This was a linear, like I said, editing and I made the decision after about three and a half years at Showtime to leave and find a job at a post house as an assistant editor and back then post houses, in New York City at least, really ran two full shifts. They had a day shift from 10 to six and then a night shift from six to two am and you generally started at the night shift just doing dubs and all the crap work and little work and that's what I did and I taught me about tape decks and setting things up, and the place I work all video works also long gone had a Sony editing system, grass Valley Switchers with Apecus A62, which was a moving image still store recording device, ado, which is a DVE and a kaleidoscope or a cascope. So I learned that and then became an assistant to an editor at night. 

At that time was kind of the start of Viacom and the whole. It used to be called the Comedy Channel before it was called Comedy Central. All the Nickelodeon, nick at Night, vh1, mtv and the place I worked. There were a lot of the editors. That was their bread and butter. Being some of the original editors cutting those promos, music videos, I really kind of jumped in and then I started editing there for the longest time. I became a night editor, then became a day editor. Then they would send me to NAB because I was good at finding flaws in technology and back then NAB was really important because an editor room cost about two and a half million dollars to build and nothing was software or easily software so you had to go see it. So everyone went to Vegas or at that time it was one year in Vegas and next year would be in Atlanta. They alternated years and they sent me every year to it just to play with the new thing. And you know, it wasn't just me, it was engineers, a couple of other editors. 

Then there was this company called Avid that no one heard of and they were showing this device that was cuts, only couldn't even do a dissolve the demo and it wasn't ready. And I looked at it and we came back to New York and I immediately said this is the future. I don't know, it's certainly not ready, but this is something. And the quality was terrible. I mean, it made VHS look good and it was think $110,000 and it was just this big clunky thing. My two owners, one thought I was crazy, the other one thought it was possible and they bought one. 

Once it became a product, it was an offline device. Back then people were dubbing everything to three quarter tapes with timecode and doing everything on a real to real kind of RM 240 or some sort of editing device, creating an EDL, then going into a Sony or CMX room and conforming it. So because of all that training I was really good at conforming just in general. Then, when Avid came out, I also kind of became a beta tester for them and started doing stuff as the product was progressing. And then, as technology changed, digibeta and D2 tapes, which had a function called pre-read on them which was amazing where you could dissolve into itself, because that was the whole thing that made things take longer. 

Avid was one of the first companies that had a simple EDL that could turn pre-read on and off on the deck, and I helped them do that. I'm not a programmer, I didn't write code, but basically because where I worked had a CMX, had a Sony, which were basically the two main systems Grass Valley was out there too I would say, okay, I'm going to do the same six edits, same tape, one with pre-read off, one with pre-read on on the Sony, so they could see. However, the code was being saved in the EDL, and they figured out a way to do that in Avid so that if you, let's say, you had a tape called tape 100, if you were dissolving from tape 100 to 100, it would turn pre-read on so that you could dissolve off of itself, if that makes sense. 

0:09:11
That's super huge. I mean, we're so used to software now and just being able to say I want to dissolve this and add this and essentially add effects and transitions to anything, that it's difficult to even remember that tape is a very linear source. Tape and film, I should say, are very linear and doing something like dissolving into itself is a massive, massive feature. Right. 

0:09:34 
Or adding a title onto itself, like after a master. It was really kind of groundbreaking technology. But the downside was was that if you forgot to turn the deck on or something happened, you basically burned into the tape. So then you had to re-edit the whole show again. It was one of those things like you would hit, go or record and you kind of like went like this and it's like let's hope. 

0:10:01
Did you get? As somebody who vaguely remembers the analog days, I came in and just started my filmmaking experience. Towards the end of analog. Was there generational loss when you were doing edits and transitions onto itself? 

0:10:14 
Not onto itself. The D2 was an interesting tape format. It was composite, then it became component, which was a big deal, but there was generational loss. If you did it once or twice you definitely didn't see anything. But if you layered back and forth 10 times which honestly we did a lot for MTV, because if you remember, you know, if you watched MTV you would build something with I'm not kidding 20, 30 layers and then when the client said, oh, can we change that third layer, you had to rebuild the whole thing. It separated the adults from the children in the room. So I did that with Avid. 

Avid progressed over the years and then the Avid Symphony came out and the Avid Symphony was Avid's kind of foray into color correction. It had a few more effects, but it was basically a nonlinear color corrector. Again, I was doing some beta testing. I would be flown out to NAB to be the demo guy on the floor and I was still mostly editing. I was doing a lot of music videos, so I would do a lot of color correction on my own. But Avid was still being used as an offline tool, even though it had online capabilities. But DNx didn't exist. Then Everything was much lower quality, but it was certainly good enough for the standard definition days. We're talking SD footage. 

So then the symphony came out and I got this call from the head of post production I think it was CBS or ABC, sorry I forget, and this is late 90s and he called me up because hey, we're doing this really long nine act, beatles retrospective, and if you could imagine what the cost would be just for the music rights of the Beatles, this was a big thing for a network to do and I think it was like two, two and a half hours. And they go. We're looking for it's going to be done on symphony, the finishing. We're looking for symphony experts. And I started laughing out loud. This is on the phone. And he goes and he goes. Why are you laughing? I said, well, how many are you looking for? And he goes well, we think four. I was like, how many do you have? He goes well, I have two and I'm calling you. He goes. Well, tell me why you're laughing. I was like because they're full of shit. And he goes. 

And then he started laughing. He started laughing and saying explain this to me. I need to meet you, but it's just explain it to me on the phone. I said well, it's been out for two weeks. So who is an expert? I said. I said I've been on it for two weeks. I would say I probably qualify as one of the most experienced people on the symphony, but it's been out for 10 days. So let's be realistic. So he said come on in, I need to talk to you. Came in, we had a great conversation. He goes are you interested in doing it? I said sure he goes. It's nine acts. There's gonna be three of you, so you'll each do three acts. 

0:13:18
You had 15 days of experience on it. Now. 

0:13:20 
Yeah, it was crazy the hours that I did. I mean it was literally 18 to 20 hours at the end of the first day. It was like three in the morning. He goes can you come to my office? And I had never been in the building. I said I have no idea where you are. I assume you know where I am, can you just come to me? And he came down to me, he sat down. 

Abbott had given them a bunch of symphonies because again, it was a brand new product so it would have been great to promote. This big show was finished on a symphony and he goes okay, so here's the deal. Everyone loves you. I fired the other two. One didn't know anything that they were doing, the other one I flew in from Boston so I got to keep them in the hotel. But do you think you could finish all the acts? And I basically looked at them. I said 20% more. And I don't want to hear anything about over, like no one questions a thing, I just do it, I will get it done. But I don't want anyone saying oh, were you really here? I get a car home, I get you know this, not no diva demands, but just like I was leaving at five, six in the morning, going home for an hour or two showering, eating an egg sandwich and coming back. 

0:14:36
It's like the last you're replacing two people too, so it's a good deal for them. 

0:14:40 
So I did seven of the nine acts. From that day on they just kept hiring me for different things. I was still doing editing, mostly, but some color correction, and I started. There was a filmmaker and reporter who unfortunately passed away a long time ago named Peter Jennings and I started doing all of his work. It just kind of spiraled and then over the years I got away from editing and more in the color correction. Honestly, because everyone was calling themselves an editor, because Avid became more pop and I was like I need to do something different and I'm not a graphics person. I learned DaVinci shortly after Blackmagic released it, their version of it, and there we go. 

0:15:25
I was gonna ask so where Resolve came into this? Because a lot of people, myself included, really jumped on the train when the availability came down. It stopped being two to three million dollar rooms and it came into the six-figure rooms because the axis became easier. Obviously, the software and hardware is one thing, and then we still have to learn the craft, but being able to get on the box is a big barrier for a lot of people, especially back then, as you were mentioning, there were million dollar rooms. You can't learn something if you don't have access to it. 

0:15:53 
Yeah, I used to own a symphony and it was $180,000 for a symphony. Now you could get the symphony for $40 or $50 a month, but my first dongle for Resolve that I bought from B&H was $3,700, I think, and it's on my system now. 

0:16:14
I mean it works Exactly. I think I paid $1,000 for mine and it's $299 now, and so and I bought mine after I'd used the free version for so many professional jobs that I essentially felt guilty for not buying the studio version of the software, and it was. I probably should get the studio version by now. This is insane to be using the free version for so long. 

0:16:35 
I have a drawer full. I have like four dongles because I bought a speed editor. It came with the dongle. I was freelance and I wanted to have two dongles to keep, one in my system, one in my pocket if I needed it. 

0:16:46
Blackmagic really opened the doors for a lot of people other than with their hardware, but especially with the ease of access to their software for myself and a lot of people included. So how did you get into the documentary work that I've seen you work on, like super models and on points, a narrative series? 

0:17:04 
but no, I'm point is a doc series and on point was my first HDR series, but I'll back up and then go into it. So, like I said, the first symphony color correction job that I did was the Beatles retrospective, which was ultimately a documentary. And you know I mentioned I did a lot of stuff for Peter Jennings. Those were all documentaries. I kind of fell into that world. I was also doing an enormous amount of music videos. There was a director who liked working with me named Matt Mahurn, who's been retired for a while, and I've done five or six little read videos Metallica, all different people. Again, this is back when music videos were a thing. I had a wide variety of stuff and a lot of crossover because back in those days there were very few editors that were linear editors and avid editors at the time and the premiere really didn't exist, so it was really just avid. There were some other non-linear that came out and gone, but we don't need to get into that. So when I went freelance I would get a lot of work because it's like to hire someone who could do the offline and avid and then do the conform on a CMX or Sony was really a rarity, at least in New York. There was a big market for that. It was great for a while and I've done some commercials and stuff like that. 

But I like documentaries. I generally like things that are different. I mean, docu series is relatively new and that's one of the reasons I came to Goldcrest, which was just under six years ago. I had been working before that at a post house, also defunct. I don't want to give the impression that every place I worked goes out of business because of me. 

Then I was freelance for a while and HDR was just becoming. People were talking about it and security protocols were going into place and I was doing an enormous amount of HBO. The people that liked me at HBO were like hey, evan, we love you, but we're going to have to stop sending you drives to your house. It's just not allowed anymore. So I kind of realized I needed to find a place that I could either rent out or do work. Like I said, it came to Goldcrest. They wanted to expand on their documentary kind of side. They weren't really known for it. They had trouble doing it. If you're known for feature films and stuff like that, which is what they were known for, it's a whole different world and because I was a one man operation, so to speak, or one person band, I conform, I color, I deliver. That's why I came here. 

And then during the pandemic I happened producer who became a director, was doing her first big show that's on point that you mentioned, and that was for it was I think it was the first documentary on Disney. I might be wrong about that, but I think it was. I had a bunch of works, but I think it was the first one that aired and it was going to be my first HDR job and it was exciting. We had a good time. It was weird because it happened right in the middle of the pandemic. Before that there were vaccines and stuff. So we're in there with masks and instead of six people we limited it to two people, occasionally a third person, all the normal protocols that were in place. Nat was also co produced by Imagine Entertainment. From that time they have been, imagine entertainment has been a very big client of mine. 

I just did one I could talk about. I just did something called choir. I don't know when it's going to air. It's about the Detroit Youth Choir that became famous when they went on America's Got Talent and basically brought down the house. It's a great doc series about that. I'm not sure when it's going to air. I just did a documentary with Bryce Dallas Howard Ron Howard's daughter that I can't fully talk about yet, but that will be on one of the big streamers that she's in or she directed. 

0:21:03
I know she's directing now as well. She directed fantastic. 

0:21:06 
She's done a couple of documentaries. This is my first time working with her and she was remote, but I had the DP in the room and obviously the Imagine people in the room, supermodels again co-produced part of Imagine. That's for Apple TV. That was my first project that is airing on Apple Ironically co-produced. One of the co-directed. One of the directors, larissa Bills, was the director on On Point. So this is how this circle if you don't screw up a job and you keep people happy, they keep coming back. And I have four more projects in the next seven months with Imagine, all Doc series and a bunch of other things. So it's busy, which is good considering what's going on in our industry right now. 

0:21:53
It's exciting to hear and it's a testament to not only your work but everybody at Goldcrest that you, when you keep a client happy, they want to come back. It's a positive experience, not only in the quality of the output that you have, but working with you, because if you make great looking images but you're not pleasant to work with, then people are not going to want to come back. 

0:22:12 
I used to teach color correction, NYU tish, the main thing I talked about. I taught the class very differently than most of their teachers do, because I really talked about the industry a lot and just my experience, and I still hold by this. I could teach anyone how to color correct, but can I teach you how to do it when you have a client that has a migraine or is angry or is mean or is just found out they're getting divorced or is just in a shitty mood? It's dealing with the craziness. In the 90s I was literally dealing with doing music videos where rappers were coming in with Oozies and cocaine and I was like, okay, leave the coke, put the gun in the limousine. You have to be able to understand and listen to what the client wants and even if the session is going great, sometimes they go, oh, I want it more saturated, and you do that and they go, no, no, I just want it brighter. And it's like, no, no, no. 

0:23:14
I mean it's like it's an interesting juggling that we do, but I do think that personality is 70% of the job Running the room is something that is super difficult to not only learn, but it's, I can imagine, very, very difficult to teach as well, because it's hard to learn without discovering it for yourself. I will never forget the time that I was an assistant color referral and I had been moved from the night shift to the day shift on last minute and I was unfortunately not doing anything at the moment and because of the shift change, I had started to fall asleep during the day and later in the shift my producer told me hey, that producer, he saw you nodding off and he said get that guy out of here. And it's amazing how the smallest thing can completely turn a session around and once that happens, it's really difficult to get that back. 

0:24:07 
Yeah, yeah, I mean two weeks ago I had a very challenging session with a new client and I was just like, wow, I can't tell if they loved me or they are looking to book a plane and get as far away from me as possible. It was so hard to tell. It seems like they were happy afterwards, but in the session it was like a Jekyll and Hyde it is what it is, but it was challenging. And at doing this for 30 years, being 56 years old, it's like you still have to deal with that stuff. 

0:24:42
So, from one professional to another, what are some of your strategies for not necessarily just running the room, but bringing it back when you have a client that's not necessarily in the best mood? Or, like you said, the most difficult one is having a migraine, like I've been there, but being a client in a bad mood. What do you do with that? 

0:25:00 
I am a true native New Yorker, which means I can be a little snarky. I think I have a fun kind of attitude and personality. So I and I love humor. So I try to interject humor. I try to either make fun of myself or sometimes even make fun of them in a light way. I just try to break the tension in the room. It's kind of like being on a blind date or first date and you're not sure if it's going well. So you tried impressing him or her with your job and your family and now you're just going to try to make a funny joke or. But it works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. 

I think the main thing is to be flexible until when I say listen, like really listen, try to figure out what's going on, try not to take it personally which I can't say. I'm always successful at not taking it personally and just try to roll with it. And if it doesn't work going this way, then shift a little this way and go this way. I do find humor and laughter really helps break tension. So I do that. I'm a straight shooter, so I try to be very honest with them and if they ask me a question and figure out, even if they don't really like the answer. It has certainly bitten me in the ass a few times, but at the end of the day I feel better about myself and I think nine out of 10 times it works so. 

0:26:26
I want to touch on something that I think is really important and personally it took me a long time to learn. 

I think when we get into this career, originally we see ourselves as as fixers and we want to do a solution, we want to help our clients. But by doing that we can somewhat paint ourselves into a corner, and by you saying we're a straight shooter, I tell them what they need to know. I think that's a super important piece of advice, because if you hold it inside and try and fix everything as fast as you can without alerting the client about that, and then you can't do it, you've not only wasted your time, but you've wasted their time too, and then you sort of have to admit it a little bit, as opposed to if you were just straight about it. You can be honest and say, look, I'm going to try and fix this real quick, and if we can't do that, we can go in a different direction, and in the attempt of trying to fix something, you've actually painted yourself into the corner and made yourself the bad guy. 

0:27:21 
Going back to advice, we all and I do it still on a unfortunately fairly regular basis you dig myself into a hole. Technically, you overthink what you're trying to do, you make mistake. What I think makes you good at what you do is even the client notices or doesn't notice doesn't matter, but to be able to acknowledge it and then dig yourself out of that hole. When people get so fixated like shit I fucked up and then all they're doing is obsessing about that and they're digging a hole deeper, I try to take a deep breath. I, you know I use and I didn't make this up as like the saying kiss, keep it simple, stupid. It's like just okay, let me stop. Maybe that means deleting all my nodes for that and starting over. Maybe it's just breaking it down, maybe it's just walking myself. You know it's not one set thing, and that's the thing. If you're so rigid about doing it everything one way, you might be a great colorist, but you're gonna bang your head more often than you need to. 

0:28:24
I call that brute forcing, and it's. It was really a difficult solution. It fixes problems and sometimes, I think, the slowest way possible, especially when you have a client in the room. They can not only see your frustration and you banging on that nail repeatedly, but they can feel it, and I think that's really hard to get rid of that feeling. Even if nobody says anything, there's a feeling of why are you hitting that nail 10 times repeatedly and there's no difference happening? Right? So I love that suggestion of taking a step back. I can't tell you how many times I've had to delete all my nodes and start over again and go. Well, that was so much easier with two nodes than with the six that I had before. This shot's different than the other, right? 

0:29:05 
And that's why I like at Goldcrest, most of our rooms the colorist is in the back of the room and I like that. That reminds me. So this job, that was a little difficult at one point the client goes. When I was at this place the colorist was in front and I just like that better. And again it had been kind of adversarial and I said, yeah, you know, I've worked like that. I said the advantage to me being back here is I can make faces on you and you can't see them and the room goes silent for like three seconds. That felt like 10 minutes. 

and then everyone just broke out laughing and it broke that tension and, you know, brought it down and I could have said I could have lobbed that one and it could have been like get the fuck out of the room or what, but roll the dice and see what happens. 

0:29:54
I love that and you're not the only colorist that I know that has that setup for exactly that reason, so you can keep the client focused on the image and not on what you're doing with knobs and dials. And we have pretty complex setups. I call mine the Starship Enterprise, so it's really easy to get distracted with. Well, what are you doing on that panel, what buttons are you hitting? And it's like, yeah, don't worry about that, just focus on your image that we're working on. 

0:30:16 
And sometimes you're just staring at the panel going, what the fuck do I do next? You don't need them, like if you're not typing on the buttons or you just want that silence. And if they go, oh, are you doing something? Yeah, I'm doing something. It's just not on the screen yet. Don't worry about it. And I'm sitting there trying to figure out what I'm going to do next. 

0:30:33
I've also heard certain people literally click extra buttons to make it sound like people are doing something, and it's that mentality of you. Know, we don't need the client sitting over our shoulder every moment. We just need them to focus on the end result, which is we are making your pictures gorgeous, and is this what you wanted? Is this what you wanted it to feel and look like? And so I love that you take a couple seconds to look at the panel and just make your decision, because sometimes we need a minute to think. 

0:31:00 
Yeah, yeah, and what you're meant to about pressing buttons. I mean, as a linear editor, that was an old trick that we always did. Anyone, you just hit space bar a few times again because linear, you know, changing the dissolve length could be a big deal. It sounds simple and they would be like oh, can you make that two frames shorter? Which would be like oh, my God, it's going to take 10 minutes literally, and I would just click a button like a few times and say look at this. And they go oh, that's so much better. And I didn't change a thing. Didn't change a thing. 

0:31:34
And that mentality does work today, sometimes when it's like, oh, you know what, now it's perfect. I didn't get a chance to change anything yet. My finger is still on the game, we haven't had a chance to change it yet. But you know what? You're the client, I'm happy if you're happy, yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about your shift into HDR and how that changed your work. For you, it's a big shift in the way that we think about images. Obviously, it's a shift in the way that we look at images. How did that change the way you grade, or did it not? 

0:32:04 
No, it absolutely did. And I'll tell you what also shifted, because prior to me doing a lot of the doc series work, I was basically working in a non-managed environment. Everything was 709. I spent about a year and a half moving over to ASIS for a while and now I'm fully into DaVinci wide gamut project base. I drank the Kool-Aid and preaching it every day now, I think with HDR as we all know, the first HDR stuff, everyone was hitting a thousand nits because like we could go brighter. Now everything's like okay, 250 to 450 is a good medium or something in there, and I did that too. It's nice coming back down to a reality. 

Clients, I think, need it more. I've really gotten into it and I'm sure I could have done this in an ASIS thing about anti-ASIS now. But I've really gotten into a really good place with DaVinci wide gamut, where I know where I kind of want the skin tone levels for interview faces, I know where I want titles and all that. So now when I do my Dolby Vision trims, I might be touching six shots like I'm barely touching it, it's just there. And when we, after we switched the room and the monitors, the clients go oh, that looks great. And you know I change a few little things, but I spend maybe an hour just watching through it and I might adjust four to 10 shots If that are you doing the HDR pass first or the SDR, and then transform HDR? 

mostly the HDR pass first, occasionally the SDR pass. I could go either way. I think we both know colorists that prefer going SDR first these days and going up, mostly because the way the clients want it. Now they want to see the HDR. But there was that middle time, probably about a year ago, where they were like I don't care about HDR because there's three TVs out there, and now that everyone knows that you really can't buy a TV now, that's not HDR. I think it's more common. Certainly Apple wants you to do that first, netflix wants you to do it first, some networks, I don't think care as long as everything looks good. 

0:34:22
Definitely nine out of 10 times it's HDR first, but I don't have a strong feeling about that Well, especially if you're only having to touch a couple shots to do your trim, that's clearly that your color pipeline in your workflow is doing most of the work for you, which is a how it should work. 

Yeah, and I just wanted to touch on the, your concept of everybody was trying to hit a thousand nits and now we're sort of settling on the middle ground. I saw that period as people like trying to overfill their cup and now what I sort of feel like it, as you can get a really fast car with a lot of horsepower, but you're not always pushing down the pedal at top speed. You're only using that in very specific circumstances, because then if you're always slamming the pedal down, then you're not. It's all the same, you're not going to feel that difference, you're not going to have that appreciation. But when you're constantly sitting at I don't know 20% of the power, then when you need that scene to really impact you, you can use that dynamic range. So that's how I started to look at HDR now is we have. We have the power, so to say, but we don't always need to use it. 

0:35:31 
Yeah, I totally agree, especially in documentaries where you basically have interview shots, you have sometimes recreations and then you have archival. When I was watching some documentaries that were HDR and the archival was at 800, 900 minutes, I was like, oh my God, what, why? Who did that? I generally don't judge color of other people, I really don't pay attention to that, but it was just more shocking. So just to bring it down. 

But the doc I did for Bryce Dallas Howard had all of those elements. And then there was this beautiful stuff that was shot I think it was Greece and Italy with over the water and the sunset. So to be able to bring that stuff up, it just made it same. It just looked so beautiful and the interview, everything was shot beautifully, but it was just. The interviews were just normal, they were in a studio, nothing was great. And then you had these whether it was drone shots or just camera shots of someone standing at the beach and it was a beautiful sunset with oranges and reds and you could just bring that up to 6700. And it just looked amazing. 

0:36:43
Exactly you pinned it right there. So when you needed that rain for these shots, to really not only make those shots sing but to bring in the impact. Because in documentary obviously the interviewee is bringing the emotion and the narrative, but on these other shots it's all on the shot. To sell that and being able to use HDR to help bring that extra impact is, I think, really important and essentially sells HDR, at least to me. 

0:37:09 
Yeah, and I think with certain recreations it could be really useful. I did this project I think it was. Yeah, it was on Hulu called have you Seen this man and it was kind of a true crimes docu series and they wanted the recreations to be very stylized and really like no one could mistakenly think, oh, is this a recreation. They really wanted it to be a slap in the face like you're in a different time, and we were able to pull the colors and contrast so different than everything else. I forget how the knit average, but it was certainly above the 250, 350 I normally kind of hover at, was probably 450 to six guessing, I don't remember, but it really made it stand out, which, to me, is the whole purpose of HDR the ability to differentiate, especially in a documentary. 

0:38:01
It's not you're not trying to slap people in the face until you are with this, as the client really wanted to. So, as we start to approach the end of our time together, I wanted to ask you another question that I ask everybody on the show, and it is if I were to take you and continue all of your documentary work and I were to take you and put you on a desert island and you were to be able to take one color grading tool with you doesn't necessarily need to be in resolve, but any type of color grading tool from your entire career. What would that tool be? 

0:38:31 
Hmm, I've been enjoying a lot of the DCTLs that are being made these days. You're making some great ones, which one of them your exposure tool is steadily in my pipeline. I've been using for about the last six months. I've been really enjoying sin look by the Raven grade and that's a tool I've been really enjoying for look design. So I would say inside resolve, that's probably the number one tool. I would say outside of resolve, the part of it, stream decks. I can't live without them. I have two of them on my desk. In most of our rooms here we have the advanced panel and we can't have a stream deck on it. Because of our workflow I use the advanced panel. I would be very happy and most of the time prefer it if I had a mini panel and two to three stream decks. I'd be happy, especially now that you could do Dolby trims in the mini panel. 

0:39:26
Yeah, stream decks were a game changer for me and if I keep going, I may end up getting a third, when I have two, one on either side of my mini panel, and they're just fantastic. Tools probably work without my mini panel and use the stream decks, but I would keep reaching for the middle trying to go for my wheels, and that just feels weird. So if our listeners wanted to learn more about you see some of your work where could we find you online? 

0:39:51 
You could look me up on IMDB and you could see a list of my work. I have a website, evananthonypostcom. I'm terrible at demo reels and still images from shoots. I am on Instagram, which is just for work. I believe it's evanthonypost, but I will confirm that and that's about it. 

0:40:15
Well, all of that will be in the show notes, along with some links to your work and, of course, a link to the stream deck and everything else that we've talked about in this episode. I wanted to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your knowledge. It has been so much fun chatting with you. 

0:40:29 
Yeah, this has been great, jason, really fun. 

0:40:31
And for this episode of color and coffee. Thank you so much for joining us. This actually wraps up our first season of color and coffee, so we're going to be taking a break, but we will be back for season two after a few months. Thank you so much for enjoying our season one and we'll see you next time. Bye, be sure to follow us on Instagram, youtube or your podcast, apple choice. If you're using Apple podcasts 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. Happy grading. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page