You can color him content in his field
Stefan Sonnenfeld
Digital Colorist -- co-founder of the Santa Monica and New York-based post-production house Company 3 that uses the Digital Intermediate (DI) process, converting film to digital files and back to film, for commercials, music videos, TV and films.
Current assignments: “Mission: Impossible III,” “X-Men: The Last Stand,” “Miami Vice” and the two sequels to “Pirates of the Caribbean”
Previous credits: “Collateral,” “Man on Fire” and “The Island”
Job description: “The analogy I use so everybody understands quickly is: Have you used Photoshop? Then I say, [we use] a very complicated and sophisticated Photoshop that enables you to do real-time color correction and manipulation of film to enhance, replicate or create.
“It is a big step in replacing photochemical color timing to create a film’s ‘look’ because ultimately, as you’ve probably heard, the theaters are being equipped with digital projectors. When that happens, we will not be making release prints for the United States and the rest of the world. That is going to take years and years to accomplish. But at that point, your color-corrected files will be projected using a video 2K or 4K video projector, and that data will get sent to all the digital projectors in the world ... replicated exactly. The photochemical timing still comes into play because once we color correct the 2K files we then record that information, make a new negative, and that negative still needs to be run through the printing process.”
Color schemes: “Let’s take a movie like ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’ We start way in pre-production and discuss the look of the film. Every single day they shoot and we get the dailies, we try to follow a look that is determined by all the creative people. We do that because the first place the dailies go is to studio executives and to the editors, and you want to show everyone the best-looking stuff you can. If the footage doesn’t look good, it’s very disconcerting.
“Then we carry that look through the dailies process into the previews and into the DI when they are finalizing the look for its release. Then that same color-corrected final file gets translated into video space for all the home video, TV spots and trailers, so it is consistent all the way through.”
Dealing with cinematographers: “I personally feel that [digital coloring] doesn’t take away from the cinematographer. Any photographer who feels that way isn’t looking at this properly. In general, I have heard few complaints, but thankfully I work with people who embrace this as a collaborative tool and an enhancement for what’s there. It’s there to make things better or fix things; it’s an incredible tool....
“I think almost every movie that gets nominated for cinematography in the past couple of years, has been a DI. As a matter of fact, one of the ones I did, ‘Collateral,’ won the British Academy of Film and Television award for cinematography. That was mostly digital and shot specifically with the post process in mind.
“You couldn’t release that movie the way it looked when they captured the information because [director] Michael Mann, he did a lot of preplanning [with the cinematographers]. It had to be manipulated in post because of the way they exaggerated lights and overexposed things. You needed to bring that back into reality when it was all said and done. That was a classic example of everybody working together and producing a product I think everybody seemed to like. And it got numerous awards.
“I get responses all the time about how crazy some of the stuff was in terms of how beautiful it was in ‘Man on Fire.’ When Denzel Washington had his angry moments, we had different color palettes and techniques for that.”
Collaboration: “There is always somebody present [in the booth] to finalize things. At least the director and sometimes the DP come in and participate. There are lots of people I have worked with for a long time who let me go crazy in the room by myself. Then they’ll come back and see what they like.”
Technology advances: “The problem with this business is that it’s very capital intensive. The room I’m sitting in doing commercials is a $3-million room. The technology changes all the time; we collaborate with the software people to implement changes.”
Background: “I went to Boston University as a business major. I got a summer job as a driver for a post-production company here in L.A. Ironically, my first thing was transporting ‘Miami Vice’ dailies from Universal for this post-production company. I started to learn the business and liked it.”
Resides: Brentwood
Age: 41
Union or guild: “We don’t participate in that.”
-- Susan King
