Welcome to the Color Time Podcast.
I am your host, Vincent Taylor.
This is the show where we chat to professionals
who work with color.
Today I'm speaking to
season colorist, John Daro.
Seasoned, he's not, he makes him sound old.
He's younger than me, but
he's been in this industry
for a long time and has
worked on some incredible projects.
I really want to chat to him
about working with animation
because he's done some amazing projects.
And I find that a bit of a dark art, so let's go.
Take your seats because the
Hourglass is about to turn.
We are entering the world of the micro podcast.
Explore the craft,
creativity, and science of professionals
who use color to tell stories.
Welcome to the Color Timer with Vincent Taylor.
John, hi, thanks for joining me.
Hey Vincent, how's it going, man?
Good man, you look like you're doing your
satanic worship in that dark darkness.
I live in the dark, this is all I ever see.
Don't take me out into the sun.
I have bumped into you a
number of times at different events
and I keep threatening to get you on the podcast
and I've been true to my threats.
So welcome, I said to you off mic,
I don't actually have specific stuff
I want to talk to you about.
I want to talk to you about everything.
But before I get in trouble with myself,
I'm gonna start my sand timer
to get the game show happening.
And I've got a question for you.
You're gonna love this one as an icebreaker.
And try not to think about
it too much before you answer.
Just go knee jerk if you can.
It's a nasty one.
What would you say is one
of the most beautiful things
you've ever seen?
Oh, sunset, Pismo Beach, done.
Wow.
That was easy.
Wow.
Wow, and was there a specific sunset?
It was up there for my birthday
and it was just one of those ones
where it was like perfectly clear
and you watch that sun just
disappear over the horizon
and it's just stunning.
There's nothing better than that.
That's life really.
Like that's like--
Yeah, it is right.
Yeah, and doing the rural moments.
Do you, you know, in nature and things like that,
you're a colorist, man, you're a colorist.
So you're looking at colors all the time.
Are you conscious of that?
Are you, do you kind of go outside of yourself
when you see something like a sunset
and you go, oh, look at the graduation of that
or look at that, or not really?
Do you just kind of soak it up?
It depends, in that moment, no,
you got to be in the moment, right?
But then there's some times
where I had this one client
and he kept getting on my case
for having the skies too magenta, right?
And I remember I was taking out the trash
and another sunset happening.
I looked at the sky and I took a picture
and I sent to him, I said, hey, magenta sky.
So sometimes, yeah, of course,
you do think about these things.
But you try not to, right?
You try just to, especially
if you see something beautiful,
try to be in the moment.
I had a mentor once that,
this was when I was editing a lot.
And he said, you know, you've matured as an editor
when you can just watch a film
and don't have that inner
dialogue in your head thinking,
oh, that was a nice cut, or,
oh, that bumped a little bit.
Yeah. So I think there's two modes
that you can oscillate in
and you kind of need to live in both.
Yeah, I find, because folks ask me that,
they say, oh, do you notice color grades in films?
And I tend to notice them
if I'm not enjoying the film.
Like if I'm not in the film, you know?
I just work with the work that no one notices.
Yeah, yeah.
There's exceptions to that where you,
I went to see the Joker film the other week
and I did really enjoy it actually.
But there was moments there where I'm going,
oh man, that looks so beautiful.
There was moments where I
just wanted to dive into it.
Your career, I was stalking you
and I was looking at all the things you worked on.
You worked on so many things.
And I did want to talk to you about animation,
about, I've probably only graded maybe one or two
animation pieces in my whole life
and they were really, really small.
But I wanted to talk to you about how you approach
an animated project versus a live action project
and the differences or the similarities.
Sure, I mean, I think that the first thing
to talk about there is like, that's my home, right?
My father was in
animation, you know, so growing up,
the very first thing I ever did in this business
was he brought home a cell
and we painted it together.
Right, and I was like, I like this, this is fun.
And then from that, I remember him taking me
to a telecine session
where they would get the film back
from the animation studio
and they would bring it in.
And they'd have to tweak the color
because you have a bunch of animators
and nothing exactly matches.
And I remember walking into the telecine bay
and looking at that going,
it looks like Starship Enterprise.
That's what I want to do.
Wow.
And I also remember going,
you can have whatever you want for lunch,
like whatever you want.
It's like, yeah, you can get whatever,
I'll have a hamburger.
But I thought that was very, very, very slick.
So, you know, it being the family business,
I think that I'm predisposed
to being able to, you know,
talk the talk, speak the jargon.
But also if you think about color grading
and what we do often,
and I'm not talking about just setting a base look,
but the nitty gritty of it, the tracking shapes,
setting keyframes, doing dynamics to connect things
so that they don't bump editorially.
A lot of that goes back to
those original dope sheets
that I'd watched my dad doing on the kitchen table,
where he'd be, you know, he'd have the audio track
and he would, you know,
reverse forward, reverse forward,
and basically be timing out the animation.
So like, okay, this is gonna take six frames.
And he'd be just setting the keyframes
and he'd send it off to the in-betweeners
and they would build the animation.
It's not a whole lot
different than what we do right now,
where we have mattes and we're tracking them
and we're, you know, enhancing certain areas,
making certain areas recede,
we're setting those keyframes and then saying,
All right, computer, you're the in-betweener.
Figure out between these
keyframes what it would do.
So I think that it was a really good foundation
for me, you know, growing up.
It's funny, because it was something
I used to be embarrassed of.
You never wanted to be a Nepo baby,
but now in my older age, I'm like,
"No, that was the best upbringing,
"the best childhood I could have possibly had."
Yeah.
So, you know--
That specific memory though,
that you started just a moment ago,
that's beautiful, man.
That is so lovely. No doubt, no doubt.
You know, and it's funny too,
because the big ones that I remember of him
were Heathcliff and then the Ninja Turtles.
So being a child of the 80s,
having your dad work on Ninja Turtles,
that was pretty cool.
Every single Ninja Turtle
toy you could ever imagine,
all I wanted was like a Transformer, a GI Joe,
but no, no, it's always just
the free ones from the studio.
But, you know, to your
point about grading animation
versus live action, the two big things is,
live action, you're working with the DP,
you're setting a look,
you're setting a vibe, right?
Typically in animation, that stuff has been done
by the art director very early on,
and it's been a three year process.
So they've been living with this.
So it's more about getting the tires
like the ones on their car, right?
I just want tires like the ones on my car,
please just get me to what
I've been seeing for so long.
So one tip that I can recommend is,
if you can start early on and make sure
that you're part of the calibration process,
make sure you're part of the color pipeline process
so that everybody is on the same page.
So there are no surprises when you get to final DI.
I think that's step number
one and very, very critical.
I think the other thing is,
if you can work with the animation studio
and get the matte packs in an efficient way,
make sure that you're
consistent with the matte naming
so that it's easy to throw
grades, easy to organize.
One thing that we do on almost every animation show
is we take the key characters
and we give them categories, right?
So then we can sort in the Baselight,
show me all of the shots of this character
and make sure they're all consistent
throughout the entire process.
But then you start taking some live action
that maybe is heavy visual effects based, right?
And you have all of those
mattes and it's photo realistic,
but it's still done in a computer.
If you think about it, it's
photo realistic animation.
So when I'm talking about like a heavy VFX film,
there's not a whole lot of
difference between those two.
But I think that the other thing
that from the live action side,
there's color grading and there's color correction.
You don't really have as much color correction
and animation as you do in live action.
You don't get a cloud and animation that comes by
and makes everything a little desaturated and dark.
And you have to fight that a little bit.
So I think that there are differences,
but at the end of the day, it's still the same.
You're still trying to tell stories in both.
And you just want to make sure that nothing bumps
and that everything is consistent
and that it's beautiful, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And this is, I'm gonna prefix
it with, excuse my ignorance,
but in my brain, I kind of see, okay,
they've designed the shot of
the scene and the animation,
they put the colors in, they put everything in.
Isn't it how it should be?
Why do you have to then
mess with it on top of that?
Because you never done, Vincent, you're never done.
You just run out of time.
So even the art directors
and the directors of the animated films, right?
there's always something that
could have been better, right?
And that's really what finishing is.
This is the last step before
it goes out into the world.
So if you think of it from that point of view,
often it's, well, what
didn't you get in that render?
Tell me your deepest desire, right?
Maybe I can do it, maybe I
can't, but let's take a crack.
Do you got five minutes? Let's try to spend.
I remember a few animated films.
Often there was the director was saying
that the main character was too angular, right?
Too harsh, right?
And I don't know if that was the lighting
or if it was built into the model,
but one of the things that we went ahead and did
was we started to take that
and using the texture blend
in Baselight, basically blur part of the image,
composite it on top, right?
And then take certain
frequencies and knock them back.
And then at that point,
then you're tracking the face
and comping that back on top.
So in a weird way, it's like the final composite.
Yeah. Yeah.
I was something stuck in my
head about color correction
versus grading.
So for something like, you
know, you've got a Scooby-Doo movie
and you've got Shaggy's
shirt or something like that,
which is X color.
Would that be then consistent
and you wouldn't have to
worry about getting that same tone
or do you still have to?
You hope it is, right?
But the thing is that, again, you
have many different animators working on it.
And if you think about--
there's 2D animation, right?
And then there's 3D animation.
And 3D animation really kind
of works to the same physics
that normal, traditional live action works.
You have lighting.
That lighting is bouncing off
various things in the scene.
That light then bounces onto a shaggy shirt.
And then it bounces back to the virtual camera.
So there are things that will cause it to be what
we call off model, right? So here's
the model. This is what Shaggy shirt color is. This
needs to be the same across the board,
but you also want it to be integrated in the
environment. So you do have correction to
do to make sure that, you know, these characters,
these iconic characters that we've lived with
for, you know, 50, 60 years still represent as
themselves, but are also integrated into
the story that you're telling into the environment
that they're playing in, in that particular scene.
This is a question I ask a lot because I get
overwhelmed sometimes when a project starts.
Where do you start? So sticking in the world of
animation, what's, what's the first step
for John Daro?
I think it's different for
different, different projects, right?
Obviously, the best thing,
And I know that this is beating a dead horse
because everyone says this, but start, start
super early.
It starts in pre-production, right?
Whether it's an animated show
or if it's a live action show.
If it's a live action show, you're starting with
hair and makeup tests, usually lens tests,
that kind of thing.
And you start to build the look
with the director of photography.
And how I tend to do it,
is I have a web page that
we start with V1 look, right?
Typically, if it's like a film look, let's say,
you start with a pretty generic Kodak or Fuji
or something that's pretty standard,
and then you build from there, right?
If it's in animation, you
kind of tend to work in ACES
just because it's easy,
and if you have a lot of different animation houses
working on the same
project, it's really simple to say,
Hey, everybody work with this set.
It's built into most
software. Everybody's on board.
So from there, you can start
to build that color pipeline,
and that's really critical to get that early on.
In animated shows, I'll typically,
on the ones especially through the studio,
I'll be involved in the lighting reviews,
and that was very, very critical
because you can get a lot of work done upfront
and save time on the backend, right,
by making those corrections in that render
before it comes out.
Another really useful thing, this is back in the
days of 3D, it's not so important anymore
because we don't tend not to do stereo films as
much as we used to. But if you see something like
a lens flare and you say that could be a problem,
make sure that that is the same in each eye so
that you don't get retinal conflict.
Catching that kind of stuff
early is obviously a benefit.
With the live action, then
we get into dailies, right?
And I'll usually supervise the first week of
dailies, make sure that everybody's on
the same page, and also work with the studio to
make sure it's like, no, it's okay.
This is going to be a...
It's dark on the dailies, but don't worry.
We built in a stop down under the LUT.
Here, if we take this off,
look, you have a ton of range.
It's a very thick neck.
You got everything you need.
It's okay.
Totally, right?
Yeah.
And then once that's rolling,
then I kind of disappear for a bit, right?
Right.
Gets into editorial sometimes, you know,
in editorial there'll be some things,
hey, can you send this one scene?
Can you just make sure that this is,
can you smooth this out and send it back?
Just to make sure that the edits kind of are happy
and that they're gonna get
what they want in the final.
So we'll go through that.
We'll do preview versions,
especially for, you know, audience reaction,
that kind of thing.
It's usually a very quick pass that we'll hit
maybe a day or two.
One thing that I like working on the Baselight
is being able to take that and, you know,
back in the day, you used to throw away that work,
but if you can convert
that into your working space,
a lot of that work can track to the final.
So that's a benefit that's--
I missed that or I zoned out.
What do you mean by that?
Okay, so like, for example, like, you know,
15 years ago or so, right,
you get these preview versions,
but you're working in 709, you know,
off of like a typical like, well, OMF Avid output.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, nowadays we can kind of convert that,
put it into the working space.
You might not have the range, but you sometimes
will reconform and actually match the edit
and be tracking that
through to make a preview version.
But in doing that process, if you can do as much
upfront that will get to the final, that's
obviously the best move, right?
Because you don't want to just do work that is for
a one-off screening and then throw
it away, right?
Everything should always be
gaining towards that final.
Every minute that you spend should be going towards
the direction of the director and
DP want to get to at the end.
And if you're putting in the work, if you can track
that all the way through, that's
a huge benefit.
And then you get to the final grade and then
everything from that point, hopefully you
kind of had made a lot of those decisions upfront
where it's sitting in a nice spot
that everyone agrees on.
And if you can get that balance done very quickly,
then you can get to the what I call
like the icing on the cake, the tweezing pass, the
stuff that's really value add, sharpening
eyes, working on bringing out key story moments and
enhancing certain elements.
Maybe there's a color value that is kind of like a
character and you can kind of start
to work that through and build a theme.
And all of that work goes on
top of that initial balance.
So the faster you can get to that point, I think
the better value add is there.
Yeah.
You mentioned 3D and how
it's not as common anymore.
I mean, are you still doing 3D passes or?
We do.
It's typically for
international markets these days.
And you know, that's a it's a
shame because I'm a big fan, right?
I think that-- Oh, you are?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now that was early days, I
was early money on the 3D game.
But I think that going forward,
we're gonna be more headset driven like HMD,
Vision Pro, or even augmented reality
as far as the stereo work goes.
So I think that for the theatrical experience,
it's still huge, it just
never really took off in the home,
the glasses were always kind of funky,
they were never charged, right?
They always like went on the fritz.
So it just never really caught on
like it probably could have.
But I still think that there's nothing like that,
you go to some of these IMAX theaters
and it's completely immersive and you put that on,
it's like, wow, that's that extra dimension.
I consider that in the sound world,
you have stereo mono sound, right?
But then you have Atmos
and Atmos is so much better.
That's like our version of Atmos.
That's so interesting.
Once again, people are
gonna get sick of me saying this
about me breaking my own rules,
but my time has run out, so we're out of time.
But bonus round, because I
always have all these extra
things that pop into my brain.
I don't know how else to say this,
but you've got your fingers in a lot of pies,
like you're a member of different societies
and you're really active in the industry.
This is a pretty broad
question, but what's going on?
What do you see going on in
the industry at the moment?
That is kind of peaking
your interest or concerning you
or standing out, I guess.
No concerns other than I think that there's a lot
of different outlets.
It's never been a better time
to be an aspiring filmmaker.
maker, the democratization
of the technology is huge.
You can really make a film with
very minimal equipment these days.
And the software has never been cheaper, right?
You can put together a pretty good kit for, you
know, back when I started, it was like,
you know, you needed about, you know, 700 grand to
a million to get going, right?
Now, you know, a pretty powerful laptop and, you
know, decent camera that you can pick
up for, you know, $10,000 bucks,
you're pretty much off and off and rolling.
So that's huge, right?
But I think that with
that, you have a lot of noise.
So now it's a lot harder to do something original
because there's so many people doing, making
content, which is great, right?
That's what we do. We tell stories. But I think
that something that is going to be a really huge
benefit to getting more work done efficiently is
some of these machine vision tools. And when I
talk about that, I'm talking about auto
segmentation or some beauty type work that can
kind of auto detect the faces and be able to track
with it as it moves around in 3D space.
So I'm really excited for that. One thing as a
society that we need to kind of do as a
colorist group, I want to start working with the
Academy, the ASC, the different guilds,
and SMPTE and kind of come up with a standard.
Because right now it's the wild, wild west for
these models. And as we start to integrate them
into our tools, it would be really nice to kind
of standardize on something so that when we're
training these models that take a ton of time
and energy to put into them, we want to make sure
that they're usable across multiple different
platforms. So very similar to how like a shader has
been used in the past, I kind of look at these
different models as sort of like the new v2.0
shader. And so if we can start to kind of
standardize that and be able to use them across
platforms, from visual effects all the way through
to finishing, it's going to be a really powerful
tool and kind of get us to that next level
of color grading. Yeah, wow. I am I'm going to
finish off with a pretty easy one. They've all
been pretty easy. You're an 80s boy. Your favorite,
your favorite film from the 80s?. Oh, oh, gosh,
that's that's that's a loaded one. But you know,
I'm a big fan of ET, ET is fantastic also came
out in 1982. So did I. So I think that that's a
that's maybe why but that one's great Goonies.
Come on Gremlin. I see they're doing another
Goonies film. Did I read that right?
Yeah, I think that was a hoax. And it was kind of
like, yes. Oh, man. You have a ticket sold. Do it.
I think it was. Yeah. John, thank you so much.
The time goes so fast. But but
yeah, absolute pleasure to chat to you.
I'll see you around Vincent. Cheers, mate. Cheers.
Cheers. John, thank you so much for joining me on
the podcast. It's a great chat. And as usual,
you know, I had to stop on the record and we kept
talking about so many cool things afterwards. But
look, yeah, thanks a lot. It was it was cool. Thank
you to you, the listener, for joining me
as well. And for those crazy people who actually
bought color time and t shirts. Thank you so much.
If you want one, there's a link somewhere in the
show notes or something. I think there's even
hats now. It's going crazy. But but joking aside,
thank you so much for supporting the show. It
means a like. It means like it means a lot. I quite
like that. It means a like. It means a lot to me.
And and thank you to my executive producer
MixingLight.com. If you are watching this or
listening to this on their website, you already
know what they do. If you don't check them out,
MixingLight.com. They can help you all things in color
And yeah, look, I'll see you on the next
one. Thank you so much. See ya.
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