The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP037: Color Education PT 1 w. Cullen Kelly

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

In this episode of The Offset Podcast we’re talking about a subject that’s near and dear to us - color education.  Over the past 25 years both Joey and Robbie have written books on postproduction, authored hundreds of hours of tutorial content and spoken on color and postproduction at conferences and events all around the world.  For this episode we thought it’d be fun to have one of our favorite color educators join the show as a special guest.  Who’s that special guest? None other than the incomparable Cullen Kelly.  As a colorist Cullen’s eye is sought after by some of the biggest brands and best film makers in the world, as an educator his knowledge and easy going manner have earned him the respect of thousands around the world and even gave brith to a thriving community he manages. As a developer - first with DCTL and now OFX, Cullen is combining his love of color science and workflow all to help colorists create compelling images.   Specific topics we cover in this episode include:Cullen’s background and how his journey began with a desire to know more about colorHow being a staff colorist drastically impacted his skills and learning the craft of color gradingHow the facility experience also drove his desire to learn more about what was happening behind the scenes with image creationRewarding the passion of others by sharing knowledge and building a communityColor and post have lots of ‘lanes’ of knowledge, no one ever regrets knowledge gainedHow knowledge is tiered - you can’t learn everything all at once.  The challenges of calibrating education to your audienceThe role of principles and how they outweigh any specific toolThe challenge of teaching when the quality of footage, projects, and skillsets varyIf you liked this show consider support the podcast by buying us a cup of coffee. - https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcastAlso be sure to like and subscribe to the show where ever you find it!

Hey everybody and welcome back to another installment of the Offset podcast. And this week, we're talking about color education, what you need to know and who you need to learn it from. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast.

I'm one of your host, Robbie Carmen, and with me as always is Joey Deanna. Hey, Joey, how are you doing, buddy? Hey, everyone. Joey, so today, I want to take a look at something that we've been skirting around, like, I think, discussing on some levels, because we weren't quite sure how to frame it.

And that was the idea of sort of color education. You know, the concept of, of learning what the buttons do, how to use the buttons in context, the creative part about that. And maybe you could even argue a little bit of like the business practices that go on in terms of like, you know, running a colored business. Now, I think, you know, both of us have a, how would you say this? Like a very long and varied background in education, right? Yeah, yeah. We've done conferences.

We've done web-based training. We've done official training for companies like Dolby. We've done, you know, one-on-one consulting with clients. So we've been around the education game for a while. Yeah, I mean, listen, I was thinking about this today and ahead of this episode. And I was thinking early 2000s, whenever Apple rolled out the Apple Pro Training Series program, I was part of the first generation or so of that. I think I did the first book project, the first book I wrote in 2003, maybe 2004.

I've done a lot of books. I've done a lot of online training with with Linda.com first. That became LinkedIn learning. And then I, with a couple other colorist friends of mine, at the time we started a whole, you know, training platform and ran that company for, you know, and contributed content for over a decade. As you said, conferences, et cetera. So it's there.

But I just think like when I think about education and what, you know, our part, what we've done over the years and what's going on right now, it just seems to me that like these, tools are not getting any simpler, right? The workflows are not getting any more robust. In a lot of ways, they're becoming more complex. You need to know more than you did 10 or 12 years ago, right? Like, it used to be like you walk into a room and talk about a lookup table and people will look at you like you have five heads, right? These days, people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, less. I don't care about that. I want to talk about like the computational performance of a plugin or something like

that, right? Like people, people's level of this has just gotten much better. And it just dawned to me that, you know, we should maybe do an episode where we talk a little bit about education and the importance of it, the ongoing part about it, the learning paths, the preferences. But listen, man, we talk a lot about this stuff. We teach it a lot. But there's plenty of other people out there in the world who are doing an incredible job teaching. And I have over the past, I would say, six, seven, eight years, probably been the most impressed by our good friend Colin Kelly, who Colin Kelly, Cullen Kelly Culler, say that five times fast, is a colorist, he's a developer, he's an educator, he's a speaker, he's, you know,

all the things that you can do in that world. And it just so happens that we reached out to Cullen and said, hey, bud, can we get you on the show? And here he is. Welcome, Cullen. How are you, buddy? What's up, guys? I'm doing great. I'm glad to be here.

Thanks for having me. Oh, no worries, man. We are, we're stoked to have you. you know, just a quick side for all of our audience or our viewers. I was lucky to meet Cullen probably about a decade or so ago. And, you know, he was at the time working as a colorist in Austin, Texas. That's where you're from originally, right? Austin.

Dallas way back when, but still a lot of awesome as well. Yeah. And, you know, there was something like, you know, when you meet somebody, you're just like, that guy's on to something. And I kind of like, I didn't quite know what it was at the time, but I was like, there's something about this guy. And flash forward, you know, a decade or so, you're kind of running your own little like color empire, if you will, right? Like you got your hands in a lot of little things, right? It's you're doing grades for big time clients. You're, you know, running your own community with, you know, hundreds if not thousands of members now who have taken your classes and courses and, you know, kind of followed your sort of your zeitgeist of color education. you've, you know, gotten into the development game. I think a lot of people probably know you from all your amazing DCTL work over the,

over the years. But like, even now, you're jumping into like the next level of that, right, doing your own program. I know you have like, you know, a couple plug-ins that you're developing. Contour comes to mind as one that's out there right now. And then, you know, somewhere in that whole mix, you're finding time to, you know, be a dad, be a husband, you know, all that kind of stuff. Also, very, very big congratulations.

You just became an associate of the ASC. Is that correct? That's right. Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate that. Man, that's super impressive. And for those of you don't know, this is like, it's a pretty hard club to get into, right? You have to have proven yourself to a lot of very high-end practitioners, DPs, technical people, or whatever.

And so Cullen has that in space, man. But, again, we can't thank you enough for coming on today and talking to us. I want to begin our conversation a little bit about just if you give people. people, the, your, you know, quick backstory, how did you go from, I'm a colorist to now, hey, I want to be involved in education. I want to be involved in development. What did that path look like for you? Gosh, you know, there's so many different, like, moments in that story that I could call out that kind of like pivoted the path a little bit left or right of just like being a colorist in the chair all day, every day. But one of the big ones that comes to mind is like,

I've been on my own for like a lot of my career and just having to figure stuff out. In fact, like, one of my, I think the first time I, this may not have been the first time we met, but the first time that like one of the first experiences I remember having with you, Robbie, was going to NAB like, gosh, however many years ago, like 10 plus years ago. And really wanting to learn more and like knowing like, hey, if I want to learn more from the people who know this stuff who are sharing it, I need to be in this room. So like I scraped together like a Southwest, you know, like airplane ticket to get to NAB and to join for post-production world.

So I was like, you know, very, very hungry for not. knowledge. But what comes to mind thinking about where my path has gone is as I started to get access to that knowledge and find people who were willing to share or who I could like, you know, like sort just keep nudging until they would tell me what I wanted to know. One of those big moments for me was when I actually went to work at a post house and I wasn't the only colorist. I wasn't running my own business. And somewhere along at that point in the journey when I started to get, I feel like I was getting like, oh, I'm getting luts like from these other post houses and getting insights from people who are working on big movies and with the big colorists.

One of the things that really occurred to me is like all at once is like, wow, this is so cool. Like not all this knowledge is expected and it's not all stuff I would have guessed. But the other things I was like, dude, this is just knowledge. Like, why is it that hard to get? You know, like I was equipped to understand this. I was excited to understand this five years ago in some cases. Why did it take that long? That was for me one of the very first seeds that was like, this got to be fixed.

You know, I don't recall when this was. It was some sort of industry event. Maybe it was NAB or maybe, you know, an early version of the colorist mixer or something. And I remember somebody, you know, a couple well-known colorists. I won't name names. They're so well-known and known in the industry. Kind of came up to me with like a little bit of an attitude being like, why are you teaching this stuff?

Like, you're giving away the special sauce, the secrets. And like, I just remember, like, kind of being a little incredulous about it and just being like, you guys, like, no, like, this is, this is information that, you know, We're doing ourselves a disservice as an industry if we try to hide it. You know, it's like we're not like, you know, I know you feel, I know you feel similar. So it's interesting to hear you kind of. Yeah, I mean, we have moved, I think, forward a lot as an industry in terms of removing gatekeeping on both capability as in all the software is much cheaper and all the hardware is much cheaper, but also getting rid of gatekeeping in terms of knowledge. I think at this point, the overwhelming attitude is that if.

someone's hiring you because you know a secret that you probably are not well positioned in your career. I don't feel threatened by somebody else learning what I just learned or I learned a year ago or whatever, whenever. Absolutely. Yeah, that secret sauce syndrome is is like on its way out, thankfully. Totally. So you're in this post of environment. You're getting those juices going. What happened next? Yeah, man. So I another like significant part about this chapter in my career is this was the first time. So at this point, I am back in Los Angeles after living in Austin for several years. And in Austin, I'd run my own post house. So I was the guy in the chair, but I was also trying to run a business and cook the books and produce the jobs and, you know, like run client service and do all the stuff that you do when you're just a little, you know, like color business trying to take care of your clients. And this was my first opportunity working at this post house in LA. They're like, hey, go great. Do your thing. Producers will produce. Client service will provide client service.

The assist will do their job. Your role is to color grade. So I was color grading all day every day. And like that was a magic moment for me. Like I felt so excited. And I grew in my practice like crazy in that time. And then a really weird thing happened. I realized like this is kind of boring to me.

Like I was not down to be in the chair eight hours a day. And I realized like there are all these other adjacent things that like like I would get distracted by weird stuff. It's not like, oh, man, this is boring. Like, I want to go to a ballgame or something like that. It was like, this is boring. Like, I want to play around with like how these images are being formed. Or I want to better understand like what this tool is and how it works. So it was all still in that sandbox, but I wasn't content to just do the thing all day every day if that makes sense. And that's maybe another. I've never heard somebody say it's articulate, but I, I agree. I've always explained that feeling as kind of like a like a circular

one thing feeding the other kind of round robin kind of thing, right? Where it's like, okay, well, I do the, do the creative work to give me the cachet to be able to speak and talk about it, right? Which then gives me the cachet to do other, you know, book projects and, you know, education, probably kind of all feeds each other. And I think that that feeling of, it's hard for us as colorist too, right? Like, especially if you're working on similar genres all day, it's pretty easy to be like, yep, just another day, you know, lift game of game, saturation, next shot, right?

Right. And you're plowing through 1,500 shot timelines. You need something in your life to kind of give you a little, you know, a little peek at that other side, right? It sounds like getting into education, doing the development stuff was kind of that for you. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this was around this, like, right in the same time period. This is probably like, I don't remember when it was. I think probably Resolve 16 was when the DCTL thing came out. That was another like ingredient in this dish. I didn't know I was making yet. Like, that. That, like, literally clapped me back to being, like, eight or nine years old and programming in Q Basic. I was like, dude, this is, like, incredible. Like, I got to, I just got completely obsessed by that dimension of it. And that became, like, one of the main, like, okay, I'm tired of grading. I want to do this other grading related thing. Like DCTL became kind of the number one pivot.

And then that, you know, started adding to the pie as well. QBASIC was legit, though. Come on. Okay. Yeah, that was serious stuff. So flash forward a few years. Obviously, you know, you have worked hard at all of these angles in your life, the creative and the technical and the stuff.

Let's talk about the community one for a second because it seems to me like a pretty natural transition to go, like, hey, I'm a practitioner, I'm a colorist, I'm doing this. And then the adjacent stuff. Like, I want to figure out how the tools work. Great. So you research, color science and stuff. And we'll get into that minute. And then you start getting into programs.

and cool you're making tools now but like that seems like a fairly far jump from to like to like nope now I'm building a community I want other people to get up to speed like did you always have a so wait for say it like did you always have the passion to like kind of see other people win have them sort of grunk it learn it and go oh they're sort of their aha moments with that kind of stuff or did that just kind of happen by like a byproduct of doing what you were doing You know where that passion came from? It came from my own experience of being like, like, I started to grasp at this a minute ago, I think, when I was like, look, by the time I started laying hands on the knowledge

I'd been seeking, right? Like, this is how high-end movies are graded or this is like, you know, these are practices that a lot of high-end colorists use or that most high-end colorists you're not going to see use. Well, like, whatever those pieces were, getting that knowledge and being like, oh, my gosh, like feeling like my thirst quenched on one hand. but then on the other hand, being really frustrated. I'm like, the only reason I didn't have this five years ago

was because no one would give it to me. It's not that I wasn't ready to receive it. It's like, you know, like, I think about music a lot. I think there's a lot of overlap there. And I know, Robbie, you're a musician. Like, when you're playing guitar, any instrument, there are things where like, okay, cool. I just mastered this skill or this little, like,

piece of dexterity with my instrument that, like, I wasn't ready for six months ago. So that's cool. I'm leveling up. This wasn't that. This was like, dude, you were ready. Just no one would give it to you. And it was because they had.

had this mislaid notion of secret sauce protecting their ability to thrive. You know, you know, that's a great, the music analogy is another good one. So I've played guitar my entire life. It's a passion of mine, but my son, who's now 11, 12 years old, is really getting into it. And I was telling him a story the other day because, you know, now it's tab apps on the iPad or the computer. Like you can, like, it's simple to find, like, how to play a song. And I was trying to express to him, I was like, dude, when I was a kid, like, I had to get like guitar player,

wait for it every month. And then in the back of a guitar player, it was like two songs of, it was like a valian song and like a rat song. And I'm like, that's all you got. And like you had to learn how to play it. Right.

That's what I get to learn this month. You know, so it was very squestered like that. The rat song is all you need. Come on. Right. Exactly. Twice.

So if I can interpret what you just said then, you had this passion for like, hey, I wanted this knowledge and then it kind of just landed in my lap. Is like, is running a community. and doing what you do now, is that like the manifestation of that? You're trying to give other people like, hey, do it with it what you will, but I don't want this knowledge gap to be like a deal breaker for your creativity.

Is that kind of the motivation behind it? 100%. If anyone shows up with the level of like passion and intention that I had when I needed that knowledge, they should have access to it. And I feel personally responsible for making sure that happens. Excellent. Well, we'll get back into the community stuff for more detail in a second. And I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about kind of the general areas of education that I see for us needing to know in the color world post-production, et cetera, and get your perspective on them.

Because I think one of the things that Joey and I get accused of is maybe too strong. But I think we're definitely biased for is like the technical side of it. Right. Like we're, you know, very heavily, like the ones and zeros, the signal, whatever. And I think that's kind of where I want to start, sort of like the kind of the science of color, right? Like, in your opinion, how important is it for somebody who's getting into this, you know, maybe somebody in your community to really grasp, like human visual system, right? like how, you know, like visual science works, like, you know, CIE diagrams, you know, 1931. Like, what role does that stuff in its importance do you think it plays into getting up to speed and being able to master the craft?

How important is it? Yeah, it's a great question. It really speaks to the fact that like almost as soon as you get into the room when you start learning color, it appears that there are like these 20 different corridors that lead very different directions. Like, oh, I can get into gear. I could get into image science. I could get into grading and get into tools, get into lust. like get into client collaboration, get into like how to sell myself as a professional, like all these things that ultimately converge, but they feel very opposed at the beginning, right?

So like the thing that I always like to apply there, like you guys can vouch for this. The challenging thing, the cool thing, but also the challenging thing is the answer is like, there is not a single one of those hallways you could walk down and be like, I'm mad that I did that. Like, are you guys mad at an inch of the expertise you have in like the most like esoteric aspects of display technology? No. It serves you, right? In your profession. I'm same way. Like there's nothing I've ever learned in any of the lanes that we just like made a quick index of. And I'm like, oh man, what a waste of time that was. So I think the better question becomes, and it's a question you can continuously ask yourself, where are you currently constrained? At the moment, what is your weakest point? What is stopping you from attaining whatever you want next in your career, which is also personal and depends on the practitioner? But if you can ask the question and answer it, okay, like I'm really suffering because I don't understand look development and the powerful role it can play in my process. All right, you better go learn look at.

I'm constrained because I just haven't looked at enough images. Like, I just don't know what makes a beautiful, well-reproduced image. That's where you need to focus. So, like, that theory of like looking, it's a whole principle that has really impacted my life as I've come to understand it, like the theory of constraint. Like you look for where you constraint and then you relieve that bottleneck aggressively until it is no longer a constraint. And then you look for the next one.

Well, let me ask you this. different way because I mean I think you're I understand what you're saying I think that there is like there's a level of conversantness that needs to happen for people like I you know if I'm going to have a discussion about you know something technical in the color world I'm probably going to you know have to be somewhat familiar with a CIE diagram or like a a volumetric graph or something like that I guess my question is like there's there's conversant and like base knowledge and then there's like going the level deep. Like we had a we had a call a podcast episode I don't know maybe about six months ago where we were talking to Nate McFarland from Dolby and he went to um he went to RAT and did the

whole image you know a program there and really knows the depth of it and I asked him a question like like well do I need to know like all the matrix math and like you know Farrier transforms and all that kind stuff and he's like if you want like I just I guess from your perspective you obviously can go deep on that kind of of color, but to be like a valued member of our community to be a good practitioner, how deep does one need to go with that stuff? I get the blockage. I get the roadblock thing that you're talking about. But like, just like when you're teaching somebody, do you like harp on this stuff?

Like, you know, you need to know some baseline color science to really be successful. You know, another good way to look at this, like this one I'm going to steal directly from, do you guys do the masterclass.com thing? Yeah, I was a member for a while. Sure. God, dude, I'm such a junkie for learning new cool stuff. But like one of my favorite ones, it was like one of the first ones they did was Neil deGrasse Tyson's.

Oh, yeah. And there's, of all the stuff I really like took away from that one, he's got this great point. I feel like for anyone who teaches this stuff, because the question you're asking is like right at the heart of like, how in the world do I teach this in an accessible but in a meaningful way to all these to people want to learn. And he's got this great like analogy or not analogy, just this great sort of like framework that he walks through for how he teaches people about. the roundness of the planet, of the roundness of the planet Earth. He's like, okay, level one is the

earth is round. Do you understand that? Would you like to know more? Like, well, it turns out the Earth is not perfectly round. It's a little flattened at the poles. Do you understand that? Would you like to know more? So there's this sort of, it is kind of a tiered, stepped thing. And I think like, creating those steps. So it's like, all right, this is a handhold. It doesn't mean you're not going to want to climb any further, but like, here's a handhold for you and then saying, like, when you're ready, there's your next one. Like, you guys, I can't see my hands. But, you know, you get my point. I feel like that's, there is still that analogy that holds of like, it's really just a matter of like finding the next handhold without worrying about what's

at the top. And then evaluating from there, does this suffice for now for what I need to do for my clients, for what I want? Or do I need to go a click further? And I really do think. Yeah, I always felt like when it comes to the technology and the science part of it, there is, you know, in the grand scheme of getting a successful color grade done and having a happy client and getting your bills paid and being fulfilled in that career, right? Knowing the deep color science is like 5%. And knowing a deep enough in that kind of genre of technical knowledge is like a 5%. But I do feel like it is also some base level. knowledge in that is important to have a foundation to build from, right? It's like, yeah, it might end up being 5% of your general knowledge of the overall subject, but it's kind of the first 5% you need because you're building up from there. Like your example, if you start to think about navigating and you don't start with the earth is round, you're going to run into some really

bad days, you know, trying to get around. I hear what you guys are saying. I guess we're Where I'm trying to lead at is that one of the things I think that Cullen, in the world of color education, broad term, of course, but one of the things that I think you've done very well, and I'm only saying this because I watch from afar a lot, the interactions in your community, right? Because there's a lot of people, there's a lot of really good conversations. And I've been doing this for almost 30 years. And I sometimes look at that community and feel intimidated, is the right word, is really the, like the closest word. say because I look at it and I'm used to be like not to toot my own horn, but I feel like a lot of times I walk in a room and like I'm the smartest guy in the room right about about this stuff. Right. And I walk into your community a lot and I go like they're talking about matrix math and this and that. And I'm just like what is going on? And so because it's, you know, sort of the community that you've helped foster, I'm asking the question, are you placing an extra level of importance on that stuff? or does that just happen to be the type of practitioner that you're currently attracting is the one that's really into that super geeky stuff? Yeah, I mean, look, there's some hardcore geeks in my community for sure. And I would count myself among them, except I have to caveat that by saying,

I also drop into some of those threads like, you, Robbie. I'm like, what have I done? I don't know what you guys you talk about. But it's like I really do think, like, there's no pat answer. I mean, here's the other dimension to it that always comes to mind. Like, some of the most successful colorists I know, you guys know these artists too, their knowledge of just the baseline, like, is not existing.

Yeah. Yeah. Old school, tell us any colorists who can get a great image 10 times out of 10. And they've got a great client base. And that is how their career is going to play out. And who's to say, like, there's a problem. Like, what's the problem? Their clients are happy.

They love their work. So it's really hard to assign an absolute even minimum mandate there. It just depends on where you're. passions run. And here's the other thing I would say like, because that example, I feel like gets thrown out a lot in conversations about how much do you need to know. I would say that is not a bar to aspire to because if those colorists were, if I were to hit reset on their client base and on their skill set today, could they reacquire their successes without that stuff today? I think that's a question that is like more up for debate. But it just point out that like

it can vary a lot. Just depends. And I realize, I mean, like, I'm, I'm a few years older than you guys and I kind of realized that I'm like, I'm this like kind of like midlife crisis moment where I'm kind of just being like, like simultaneously feeling like, okay, fine, I'm now to a comfortable place where everything's not a struggle and I can, you know, repeatability of work and I'm making good money, whatever. But then I look at some of the younger crowd out there and I just, I feel, I sometimes feel like I'm being lapped in my education and my knowledge about some of this stuff because it's sort of like when I when I when I was getting many. entered and training up, nobody was talking about mathematical transforms, right? We were talking about, you know, like, S video cables and like being, like, it was, it was just a different world. I get that part of it. But like, it seems to me that one of the challenges that you're talking about limitations, I've noticed that as a limitation of mine. Like, I need to become more knowledgeable, more conversant. Even if I'm not doing all of the math about this, about the color science part about it. And I'll say,

you know, at almost, you know, my late 40s or whatever, it's, it can be challenging, right? And it's just, it's hard to kind of switch that gear because for so long, those gears were tuned to just twist the knobs, don't worry about what they do. And now everybody's like, oh, dude, I just made this custom tool to do X, Y, and Z. Isn't it cool? I'm like, yes, I want to do that. How do I do that? And I get stuck at the math, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, dude, it's so funny. Like, I feel like I, at one point, maybe a few years ago, I represented to a lot of people some sort of like plausible end point of how deep you would take that knowledge journey. Now I'm like maybe in the middle. Like even within my communities we just talked about. There's people who are like way talking around me. Like one of my like easiest examples, like one of the people I talk to most in my life is my mentor, Mitch Bogdanowitz.

I speak with him probably at least every other day, 76 year old man who talks circles around me and I'm literally just trying to hang on to the ride like in our whole conversation. and quite pleasurably so, but there is like, there is for me a concept in there of like, all right, whatever I can hang on to, whatever like grabs me, that's what I needed to grab at the moment.

And whatever was like skated past and I just couldn't get my arms around, that's okay. It's either going to come back around or it's not for me, even though it might be for somebody else. Yeah, I get it. Well, let me, one last question about sort of this color science stuff,

the background. Where, like, what did you do? Because obviously, I mean, maybe you were born with an innate knowledge of how this all works, but like, what did you find as valuable reasons? I mean, obviously, your relationships with other color scientists, as you just mentioned, is a big deal. Like, obviously, that's a leapfrog to your knowledge, having direct access to people who

have that background. But where did you go? What did you do to improve this knowledge of, no, like, this is how, you know, everything from, you know, emotion layers on the film stock work to this is how the math and a transformer. It's like, what resources were you using and, looking at to like get up to where you are now. Yeah, you know, it's funny. Like it's even like when I was learning this stuff like we're in such a different moment now

in terms of like availability and volume of like knowledge and and you know, like information in this area. Yeah, yeah. When I was doing it, it was available but only in limited portions. Like I can I can remember like the handful of resources that really fed me for like the first year or two, they were patent filings from Dr. Mitch Bogdanowitz. I can't tell you how many of his patent filings I read just trying to understand film and its intentions and its mechanisms. They were posts on Aces Central and the other huge one that like, I think this finally went down

and I grabbed it as a PDF beforehand, thankfully, the ARI-D-I companion. Do you remember this thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Like a great image scientist. This thing, like it was just meant like Erie published it like, you know, as a way of documenting like how their cameras and how their scanners and stuff work, but it ends up being like this incredibly great contextual tour through basic image science and the way it touches in these different areas of the process. So for me, it was less like, like there was enough for me to find resources, but not so much that I was like, oh my gosh, where do I go from here?

Yeah. That's more where I am now. I've got like a backlog of PDFs and like a bunch of books and stuff that I've got to go read that I'm behind on. But when I was learning this stuff, it was more like. Like it was just it was kind of like your, you know, uh, guitar player monthly thing of like, all right,

I'm learning these two songs this month because that's what totally. Well, it's funny because like Joey, for example, Joey can sit with a white paper like, you know, Joey has like, you know,

Charles Pointin book sitting on his coffee table that he reads for like, you know, like, you know, like, I've always looked at that stuff and gone. There is a, there is a layer that I'm missing to get to there.

Right? Like I'm sort like I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, what I admire in people like you,

uh, you, uh, You mentioned Aces Central, so just jogged his name. Nick Shaw is another great example of somebody who can do this, I think, is like that conversant, like if you're with, you know, Dr. Bogdanovic, like you're having one set of discussions with a certain vocabulary. If you're talking to your students, you're having another, you know, discussion with a different

set of vocabulary. Like, so I guess the last question I'll have on this is how do you modulate that? And like, especially for your community with people of varying skill levels. how do you modulate those discussions to where the new person can get it and the person who might be a little more advanced can kind of get it? How does that translation work back and forth? Yeah, you know, it's a great question. And it's when I ask myself all the time and my short answer there would be imperfectly. Like I know that I don't calibrate down like sufficiently for beginners all the time.

I think my biggest secret weapon there that like at least works for me like anytime I'm learning something, quick the sort of like the context I try to give to other people or the experience I try to give to other people like when I'm learning something I need context and I need repetition. Those are the things that unlock it for me. So like even like Dr. Pointin's books as a great example, I can't read Dr. Pointin's books without needing a reason to read that chapter of Dr. Pointin's book because I'm working on a problem. You're a reference for it.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like without that, I will never get it. The other thing that's just mandatory for me, you're going to have to repeat it to me. Like Dr. Berganoitz knows this from all of our like hundreds of hours of phone calls. You're going to have to repeat it to me, like eight or nine or ten times. That's the one that comes to mind when I talk about this because, like, I don't make a ton of conscious effort to calibrate my, my vocabulary down.

Like, I still use the shamanology that I do. I just try to take the time to define and I repeat it like crazy so that if you've hung out for me for two or three of my, like, YouTube live sessions, you've heard these terms before because it's the same ones I'm using weekend and week out. So there's kind of an indoctrination just by, you know, like repetition, if that makes sense. Yeah, whenever I've been training people on anything, I feel like, I always get to a point where I'm like, okay, so here's, for example, this set of steps and the why behind them. But until you actually take this and utilize it in a real project where you're trying to solve a problem with these techniques, you're not really going to fully understand it. And then oftentimes it's, you know, that's when you need that repetition is like, okay, I took in this class.

I watched this talk. I read this book, whatever. it was all really interesting. Now I'm going to sit down and try to implement this on a project that I'm working on. Oh, I need to go back and reference that material again because it just, I thought I had it, but I didn't. That's what I run into most of the time. It's like I don't really get something until I really need to use it in a real world scenario. I think that's also like one of the issues with being, you know, like Colin is like a well-known educator and teacher is that I think a lot of people,

I mean, I sometimes make this assumption. I make this assumption about you too, Joey, that, like, you just have all of this information accessible and ready to go 24 hours a day and can quote it like perfectly, right? And I think that like that's, that's, it's, I don't know, maybe it's like a nice human factor to know about like. So, you know, you might be at the top of your game right now, you know, from an educated point of view, but you still got to go look things up every once in a while. You still got to go figure it out. You still got to test it, right? I've always said that the, the two most important skills. that anyone can have in any endeavor is, one, knowing how to find out information. You don't

need to know everything. You need to know where to look, how to look, how to get that information, and two, knowing how to think processes in your brain for troubleshooting, arranging concepts, stuff like that. Once you have those two skill sets, you can kind of dive into any subject and get valuable insight from it. Yeah, that's great. And like, I feel like, I feel like, Like, you know, one of the big, like, pressure relievers for me in my education and sort of public speaking journey has been realizing exactly what you just said, Joe, that it's like, okay, we can be, you can ask me a question. Like, this happens at least once a week in most of my, like, YouTube lives. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't, this is not like everyone shows up and, you know, tries to stump me and no one ever can because I'm just that great.

You ask me questions all the time. Like, dude, I don't know. Or like, you know, I've got a three-year-old and a one-year-old. I used to know, but I don't know right now. But the fun thing about those is often what's even more valuable than me knowing is me not knowing and standing there and figuring it out in front of people because of exactly what Joey just said. Well, I think, I mean, I think that that speaks to, I mean, that's the sign of somebody knowing what you don't know is a skill, right? And that's an important thing. Let me switch here slightly from the less technical color science background stuff because I think that you had some good perspectives on that.

I think one of the things that is a challenge in the world of just generically call it post-production education. Because you could be teaching an edit application. You could be teaching an audio application, whatever, is that separation between this is what a button and the slider does. And this is the when and why of how, you know, you're using that slider, right? And I think, you know, a lot of over the years, I've often, whether it's been me writing a book or doing a video tutorial, I've come, I've been pretty. hard on myself because I sometimes have a little bit of like imposter syndrome with like the the why or the situational of doing this and kind of just default to teaching nope the slider works from zero to one and here's what it does right like how do you how do you balance that because it's like

on one level people need to know technically what these tools do right like I look at your community all the time and people are like oh it's linear gain this and whatever and like so that's like that underlying this is what it does. But how do you then translate that into, no, we got to just make some nice images that appear on the screen because that seems like a challenge. Because there's some people who don't want to have anything to do with the technical part and they just want the creative and there's other people who go, I need to know the technical before I do the creative.

And it seems like it's a kind of a tough thing to juggle. Yeah, it's kind of like two opposite ways into solving the same problem for sure. And I think like one of my ideas that I've held for, a long time is if you're just approaching kind of from the outside end of like, all right, I just need to use these to make that look good. That's a pretty low bar. It's kind of like my other favorite analogy in this stuff is golf. Like people love to say when you hit a weird shot in golf, but somehow it trickles up close to the hole. You're like, hey, if there's no picture on the scorecard, that works, you know? You could apply the same logic with color grading. The problem is

like your confidence, your consistency, your efficiency, your repeatability, none of those things convey with that, oh, figured it out type of approach. That's why like one of my big, this is probably where the core of my sort of geeky bias originates is like I am a big emphasizing of principles over like their implementation. Right. Exactly. You can change the way they're applied. If you understand the principle, you can be told like, hey, like there's, you know, like,

police tape around those tools today for some reason, for some workflow or other reason, or it's broken and this new build. Like, okay, cool. I already know what I'm trying to do. I'm just going to find, I know what hammers look like, even if I can't use that hammer, you know? Yeah, I've always said, but my general thought on that is that I, if any way I can abstract the software out of my thinking process, that's a good thing to do, right?

You should be able to, your goal, I shouldn't say you should be able to. that's kind of a ridiculous standard to hold anyone to. Your goal, I think, in dealing with creative tools is to know what you want to create and then figure out how to utilize the tool to most efficiently do that. You know, I don't like when people say, oh, I'm a resolve colorist.

I'm a baselite colorist. I'm a premier editor. I'm an avid editor. No, if you're a really good editor, you know, you're thinking about things like timing and pacing and sound. and stuff like that. You know, when you get to the software,

yes, you can be very, very skilled at using a particular tool because that's what you're used to and that's what you're fast at to get you to that end result. But if you can abstract yourself mentally from the software and say, this is the end result I want to get to or this is the end result I'm at least exploring around, that's going to help your process a lot more than knowing what every single button does.

Totally. And I saw something this morning that just put that, getting back to the guitar thing and the music thing, which again has, you're right, has a lot of analogies here. But there's a pretty famous bluegrass musician, Billy Strings, and he's just, he's a virtuoso, right? But since he's been a little, he's just, you know, up and down the neck, whatever. And there was this, you know, in the guitar world, a lot of the people I talk to about guitars are like, oh, man, if I just had this new, whatever, you know, insert guitar here, I would be so much better, right? And there's this video of him with like a $30, like, Toys Russ,

literally like a guitar made for like a child and just going up and down the neck just ripping it ripping it right it's because it's here in his fingers and he's abstracted that out it doesn't matter the tool he's using right it's just right there and sometimes constraints are a great driver of creativity as well i'm not saying artificially constrain yourself where you don't have to but sometimes being put in a constrained situation where you might not have all the tools that you could want can push you to think about a situation or a problem differently. I agree. So I think one of the challenges, though, from the creative side of education is that, you know,

you're so much of what we do is subjective, but also it's dependent on client needs and that kind of stuff. And I think that, you know, 20 years ago, it was, and you've had this experience in a posthouse as well, Colin, is that, like, you probably did have somebody standing over your shoulder going, that's not the way I would approach it. That looks like crap. Try this. Try that.

And now I think the challenge for you running a community as big as your community is, is largely people are on their own island, right? How do they know that they're doing it, air quotes here? Right. And I think I'm curious about how you express that to your community and to your students because it just seems like I'll give you a case in point. Brack, you know, it seems like seven, eight years ago, like printer points became all the rage, right?

Like, you're, you're not a real colorist unless you're, you know, you're using printer points. And I'd be like looking at the, you know, seven stop over exposed, rec 709 straight out of camera, stuff that I was working with and going, that can't help me. That's not really doing much for me, right? You know, and feeling like I was doing something wrong. All the cool guys that I knew, you know, cool guys that I knew were using printer points and creating like amazing images. And I got like really like kind of depressed about it for a while because I was like I must be doing this wrong. I don't know why.

Like everybody else is using printer points by me. So like how do you balance that? How do you balance like, you know, these tools? There's a lot of overlap in the tools. There's a lot of situational awareness with the tools. Is that what you're trying to teach more than the tool itself is just the situational awareness of the image that's in front of somebody? Like how do you balance that? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Like there's the, you know, like principles more than like specific, you know, like tools for applying those principles for sure. And then there's other like, it's principles not just in terms of like what should you be trying to do at what point in your process sort of like visually and conceptually. But there's also other principles from my book, The Colorist 10 Commandments that I go back to over and over again. So like an example would be greatest gains for least effort. So like if I can get it done simpler, faster tool, that is inherently. superior, even if the other tool can do it, it would be wrong of me in an ideal situation to pick the slower tool, right?

Yeah. The other one is, you know, like, I'm looking for cost-free. So, like, there are tools that can do exactly what I want, but then they will demand compensation that I have to go in and compensate for. And then those tools demand, and you can get into that compensation loop that I know you guys know really well. So, like, those are some of the other sort of bounding concepts that help me to narrow from like, all right, at the start, maybe there's 12 candidate tools that would be a reasonable thing for me to reach for, by the time you start to apply these very simple concepts that I feel like have great breadth,

it gets down to like one or two. And then I'm like, I don't know, pick one and be consistent with it. Yeah. Okay. And I think we'll wrap up this part because we're going to do two parts with you here. I guess big picture stuff I want to wrap up with, you know, one of the challenges that I see in color education is, you know, there's a trend of, you know, whether you want to call it clickbait,

or whatever of like, you know, here's a look. Let's break it down. Right. Versus, you know, nope. You're probably, I'm venturing to guess. Probably, you know, 9.5 out of 10 of your students are not doing, you know, the next, you know, huge tent pole feature, right? You know, so like what value as an educator, how do you balance out the perfect ideal situation

kind of thing versus like people's real world scenarios? Because what I get frustrated with, and we'll talk about this more important, part two is I get frustrated with the YouTube type educator who is like parked on a single frame breaking down, you know, a bajillion dollar feature and going, you too can have this for your crappy reality show, right? Like, it's not germane. So how do you balance that out? Like, do you feel like there's value in showing good quality footage and bad quality footage? Do you feel like variance is the name of the game when you're trying to learn these tools and techniques? Like, how do you balance that out? Yeah, it's a great question. And again, like the, you know, like one asked by

someone who's done a lot of education, obviously, because it's the stuff we think about. So I think for me, like one of the core values that I seek when I'm deciding, am I going to teach this? Like, there are plenty of things that I do, plenty of things that I know that I'm not going to prioritize teaching in tomorrow's YouTube video. And one of the ways that I decide, okay, what goes to the front of the line, what goes to the middle and what's like, that may not ever go on a YouTube video. The big word that comes to mind for me is robustness. Like, I want to teach things that whether you're grading, you know, like burned up 709 footage or whether you're grading exquisite, you know, like cinema lens, cinema camera type of stuff,

the principles will hold. The, like, what will need to be done and how good the end results are going to look. That's going to vary. Like, we know, like, from our professional practices, I can't close the gap between, like, Sicario and your over exposed wedding video. I just can't do it, you know. But I can teach you principles that will hold for grading both of those scenarios. And those are actually, if I teach the right ones, they will be the same.

Totally. I mean, there's, I always think about this, that situation being like, okay, you know, I see these people on various web platforms teaching this stuff. Oh my God, that looks gorgeous. But first of all, it's a single frame, right? Like one of the problems that I have with a lot of modern color education is that nobody is, like, I mean, you do quite a bit of this, but on the whole, nobody is really teaching shot to shot workflow and matching. It's like, because it's hard to show.

It's hard to show in a video. Let me take these 400 shots and show you how they're all cohesive. But then I'm also troubled by like, you know, I think sometimes when you look at educators, they want to show off the best version of their approach, right? And so they're using the best example, the best, the highest quality. shot, et cetera. And I often think that like, you know, God, if only Dave Hussey had to grade the crap that I have to grade day in and day out, right? But then I'm reminded that Dave went through the ringer and had, you know, worked his way up to be now he's, you know, privileged enough to work

with the best DPs and stuff in the world. But I guess the way I'm asking the question, I want to ask the question is just like, do you find as a community leader and as an educator that you face that with your students? They look at your stuff and go, that's great, Cullen. But that's not what I have, right? And how do you, how do you balance that like, is it, again, relying just on those concepts and the core competency part of it? Or are you teaching things specifically for different levels and quality of production and footage? Yeah, no. I mean, it's a great thing to think about.

And the way that I think about it is, you know, a YouTube video is one type of format. It's one type of venue. There's one type of content that's going to be appropriate and effective in that. arena. And one of the things definitely is, like, I'm not going to spend a lot of time grading stuff that doesn't look great that no matter what I do is not going to look a ton better, because that's not going to do its job of helping people find me and helping people. And also all the trolls will just yell at you and be like, look, I told you, like, Colin sucks, right? He can't make that look better, right?

Yeah. And that's, I think, a big part of it not doing its job fundamentally. So it has to do its job. It has to attract attention and be like, hey, look, this is a great outcome so I can, I'm going to like give this guy 30 seconds to show me if there's something else here. And the thing that I, you know, like I repeat, you know, to students and I repeat internally to the team is like, I will invest as much as I can in you, my anonymous student in a YouTube video as the format will allow and as I can. I will invest as absolutely much as I can. At a certain point, if you want me to invest more, I will ask you to invest in me. And that's where we're going to go deeper into whether that's engaging with the products that I create to help solve

these problems, engaging with the deeper education that goes beyond what I can talk about in a 15-minute YouTube video that has to speak up and down the experience spectrum from new, we get brand new to like, okay, I'm kind of getting the hang. I want to go deeper. So there is just a natural sort of stair step where it's like, all right, if you want to go deeper, then let's go deeper. And there's another venue and another investment level required from both of us to do that. Awesome. Very cool stuff. I want to pause here for just a moment. We're going to come back in a part two. Now that we've covered sort of Collins ethos and some of this big picture stuff,

I have some specific questions or we have some specific questions about navigating the world of training, picking the best type of training for you, picking the best avenues and stuff like that. As a reminder, you can always follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Just search for the Offset Podcast. We're on YouTube, of course, and every major streaming platform. And you can also head over to the Offset Podcast for additional show notes and some more information. But Colin, thanks for this part one. And for our audience, we'll be back in just a couple weeks.

Talk more about color education with Colin Kelly. Stay tuned.