The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP040: Look Setting Sessions

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

In this episode, we’re discussing something we do pretty regularly - look setting with a client.  If you’re not familiar with look setting, it can be a vital part of the grading process.  It helps ensure that you and the client are on the same page with the creative choices and the look of a project PRIOR to grading the entire project and potentially going down the wrong path.  Look setting can be an integral part of preproduction - building monitoring LUTs or in camera look files. Or it can happen after production has wrapped but prior to the main grade starting or combination of those approaches In this episode it’s that second scenario that we’re going to be discussing.  We’ll cover developing looks for production in a future episode.  Specific topics discussed in this show include:What is look setting and while is a vital part of the finishing process?How look setting is the first part of building client confidence and important to the communication process When does looking setting happen? Making the goals of a looking setting session clear to everyone involvedStrategies to avoid going too deep in the grade while also showing off capabilities & possibilities The importance of reviewing & discussing referencesHow to pick shots and scenes to work on Building 3 to 4 looks to share with the clientLeveraging comparative toolsPresenting shot challenges without offending clients In person, asynchronous and remote streaming look sessionsMoving from a look setting session into the main gradeIf you like this episode please consider supporting the podcast by buying us 'a cup of coffee': https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcastBig thanks as always to our sponsor Flanders Scientific for helping make these shows possible.  See you in about two weeks! 

Hey, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Offset podcast, and today we're talking about look-setting sessions. 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 am one of your host, Robbie Carmen. And with me, as always, is Joey Deanna. Joey, how are you doing, buddy?

Good. Hi, everyone. All right, Joey, well, today we're going to take a little turn back to the creative after several technical episodes in a row. We've talked recently about some pretty heavy-duty technical stuff, including virtualization, which I know that we could have recorded 10 episodes on. But let's turn it back to a little bit of creative color grading stuff today. And I want to talk about something that recently you and I both have been doing quite a bit of.

And we realize that, oh, maybe we haven't talked about this before. Went back, looked at the library. And sure enough, we haven't talked about it before. And that is the idea of look setting or sort of kind of getting a client to sort of approve the general look and feel of a project prior to you, the colorist, diving into the whole. complete grade, right? So we're going to cover a lot of details about that, why you want to do it, when you want to do it, things to think about during those sessions. But before we get started, some usual housekeeping stuff.

As a reminder, you can always head over to the offset podcast.com, get show notes, browse our whole library of episodes. We are slowly creeping up on 50 episodes total, which is crazy to think about when we started. But you can also find additional show notes and stuff like that. And, of course, the show is available on YouTube. if you're watching it there are all the major podcast platforms. Also, if you do like the show, we'd love it if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee at the link here below on screen.

Every little bit of support helps us in a major way. It takes a lot of effort to produce these episodes every two weeks, get them edited, delivered, et cetera. So anything you can do is much appreciated. And thank you, again, for just being a listener and a viewer of the show. That means a tremendous amount. Okay, Joey, let's talk a little bit about look setting. And it's funny, you know, I think that I used to think of look setting as one of those things that's like,

that's just the high-end people, you know, doing multi-million dollar campaign. And for a long time, I just kind of, I don't want to say ignored it, but didn't push it just because I thought I was like, nobody's going to want me to, like, nobody's going to support me charging for this, et cetera. And I would say in the past, I don't know, maybe three or four years, I've had a real change of heart with this. I've had about three or four years ago, I had one particular project that I will not. name because it's like I still resent it to this day that I went down this whole path created a whole like lovely look I thought client walks in the room goes what is this like this is not like this is not what I wanted right so I mean me a culpe for that I have to take some responsibility

for not doing the work about maybe perfect questions or getting best references or having the discussion and from that point on I just started thinking a lot about like okay how can I avoid this train wreck in a review session ahead of time, right? And the answer, of course, is a look-setting session. Let me ask you this. In your opinion, what is a look-setting session? What's the whole idea behind it? So for me, a look-setting session, and like you said, it's not for every project, right? If you have a existing relationship with a client and you've worked on a project before and it's a continuation of some creative you've already done, you probably don't need to do a heavily involved

preparatory look setting session with them. You can just grade the piece, whatever it is, send them a screener for approval, and they might give you some notes, and that's all said and done and great. But I think part of this also is, I think thankfully, the reason why we're doing this more and more

is I think we've gotten more creative narrative projects recently, And I think it's very important for a unique creative narrative project to do this because a lot of these projects, every single one of them is drastically different. It's not like everything a client gives you is going to be the same look as if it was for a particular brand. So when you get more creative, usually narrative, but sometimes documentary or nonfiction project as well, that you know the client is going to be sensitive to the overall look or you know. that it was photographed with a particular kind of style and look in mind, which in our mind is the best case scenario, right? Our best projects are the ones that have some of that creative intent or as much of that creative intent baked in on set as possible. This is your chance to sit with the client in a very low risk environment and say, basically, how I usually describe it to the

client is we're setting goalposts for the grade. I like to pick one or two. two shots from every major scene and say, let's figure out what you like for these one or two shots. And the reason why I like to do two shots is because we can look at how things will cut without having to grade the whole scene. And we can look at maybe if there's two cameras, we can look at how a match potentially might behave or misbehave, but we don't need to grade the whole scene. So we sit there with the client and we just say, I just want to set some creative goalposts. Nothing is set in stone. I just want to get in the direction that you want and then move on to the next scene.

We're not spending a huge amount of time doing power windows. We're not doing a lot of qualifiers. We're just going in and saying, okay, here's the general feel for this scene. I'm pretty happy with it. That way, we've got those creative guides for every scene. So then unsupervised, we can go in, grade the whole film. And then when the client looks at it for the first time, nothing is going to be a drastic surprise to them.

It doesn't mean that when they come and give that first round of feedback, we come back and say, well, hey, you approved this look. You're not allowed to make any changes. The two things I say to clients every time with these sessions is we're just setting goalposts and nothing is set in stone, but it's so helpful to get to where their heads at. And oftentimes you can get other stakeholders into this session to, whether it be creative directors,

the director of photography, if you're fortunate enough to have them still involved at this point, right? You can get everybody kind of either in a room or in a virtual session, which we'll talk about

the logistics of later, but get everybody together where a lot of times we talk about, okay, somebody has to be in charge and have the final word. This isn't the time for the final word. This is for everybody

to get their say in because we're only looking at one or two shots per scene and we can try things, we can experiment, and we can come up with something where basically our approval is the director saying, yeah, I like how that's feeling for this scene.

Let's move on to the next one. And again, we're not locking anything, but it gives us a starting point for the grade. Yeah, I agree. And I like the goalposts, the ballpark, the sports analogies work well. I also think about it too. I mean, like, you know, you made the point of like,

hey, you know, if it's somebody you, you know, you're working with it for the first time, that's a little different than somebody you have a long history with than you know their look. Because at the end of the day, I think about this as like a getting to know you session too. You know, and it's one of those things where when you haven't worked with somebody before,

I mean, by definition, color is, in what we do, is a very personal thing. It's a very, you know, individual interpretive thing, right? Like,

everybody's going to have a little bit of this. And like, we've said it before in other episodes, like, you know, part of your role as a colorist is a be a little bit of a post-production finishing psychologist, right? And what I have found is, so everybody knows, like, okay, give me some references, right?

So you might get, you know, references that are awesome, right? You know, they're super high-end projects shot by the world's best DPs with the, you know, basically unlimited budgets and everything looks magical. The problem I have with only using references or discussion points like that is that that's sort of like a, you know, if we can, let's try to get here thing. But in reality, what the references are versus what. what somebody shot are often very different, but also, like, I seldom feel like we're ever trying to hit it exactly on the nose, right? Like, so if you're referencing, I don't know, whatever,

like the godfather, right? Like, you probably don't want your film to look exactly like the godfather. You probably want it just to kind of in that ballpark. And so, like, that kind of feeling that kind of thing is very subjective. It means a lot of different things. And I find it really difficult sometimes when it's just references and just a discussion to really dial in on the things that a client likes and dislikes, right? But when they have their own footage involved, that's where you can really start to see like, okay, you said filmic, but everything I do that's filmic, you hate, right? Like, it's not grain. Nope, it's not halation. Nope, it's not whatever, right? It's not emulation. And like, oftentimes, like, that can get lost in the mix when somebody's

just talking about it. But when you have this kind of relatively stress-free time, we'll talk about in a second how to organize that. But with this relatively stress-free time, you can push things to 11. You can make something really boring. You can try everything in between. And with that idea of just be like, hey, there's no right or wrong here.

Just react. Tell me how you like this. Tell me what you don't like about this. Tell me what you do like about this and kind of get it in. And I make the point of the same points that you do is that like, look, we are not trying to, I'm not trying to box you into a corner and get sign off here that like, this is the only way this is going to work.

We'll talk about later how we often have to adapt the work that we do in a look session to the final picture. It's more of just kind of like, okay, I need to know the framework in which we are working with. So when I attack this whole film and this whole project and you sit down to review it for the first time, it's not out of left field. You're going to have notes. You're going to have feedback.

You're going to have tweaks. That part of it is normal. But what I don't want to go is like, you know, the extreme version. of this would be like, I made the whole film black and white because I thought it looked cool and we never talked about it, right? And you're like, why did you make the whole film black and white? So I think it's, I think that's it. We're on the same page there. So to me, the next part about this is like, when does this happen? Right. Like, when are we going to do this look setting session? And I think there's one, uh, there kind of one point I want to make about this that it can be

overlapping and kind of you can be the complete colorist or, uh, what often more happens to us. is that it happens prior to final finishing. What I mean by both of these things is that there is a certain logic, and a lot of people do it, to the idea of look setting before production happens, right? Sitting with a director, sitting with a DP, and having some test footage going through that, applying different looks,

figuring out contrast, figuring out saturation, and maybe even eventually using the output of that work as a onset viewing lot, right? That's the best case scenario because then they know going into it, they're looking through, I'm going to use a bad term, they're looking through the lens of that look to make creative decisions about lighting, et cetera, on set. That's the ideal situation.

That's a whole other episode for us because there's a lot of things about different camera formats, monitoring, et cetera. But like that can be one place where a look setting session is involved, right? Is that kind of pre-production kind of step where you're developing some, you know, whether this is the indoor look, the outdoor look, whatever, and have the DP and the production crew armed with that. More times than not for our work, which is unfortunately a little lower down the echelon than that ability sometimes, is that we do this kind of prior to the final grade or the final

color session, which is totally fine, right? You know, these days, it's easier than ever to kind of craft a look in post. I don't really like to invent things in posts like that, but it at least allows you, you know, that flexibility to do so. So just for clarity, the rest of our discussion today, we're going to be talking about kind of look sessions in the context of prior to the final grade. But for those of you who are involved early in a production, that pre-production look setting is definitely a viable solution. And we'll save that for a later episode. And you know what? Like, they're not mutually exclusive. You might get with a director, make some on can't make some in-camera luts for them to preview with.

And then once they're ready to start the grade, you probably still want to go through one or two shots per and touch base with them and say, okay, this is kind of what we ran into when we were shooting. We want to adjust this way or that way. You know, you're still, you still want to want to get their kind of overall gut reaction to your grade on their actual shot scenes before you go in and you grade 2,000 shots. And then they come in and say, yeah, why is it purple? Yeah, exactly. No, we're on the same page there.

So to me, I think the one of the, when you get, when you schedule this and get everybody in the room, We'll talk about the handoff part in a second, but I think the goals of this session should be made very clear to the client because I think there's there's some clients who look at it as like, oh, this is my grading session. And that's not what this is, right? Like I had a session the other day that, you know, for about a five minute period, we borderlined on going too far. We were talking about like fixing somebody's eyebrows, right? And like massaging like the, you know, like the green in the leaves of a tree, like in real. like real detail. Like,

that's not what a look setting session should be, right? I always try to define this to clients as, I am trying to get the overall tonality and feel in the ballpark, not even correct, just in the ballpark, right? And in that process, getting to know your tolerance and your preference for things like contrast, black level,

white level, saturation, overall color temp, you know, that kind of thing. But I also find maybe you, I think you'd probably agree with this. It's also your first opportunity.

We've talked a lot in the past about when it comes to managing review sessions, being active, an active participant, like knowing the names of actors and characters, knowing that kind of stuff. This is your first opportunity to display that, to get to know the film, the characters, the people, the shooting situations, etc. Yeah, this is when you talk about, hey, okay, we actually shot this scene at five o'clock because that was the only time we could get into the location. but we really want it to be more this time a day.

And you're getting familiar with the narrative at the same time. Now, it's a delicate balance to strike with how detailed you get. And what I mean by that is, yeah, we don't want to do a bunch of power windows and qualifiers and isolation and stuff like that. However, you want to kind of tease those things a little bit. And what I mean by this is if you get to one of your example shots in a scene, and we'll talk a little bit later about how the best. choose those shots.

I've got a couple strategies for that. But if the client comes in and says, okay, can we fix her face and that sky and this and this and this? You might, you know, the first thing is you do need to move the session along because these sessions are not usually like eight hours long.

They're kind of get in, get out. And you need to move along and get to every scene. So what I'll usually do when we start to find myself getting too deep in the weeds on something, right? I'm kind of like, okay, let's move on to the next shot in this scene and we're going to bounce back and forth a little bit. I'm going to leave myself a note that we need to do all these more heavily detailed things. But the exception to that is when you get into a situation where you're not sure if what the client wants is going to work.

If they're like, can we do a day for night for this whole scene? That's when I'm like, okay, let me take 10 minutes. We'll pick the hardest shot of the scene and let's actually try to execute those details. just on one shot. That way we can figure out, oh, that sky is going to be a problem and we're going to need to think about a different alternative than doing this day for night. So it's a balance between figuring out, yes, there are certain times where you do need to get into every bit of the detail on a particular shot to either, you know, persuade the client to go into one technical direction or another based on what's possible with the footage or to kind of

give them ease of mind to say, oh, yeah, this day for a need. night scene's going to work fine. Here's one example. And here's some of the stuff we can do. Right. But you also need to balance that with keeping the session moving and saying like, yes, we can we can window all the faces. We will window all the faces for this scene. It's no problem. We're not going to worry about that right now. But I left myself a marker. And you need to do that in a way that makes the client feel comfortable that they've told you what they want. But we might not want to, the best use of our time today might not be spending three hours windowing every face in a scene. Yeah, and I also use that as that kind of thing.

I agree with everything you just said. But I also, when you encounter those situations, it is also your first opportunity to flex a little bit, right? Because it's like people, for the most part, people don't like, you know, we spend every day in these rooms, these clients don't. Right. So it's like, hey, if there's, you know, there's somebody's face and you're like, yeah, yeah, we'll fix that. But real quick, I'll just want to show you how we can treat that little window, little move, track it. They see the tracking moving on the screen. and they're like, oh, wow, we can do that.

And like, yeah, so, you know, don't worry about that kind of thing. I got it. Or, like, when I did the other day was I pulled up a magic mask and showed somebody, it was like, you know, somebody just stickulating with their hands. I'm like, see, their hands were kind of gray. We can just make this. I'm not going to spend the time to really refine this, but I just want to show you this kind of thing is possible, but we're not going to let it weigh us down right now.

And that just by showing that example, it gives them confidence that later on when you attack the grade that you are thinking about these details, but you're still trying to set the boundaries of what the look session is. Exactly. And then once you're later on in the session and now you are trying to move it along, you can very confident be like, yeah, don't worry about that. Like, you know, you saw, we can, we can window those faces later. We're just going to get a baseline for this scene so we can move on. And that way you can really manage the session and kind of make sure you're always making the best use of your time. So once the client comes in, you've set these goals, of the session with them, right? Well, the other thing I kind of like to do in advance, and I usually

get this, I think both of us do, kind of in advance of them coming in, you know, when they hand off shots, which we'll talk about in a second. But I do think it's also important that in advance of this look session, that they do hand off to you any sort of references. And I find at the very beginning of that session, it's, you know, to spend five or 10 minutes discussing those references and what they are and what they aren't and how they might be applicable or not applicable to the actual project because you'd be surprised that sometimes people give you references thinking that it's very clear of what they mean by that reference you know i had one the other day where they're like why did you try to recreate this look they were only talking about one

particular aspect of that reference right and so like i do think it's important to figure that out and it also helps you as the colorists do a little research right so if somebody's hot to trot on you know a particular era of film or whatever a particular you know like i mentioned the godfather earlier like 70s 80s film was on my mind right now but like okay go on i mdb or shot deck or whatever right figure out what those were shot on get figure out the lensing all that kind of stuff the more information you can have like that you can inform because like all the time people say things that they think are true in fact and then they're like oh really that wasn't shot on film that was just an emulation that's somebody you're like yeah that was just a look that they did okay cool

Cool. So, you know, getting those references and discussing those references ahead of time, I think, is important as well. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about how do you actually prepare for this session? Because this is not a session that you want to just walk into completely blind. Because again, these are usually shorter duration. You need to be very efficient. You need to get a massive amount of creative information into your head and into your timeline in a short amount of time. And we need to optimize that. So you're not wasting the client's time.

You're not wasting your time because every bit of information you can get out of of the client's brain and into your brain into your timeline is going to inform the entirety of the rest of the grade. So I like to make this session as efficient as possible. And as I've said for everything ever, that starts with prep work. And for me, prepwork for this kind of thing starts with, one, looking at the film, two, if you've already started conforming, having the film conform. This workflow-wise, this might not always be possible.

But if you are doing a conform and you've gotten the film, I like to have my conform done before I do the look setting session. That way I'm comfortable moving around the timeline quickly. Then you need to figure out what shots you're going to focus on. And there's two ways that I do this. One, I'll go through the film and leave myself markers for shots that I think are indicative of the key frames of each scene. And if there's two cameras, I'll always pick one of each camera so I can compare. If there's a very pretty shot in a scene and a very challenging shot in the scene, I'll probably pick those two to kind of see how they play off each other.

But another thing that I've done, and you might want to gauge this with what your client's interest is and how they want to do this, but I've taken, had them put their reference rough cut up on frame I.O. And have them just go through it and leave a comment on any shot. Yeah, so we refer to that on all of our project orders as a spotting session, right? The client might not have the time or the desire to watch their film again and go through that. So in that case, you want to make sure that you've done a lot of prep work in marking shots that you think are good representations. But some clients might come in with really specific shots and ideas.

I want to focus on this. I want to focus on that. These are the most important bits of these scenes to me. So kind of go with what the client's feeling is on this. If they want to mark up a thing on Frame I.O. And you bring those markers into your timeline. Great. If they want you to pick key shots for this, great.

Do whatever the client wants. And like Robbie said, if there's references, get all of those brought in as stills. If there are references that are kind of formatted weird, take them into Photoshop, make them full screen. So when you hit play still, it looks really nice to the client. and you can actually do an actionable comparison. Basically, you want to be able to walk into this session with minute one, a list of shots that you want to baseline with the client, and references ready for them to compare at the touch of a button,

and also basic things like node tree structure, color management, all of that stuff set up. So you're not treading water like, oh, let me get this into DaVinci Wide Gamut and set up a tram. transform. Let me build a node structure for this. No, no. Yeah. Basic session prep. Yeah. You want this session to be the most efficient session you've ever done where you just

get in. We're looking at the shot and we're comparing the client's references and we are getting the client's input without any other fluff. And all of that is in more prep. To play a little bit of counter to one thing that you said at the top of that bit was that, you know, you said, hey, I like to do this after, you know, if possible, after I conform the film, I have found that this is also a good, I don't want to say procrastination, but a good like pad step. And what I mean by that is that like clients are always feeling rushed at the stage, right? They're always feeling like, oh my God, I got to get the export to the audio mixtures out

down. I got to get the exports to these guys done. I got to license these shots, whatever. So, you know, oftentimes we'll play. I think you do this as well, but just to be to play a little different from what you said is that, you know, I might go back to the client and just say, hey, look, you know, the film really well, okay? What I want you to do is pick out, you know, the scenes, the shots, etc., that you are most worried about, that you think are representative. And like, and use that as,

like, give that to us. That buys them extra time. Okay, Rob, Rob or Joey is doing this work. They're getting prep. They're getting ready. I have more time to prep the project for handoff, etc. So I think about it oftentimes as like an intermediate handoff. And I also think a lot of times about letting them do that work rather than me dictating that to them because after all, I mean, that's the challenge of any colorist is getting to know the film. And by having them choose those shots within some parameters that you might give them is super helpful because you can be assured that like, okay, these are the shots that really matter to them, not just the ones that I thought were, you know, the prettiest or the most challenging or whatever.

Yeah. And, you know, every project is going to be different. And that's also a a really big part of the prep side of this session is figuring out what your client's kind of tolerances and preferences are for communication, for how they look at the project and the workflow, and where they want to be involved, or where they want to not be involved. So this is kind of the most you can tailor this to your client's preferences, the better. So anything we're saying in terms of, oh, do it this way or do it. it this way, not a hard and death rule, very dependent on what makes the client feel the most comfortable. Yeah. So you get this footage from this client. You're doing some of that

pre-production look setting work that is on you, the colorist, right, figuring out what the references are, figuring out, you know, cameras that were used, the era, the film emulation, so whatever it may be, right, figuring those things out, I think of this, besides the technical setup, you know, figuring out if you're going to work in ACEs, figuring out or, you know, RCM, figuring out if you're going to work with a lot or some sort of plug in or whatever those are big picture things that are you that we don't have to dive into too much but they're important to kind of test out get a workflow down you mentioned node tree all of that technical stuff is really important but from there I like to think about so like okay I'm going to go sit with this client I don't want it to be awkward I wanted to

make it look like I've done quite a bit of work on this to think about it in reality you probably will do quite a bit of work but I think the more that you can control that session because remember this is your first opportunity to build confidence with the client, right? And I think coming into that session prepared, organized with a plan of what to show them, when to show them, how to explain these things is good. So what I tend to do is I think about things usually in like three to four categories of looks. I don't want to just walk into the session go, this is the look, right? Because in reality, that's just like if you make it binary for a client,

they're always going to choose the one that you don't like, right? If you're like, this one or that one, and it's especially true if you walk in with one thing and they're only going to like, yeah, I hate it, right? You need to be prepared to show the multiple things. So generally what I tend to do is organize this in like I said, three or four kind of categories, right? My first one is they gave me references.

I'm trying to get a version that is interpretive of that reference. Pretty close in the ballpark. You could say, yes, these two things are related to each other, right? To kind of show them, yes, what's possible? And the interesting thing about doing that, I think, is that oftentimes this is when you find out where people are like, yeah, I didn't really mean that. I didn't really like, like, you know, it's oftentimes people give you the craziest references and then they go, yeah, you know, I don't like any of that. You're like, well, okay. So the next one that I try to do is what you think they'll like, right, based on what the, all of those discussions you've had up to this point, like what they're really, like, this is where you're putting on your interpretation at, right?

They're giving you these references. They're telling you things that they like and disliked. like, okay, don't try to match just the reference, try to make your own interpretation of what they're saying. Then the other one I do is something that's like a modified version of that or something that I like a little bit better. I always think it's important in a look setting session to have your own voice. To be like, you know what? I looked at this footage. This is how I felt.

This is how I felt a cut together. And this is why I made this creative choice. And this is the time to do that. This is the time to get your voice in creatively and figure out where that fits, your client and then try to merge those two things together. Again, it's a low risk environment. Totally. And then I always, always try to do an out there approach, right? Because I think that once you start having these discussions about look and feel and references, you'll find very quickly you can get cornered. And it's just sort of like you start, you start, you start,

you know, doing kind of the same, you know, irritative type of looks over and over again. I always like, that might be like, cool, we're going to do a black and white 16-mill look that's super chunky with a lot of grain. Like, why did you do that? Just because to get you to think about it, to try something, it might be a high contrast look if they're sensitive to contrast. It might be something that's really vibrant. You might try things like heavy vignettes or heavy sky grads or, I mean, pick something out of a hat. It doesn't really matter. But something that pushes and is completely different than the discussions you've had.

Because the value of that is not that you're going to go, they're going to choose this one. It's that it opens up the dialogue to go, oh, you know what? I like this element or I like that element because a lot of the times these clients don't have necessarily the vocabulary to express exactly what they're looking for. And so if you can give them a couple examples of texture, couple examples of contrast, couple examples of color balance, whatever, those kind of things are going to help you inform. And so I always try to walk into one of these sessions with three or four looks prepared. How you do, that's up to you, right? You could create three or four timelines. You could create three or four versions of it.

It doesn't really matter, but I would urge you to have a few options available ready to go, you know, to show the client. Yeah, and the key thing is this is not going to the client and saying, here are your options, pick one. It's here are five discussion points or three or four discussion points. that are here, here, here, here and here. Let's figure out where in the middle of those you want to be. And then let's talk about how we execute that across all the different scenes. Yep. So once we, you know, I always tell people, hey, look, I'm going to, I need some time to probably

work offline from you in the room with this just because that's wasting your time, right? But it shouldn't take like this type of work just if you're budgeting it. This should be like a couple of hour or two, a couple hours in the afternoon one day. Like this should not be something that's dominating your time, right? this is yeah depending on the link of the film and how many scenes we're talking about like i did a a really nice look setting session with a client just last week that we went through a 90 minute feature film lots of scenes in maybe two and a half hours uh no granted i'm pretty familiar with this client but uh you know this the goal here is to cram as much creative information into your brain in the

shortest amount of time because this is not grading the whole film. Yeah, and I think, you know, a measure of success by this is, you know, if a client walks in a room and you're spending an hour going through, like, you know, I was in one last week, it was a feature-length doc. We spent about 75 minutes, maybe, maybe 90 minutes total in the session. And probably half of that was just joking around about various things and catching up. Oh, you know this person, you know that person, whatever, that kind of thing. Another really important goal for, for you, the colorist in this session is you want your client no matter what to walk away from this session excited to see your first pass. That's like the number one success metric. If that client

is excited to see your first pass, they're not worried, they're not concerned, they're not anxious. When they get that first pass, they are going to look at it with a good attitude. They are going to look at it objectively with, you know. It's like the fear of the unknown, right? If they go into it having an idea of what to expect, they're going to be way more pleasant with you and way more proactive than not going with any idea and like, they click on that link going, oh shit, oh, shit. Like, you know, like, what is this going to show me?

And that brings me to kind of the other kind of worst case scenario. What I think is, and we've talked about this a little bit before when we talk about client review sessions, the worst thing, I think, for a colorist. ever. And if it hasn't happened to you, it will happen to you at some point. It's happened to me. It's happened to Robbie. That is when a client doesn't like a grade, but they don't feel comfortable giving feedback, so they just kind of shut down and approve it and then walk away unhappy, and you don't know that, right? That is the death of a client relationship, and it's no good for anyone and it means one, your project didn't benefit from a constructive back and forth of

creative ideas. Two, you don't have a happy client that's probably not going to come back to you and won't recommend you. And that's just the worst case possible outcome. And skipping this review or skipping this look setting session and just grading the whole film and presenting it to them and say, hey, here's my awesome grade. I love it. Give me any notes is a great way to rush yourself to that outcome.

but also managing this look setting session in a way that inspires confidence in the client and makes them feel really good about the overall general direction is one of the best preventative things to stop that from happening because you are figuring out how to interact with that client and how to make them feel comfortable giving you notes, which is the most important thing, I think, in the colorist client relationship. I agree. It just instills confidence. It makes them feel that.

you are invested in the project, you're invested in the success and the look of it, et cetera. I 100% agree. I will say also that so you get this footage, you get the session. I think that when the session is going on, I think there's a little bit of a strategy to how I do this. Let's see if you agree, right? So if I have three or four looks, you know, these are short timelines.

They might be a minute, maybe a two minute, you know, long timeline altogether. I'll just, I'm like, hey, guys, let's just play these down. no need to react. I'm just going to tell you what it is, what I was going for, and just play it, right? So there's no sidetrack. I just go,

let's play all three or four of these timelines down and then we'll go back and look at it, right? And then that kind of gives them, okay, I know what he was going for here. I know what he was going for there. And I can have to listen, digest. You'll find that clients often will say, hey, can we go back and look at number two again?

Right? And you're like, cool. Then there becomes a point in time in this session where they're wanting to do comparative work, right? And I think it's, you know, as a colorist, you need to know your comparison tools very well. Things like obviously looping, playheads, split screens, versions, you know, all of those kind of tools. You need to be able to call up in various ways, right? I want to compare shot two of this look with shot three of this look because maybe we combine them.

Or I want to look at this with this reference, whatever. Like, don't be fumbling around with that because this is, again, this is your, first opportunity to show off your technical chops. And if you're fumbling around going, uh, yeah, I don't really how to put those two up on screen at the same time or whatever, like you're ruining the confidence, right? So be really prepared with that part of your session to be able to quickly compare things back and forth. One thing I also like to do, by the way, this is, I just recently started doing this. Do you know the, uh, there's an option in the resolve viewer to, to link the viewer to SDI output? Oh yeah. It's one of my,

favorites. It's awesome to do in look sessions, look setting sessions, because like, you know, you can be like, let's push in here a little bit. I'm going to show you this, you know, chromatic aberration, like, oh, I never really noticed that before, right? It's a good, you have to balance this out. You're not trying to nitpick and be really like, you know, negative about the footage. But this is also oftentimes the first time a client has seen this project on a large calibrated screen, right? And so you do. You do. You do. You do. You do. You do. You do. want to sort of, if there's a lot of challenges in the project, in a nice and constructive way, want to be able to point out some of those challenges too.

Like you were saying earlier about the day for night thing, right? But like I had one recently where shooting a lot of vintage anamorphic style lenses, and there was just every freaking shot had, you know, this four, you know, four, five pixels of bordered color around everything. And I was like, hey, I'm going to zoom in here to show you this because I want to know, how much this bothers you and what I'm actually talking about because it's going to be a lot of work to get rid of this throughout. Oh, we never noticed that before. Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, it doesn't bother us too much. You can leave it. Cool, right? You just saved me hours of work

in the grade by leaving that kind of thing behind. So those kind of comparative or analysis tools, the one thing I would not get into, and this is just me, is I would not get into a discussion about the the validity of shooting practice. What I mean by that is like your role in here is that not all of a sudden be the, the critic of what went on in production, right? It's a really, I know that what I just said is sort of nuance, right? You want to set it up and kind of prep yourself,

give yourself a little bit of pad for some of the challenges that might be there, but you don't want to be like, oh my God, they shot that guy totally out of focus or what were you guys doing here? You didn't use any lights? Like, no. You don't come in and say, oh, why is this such a mess of noise? You say, hey, it looks like in these darker scenes, there's a little bit of noise,

but I've got some really good noise reduction tools. Let me show you like four different levels of noise reduction to see how much because, and then you can explain kind of the back and forth of, okay, we can reduce the noise, but it might introduce a little bit of softness. Let's figure out your preference for that. And let's just address them. Exactly. It's about putting, you know, there's going to be shots.

There's going to be projects where it's literally about putting like a bow on a pig, right? I mean, like, you're going to just, you've got to present it in a way that it's, here's the challenge, but let's be proactive about how to fix this, right? I think the other thing I think about a lot in these sessions, Joey, and we'll get, this is a good segue into this part of it is, you know, whether you're doing this asynchronous or remote versus in person, right? And I think, you know, obviously over the past five, six, seven years, you know, a lot of places have moved away, you know, everybody wants to work at home or remote or whatever, I would

urge you whenever possible to make this session an in-person session. And I feel that way for two reasons. Number one, you as the post-production psychologist, to use that term again, right? It is so vital and massively important to judge reaction, body language, you know, all of that kind of stuff live, right? Because a lot of times people, like, their words are not going to tell you the full story, right? But if somebody watches a look and the next thing they do is fold their arms and kind of tilt their head and go, you know, make this face, like, you know right away. Like, this is not the look for them, right? There's something that I have a problem with. And that's very hard to gronk on a frame I.O review because somebody's going to be like, yeah, this is cool, but I don't

know. Like, they're not going to be as direct in body language and that in person session. I find invaluable for this type of thing. And you'll get so much done faster versus 400 notes. And like I keep saying, that's the goal here is you're, it's not that you have to rush. It's you are trying to cram an entire film's worth of creative information into your brain in a two hour session. And you're trying to best do that. Now, unfortunately, the in person is not always an option. Now, another great thing about doing this in person, by the way,

is it's going to be their first time seeing their film properly displayed on on calibrated reference monitoring, which is a great baseline for when they do the final review later, they won't come back and say, well, yeah, but on my laptop, it all looked like this. When they, when they look at looks on a calibrated monitor, and then they come back and look at rough cuts or rough passes on their computer, their default will now be, oh, my computer is not the be-all end-all of the world. That monitor that I saw in the look setting session is.

So there'll be a little bit more understanding of monitoring differences, which is the challenge when you get into a remote application of this, which is like... Totally. And I just add one more thing to that. I think that that kind of thing is also on you, the colorist, depending on the content of the film, right? So if you're looking at something that is like, hey, we shot this narrative short and it all takes place in this dark room with a candlelight or whatever, right?

Like, that's going to be impossible to judge on, you know, like in that level of nuance and detail without reference monitoring. And as you said, it's your first opportunity to have them build confidence in reference monitoring and understand the difference. I've even done this as far as when I can tell that somebody is a little nervous about things, right? like, okay, man, let's just, you know what, here's, you know, I'll make a, make a quick time or whatever, give it to them. Let's just, why you're sitting here, why don't you bring it up on your laptop and look at it next to this screen? You see how this performs differently? Now, that's a slippery slope. You might not want to go there every time, but like if somebody's really giving you crap about it, you know, be like, you know, if they're like, well, my, my MacBook Pro is perfect.

Be like, well, maybe not. Like, that kind of thing can also illustrate those points. So when you get into these remote reviews, if you. are forced to do it remote, which my last two were remote. One I did with Zoom, which was a mistake because Zoom does funny things to colors, no matter how much you try and people's laptops do funny things to colors, no matter how much you try. That was not the greatest.

I forget there was some reason why I did it on Zoom instead of Looper. So I think it's a technical issue I was having here. and that was not a wonderful experience. We worked around it. And it was one of those talking points for the client like, hey, again, we are not married to any of this. This is just to get the mood and the feel. So if it looks a little different on Zoom, that's okay.

We'll address it down the line. And it's part of that explaining process. But where I've had the most success and what I cannot recommend enough is using Looper for this session because you get the video conferencing built in so you can see reactions. They can see you, at least at the beginning of the session. Usually it starts with, hi, you know, I'm going to turn all my lights off and you're not going to see me from now on because I work in a dark room. But you can get that face-to-face introduction.

And you get the really nice color managed live view for all the stakeholders at once. it is, I can't recommend Looper enough. Yeah, and for those are not familiar with it, looper.io, it's a review and approval platform started out kind of in the, in the pandemic days when people were really craving for this. And it's developed over the past couple years into a much more full feature platform, as you said, integrates video conferencing, can integrate asynchronous, you know, notes and comments on things that you can get.

And we've had, you know, Looper started as a, a tool for offline editors, right, to get with their client and start working with a story. So they would spend all day on Looper, like an open video chat with a with a screen. And then the developers at Looper, we had actually worked with them to do this and a bunch of other colorists that we know had worked with them to really refine their pipeline to be color accurate as color accurate as possible, right? It's never going to be the same as a reference monitor. but it is the best chance at color accuracy you're going to get,

especially if you give it a good input, for example, you can take your decklink SDI input into their encoder, which is based on OBS, and encode right from your SDI input. How much better is that than trying to do it with Zoom and like an SDI to HTML adapter that might be a problem or something like that? So, you know, a remote review session is never 100% color accurate,

but a service like Looper and Looper in specific is invaluable for getting over some of those basic humps like how do I get SDI into my Zoom? You know, it is a much better tool. Yeah, and they have a nice feature that I really appreciate. And that is the, I think they call it Stream Connect, which is they have an Apple TV app too. And also iOS app that so like if, you know, if somebody is just comfortable looking at it, you know, on their TV with an Apple TV or whatever, you can stream right to that. And it's like, you know, again, we've talked about this on previous episodes, right?

There's some benefit of familiarity when people are looking at screens that they know and view things on at all time, you know? Yeah. If it's a little wrong, it's okay because it's their wrong. Right. It's their wrong. Yeah, exactly. So the other thing I would say about the remote session that I think is, is besides the technical

details of it, is that, you know, you just have to be careful with COVID. out true feelings in a remote session because even then I think people are a little, little hesitant. So I think that when you're in a in-person session, I think it's easier to spot the body language, the changes, et cetera. When I'm on a remote session, I tend to be a little bit more overt in my line of questioning, right, just to make sure that I'm not missing something with how people feel about, right? And you'll get a feel, the more that you do it, you'll get more get a feel for that. You know,

I think I find the biggest challenges of remote sessions are, okay, well, this one person's getting two seconds of latency. This one person's getting one second of latency. You know, like dealing with some of those technical challenges, but those can be over it. Either way, whether it's remote or whether it's in person, one thing I would say,

and I mentioned this before about buying your little time, you know, pad of time, is I do think that most filmmakers in these sessions, they're making snap decisions, right? and they're making really quick choices. I do think it's important after the session and everybody's feeling good about things and you know where you're kind of going

to maybe just make a couple exports of the looks that people like the most, right? And let them just kind of gnaw on that and sit with it for a day or two. Shoot me an email if you have any other thoughts. My narrative the whole time to the client is nothing we do here is set in stone. Totally.

And you're not trying to make this go on forever, right? You're not trying to say, oh, if you don't like it tomorrow, come back in and we'll revise it. You're just going sit with this. If you have any additional thoughts and you want to be proactive about it. Thanks for the work. I think this looked great. I'm really happy in the direction we're going.

I'm soke to be, you know, collaborating with you and the team. But look at this for a second because once that happens, you can, like, they'll be more confident. Again, it's all about confidence. They'll be more confident when you start in the grade, right? Yeah, and you can frame this in, hey, I had a great time. I think we're in a great place to get started on the grade. For now, here's some high-res stills if you want to use those for your socials or anything like that. And like I said, any other thoughts, feel free to let me know.

So you got all this work done. It's time well spent. Now, how do you parse that into the actual grade? You know, that's up to you. I tend to, you know, save power grade albums of these so I can just have these stills ready to go. I'll say this. Before you get into your grade, before you do anything, else when this is when you're done with your look setting session make a still album and basically

like if you've had your whole film conformed go to your little clips and say show me all the graded clips and grab a still of every clip that you graded during that session that way no matter what direction you go in the grade no matter where you are you can always jump back and reference a still of what you did with the client in the room or on looper. Even more importantly than that, I think. Snap shot in time. Yeah, 100%.

But even in a similar vein, but potentially more important, is that you're going to this happens to everybody. You're going to realize in the course of doing those test grades that you may have, there might be technical things, or might be creative things that you've painted yourself into a little bit of a corner and that you need to clean up before you start attacking 2,000 shots, right? I have this happening all the time. like, why did I do it that way when I could be doing it this way?

Or why did I organize my color management like this when I could be doing it that way? Now when you're not trying to rush an entire film's mental state in two hours, this is the time you sit down and really set up your node tree, maybe start fresh, build everything again referencing what you did with the client. And I think that's just a vital thing to like in general project prep is going, okay, I learned what the pitfalls of this were. this is going to make you more efficient. So instead of figuring that stuff out in the fly

and painting yourself into a corner and when it really matters, as you said, you got all that pre-production work done and it's you're ready to go. But my last point about this too is that I think it's, if you go into the grade with the idea that,

okay, we've created the look and this is it and you're going to be rigid with that, you're also painting yourself into a corner, right? The fact is you did a grade on a dozen shots, maybe two dozen shots or something like that. And there's 2,000 shots in the show, right? Like, you have to go into this with a little bit of an idea of flexibility. And so one of the mistakes that I see a lot of people making,

and I know there's many schools of thoughts on this, but, you know, one of the things I see happening on forums and different places is people go, oh, I do a look setting session, and then I save a lot and then I use that for my mind grade. I get it. I totally understand the technical reasons of it. But my point would be, no, don't do. do that until you're into the film.

Like, if you're going to do that, do it for performance reasons or technical reasons. I try to keep all of my look stuff live, at least for the initial portion of starting the film, because people are going to change their minds ever so slightly sometimes, but sometimes drastically. And if you're going by like baking in a ludd or whatever to be your look, you've lost that flexibility of change and you're going to paint yourself into a similar corner. Yeah. This is the point.

where when you're doing the actual grade of the film, now you do things like group all your scenes. So if the client says, oh, I love this, but maybe the whole scene should be a little warmer. Now it's one button, not 10 minutes, right? Or you go in and you might find that you graded two shots of this scene with the client. And the bulk of the photography of the rest of the scene doesn't really match with those two shots. We might need to come up with a 50% between in the middle.

middle between what we did, what we want, and what works across the whole scene. You need to build your grades so you're ready to do that. Again, this look setting session is boundaries, it's goalposts, and it's putting lots of creative knowledge into your head from the client. It's a, it's a brain transfer from the client to you. And also a little bit of that is, again, going back to the very beginning of this conversation of what you want to ask to hand off, right? So, like, you know, it's important, you know, we talk about this all the time. We've done other episodes where, you know, evaluating a representative cut of the film is important for bidding purposes, right? But it's also valuable to help you inform to what you get in this look setting session.

And I'll give you a perfect example. A couple months ago, I did a project and the client handed off all of these beautiful drone shots of Rome, right? Like Rome at sunset. And I was like, oh my God, this is just stunning, right? Coliseum and like, you know, the ruins, all sorts of stuff. And then I was like, graded that. Everybody was like stoked about it. And then all of the stuff in between these amazing aerials was not representative of what

those aerials were at all, right? And so I'm like, oh, I thought we dialed it in, but I guess we didn't because now we have all this other crap to deal with. Right. So like, you know, flipping back to that conversation, just be sure that when you do get a handoff, it is representative of all the pieces, right? Cool. Well, Joy, I think this is a really, really interesting subject. Like I said, we should do, in the future, we'll do a whole other but similar themed show on kind of doing this in the pre-production step, right? Camera Luts and that kind of stuff. I know that's something that a lot of people are interested into. And that brings up a whole new technical world about testing the Ludd and validating the Ludd and all sorts of stuff in that regard. So we'll have to think about that for the future. Again, for those of you who are new to the show, you can always head over to the Offset Podcast. podcast.com to get show notes, additional links, as well as view our entire library.

Show is available on YouTube and all major streaming platforms. You can also follow us on social media, Instagram, and Facebook is where we live the most. Just search for the offset podcast, and you'll see us by our logo that we use in the shows. And also, if you'd like to support the show, we welcome you to do that by going over to this link here on screen to buy us a cup of virtual coffee. Every little bit of support helps. And of course, a massive thank you to our longtime sponsor, Flander's scientific. for the support and our editor, Stella, who always makes us sound intelligible, which is a good thing

sometimes. So, Joey, really fun one today. I really enjoyed the discussion. Hopefully everybody finds it useful. And we'll see you next time. So for the old offset podcast, I'm Robbie Carlin. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.