The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP045: Listener Submission -Technician vs Artist

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

In this episode of The Offset Podcast, we’re exploring another viewer/listener submitted question - this time from a viewer named Camilo.Camilo asks about the balance as a colorist of being a technician vs an artist.  Thanks Camilo for the topic - it’s a deep one!Specifics topics we explore in this episode include:Color grading IS technical, but its ALSO very creative.  Most colorists aren't exclusively one or the otherHow you got into post/color plays a large role in how you see yourself and others seen youHow you can fill your technical/creative gaps with conceptual thinkingThe colorist as a fulcrum in a creative/technical seesawHow the pressures of having to 'invent images' vs respecting photography brings technician vs artistry to the forefrontHow video/film projects have less diversity of approach than other artistic mediumsThe power of experimental projectsLearning to understand your own personal strengthsIf you liked this episode, please subscribe, like and rate it wherever you found the show. We'd also love it if you'd consider supporting the show by 'buying us a cup of virtual coffee' https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcast 

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another installment of the Offset podcast, and today we're exploring another viewer-submitted question. This time, we're discussing the idea of a colorist as a technician versus an artist. 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. 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. Hey, Joey. Hey, everyone. So, Joey, we are continuing, answering some viewer-submitted questions. We did one a couple weeks ago from our viewer, John. And this time, we're going to take another one. Why don't you tell us about this question?

Because I actually think this is a really hot-button topic and something that we've discussed kind of behind the scenes quite a bit comes up every once in a while in colorist circles and I think it's an interesting one why don't you give us the brief on it Yeah so today's question

comes from Camillo who is a colorist in Cuba And he says that It usually happens that colorists are perceived only as very technical individuals And the craft As a purely aesthetical and technical series of choices. Could you talk about how the colorist contributes to the creative side of a film,

kind of enhancing the narrative through color versus, you know, just being a technician and dialing the knobs and setting levels? Yeah, man. Okay. I mean, it's a deep question because it's a deep load. And it's a loaded, it's a loaded one. Yeah, I agree. First of all, if you're not familiar with our user or viewer submitted questions, you can always head over to The Offset Podcast.com. There's a button there bringing you to a form to submit an idea. We encourage you to submit an idea because every idea helps us make new episodes. But yeah, man, this is a loaded one.

I think there's a lot to this. And I want to be clear that I think that no matter how we answer this or how we cut this, there's a chance that we offend one side or the other both sides at the same time. So apologies about that. But I want to be clear about one thing. I'm very sensitive. I think, well, let's put the word overly before it's the word sensitive. I think I'm overly sensitive about this because I think that it will come as no surprise to our audience that both Joey and I have been seen over the years as technicians, right?

We know a lot about a lot of things. We geek out. We're nerds about, you know, everything from, you know, SDI, and monitors to, you know, virtualization and IP addresses and whatever, you know, like we geek out a lot about a lot of these things. And I think that the technical part is something that a lot of people gravitate who are in this industry because, you know, it used to be, when Joey and I were coming up, this used to be really technical, really big pieces of hardware, very difficult rooms to set up, a lot of moving pieces. And that's, that's, you know, to a certain degree, it's still true. But it's also a weird industry because we have all that technical stuff, but then we're also asked to do creative things. And I think that that has always been kind of a balance out because there are certainly colorists who couldn't tell you what a codec is. They couldn't tell you, uh, you know, what PQ means. They couldn't, like, whatever. Like, you know, you could put a million different things.

They are true artists. They like making beautiful pictures. They don't care about any of the ones in zeros to get them from point A to point B, it's all just about the images. And I think for the vast majority, I don't, if you see if you agree with this, I think for the vast majority of us, we live somewhere on that spectrum of those two things, right? Yeah. You know, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say there are people who are just technicians and they don't give a crap about, you know, the image. And I don't think it's fair to say that there are, you know, very creative, artistic type

folks that, you know, don't know anything about technology, right? Everybody, it's like, it's not binary like that. I think it's very much sort of on the spectrum of that. There are, I think there are colorists who are definitely lean one way or the other or a little bit of both, but I don't think it's one way. I don't think it's just one or the other, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of it comes down to your background and the history of the technology

we've used to make images. You know, in the past, both in film and television, it has been a more technical thing because the technical part of it was so much more difficult. I come from a television background, not a film background. So my first experience with what you could call color correction or color manipulation was literally, you know, timing switchers and lining up matching cameras and then later on matching like on set display. for like a news set. So all of the color pipeline of a four-camera newsroom all matched and looked correct. And correct was very clinical and very technical.

We were pointing cameras at test patterns under particular lights and lining them up with TBCs under scopes. It was a completely technical, absolutely not creative process. But then as I evolved into finishing and editing and post-production, The creative kind of kept becoming more and more of a process and more and more of an ingredient. And as our capabilities evolved, especially in the television world, where we went from, we were shooting on video in Rec 709. So any changes we made were just tweaks to we had digital cinema cameras that needed a full creative color grade to make the image appropriate to view. You know, as my part of the industry evolved, I evolved more creative input, but I started from a technical background. Like you said, there are colorists who are the exact opposite.

There are colorists who started, I've met colorists who started as photographers or painters even. Or some that started as like writers, you know, completely creative fields. DPs or whatever, yeah, yeah. Very little technical need or a range. of technical needs and they're coming at it from a strictly artistic perspective and they're learning the technical. I like to think that in the current kind of industry and what we do, that I would like it to be a ratio of like 80 or 90% creative and like 10 to 20% technical. But I do feel like the 10 to 20% technical is the critical foundation that an effect

colorists in most cases. Now, granted, obviously there's some colorists that have an entire support team behind them, so they never have to worry about that stuff and more power to them. I'm a little jealous of that situation. But to understand the underlying technology of image capture and image display and image manipulation in the digital era, it's good to have that 10 to 20% technical foundation. So you don't paint yourself into a corner when you're trying to be creative. So you don't make a grade that only works on one shot, and then you have to chase your tail for Sessions and things like that.

So having a, you don't have to be a technical expert. You don't have to be a nerd like me. But I do think having a 10 to 20% of your knowledge base as a foundation, the technical being the beginning, so you can explore the creative, unhampered by annoying technical problems is important. Yeah, I mean, I see this. I see this as, I see both sides of the coin on this a little bit. I see that, I see technical knowledge feeding creativity. Like with technical knowledge, you understand image propagation.

You understand, you know, the things that can and cannot be done with cameras, with workflows, etc. And things that can be done are things that you hope. to be done. And I also see that creativity feeds the technical, right? Like, I wish we could do X, Y, and Z. Why isn't there a tool for to do that thing that's in my head that I want to see appear on screen, right? And so I don't think it's neither or. I think both feed from different angles trying to accomplish the same thing. I think there's no doubt that no matter who you ask in this industry, they're going to say, we want to produce the best-looking, most compelling imagery that is possible for this particular, you know, project or whatever for this genre.

Nobody's going to disagree with that, right? I think how you come to that is a little bit of a pie graph of how it were, as you said, 80, 90%, or hopefully creative, less technical. I think the best part, the best analogy or the best kind of concept that I think about this is that when you allow one side or the other to get out of the way of this, you allow one side or the other to get out of the way of the other thing, you know? And so, like, I think that when, when I'm, when you have a very sound, technical background and knowledge, you can just don't have to worry about the technology impacting your creative, you know, your creative contributions to the project. Vice versa, I think the same is true about creativity, right? If that, if, you know, if you are a very strong, creative person,

consider yourself much more of an artist than a technician, you know, not knowing that technical part of things can be a hindrance to realizing your creativity, right? And I actually think, you know, of the many things that he does well, you know, go back and check out the episodes that we did with Cullen Kelly, because I think Cullen has a very pragmatic take on this kind of this topic, right? And it's like, where's your knowledge gap? Where are your pain points, right? You know, if your knowledge gap is understanding, you know, something technical, then you need to fill that gap, right? If that's hindering your output and you're in work, fill that gap. I think he would say the exact same thing, right?

If you're, you know, good with the technical, but you're feeling a creative gap, fill that, you know, way anyway that you can. Right. And some of it, I think the problem that a lot of people get to is that, and I think you'll agree with this. With technical stuff, you can learn it to a certain degree, right? Like, you know, if you need to discuss a SDI standard or an Ethernet standard, like, you can go out and look that up, learn it, right? Creativity and artistic aesthetic, like, I heard somebody say once that you can't teach taste, right? And I do think that is sort of true. I'm constantly amazed as somebody who feels like I'm pretty, like, technically knowledgeable.

I'm pretty much weekly amazed by people that I look up to as artists, how actually much more competent technically than they are than they realize, right? And I'm also constantly amazed by technicians who are also more creatively competent than they give themselves credit for. I think that it is also a natural human feeling to downplay the things that you have less confidence in, right? I think that learning how to be a strong creative and how to be a strong artist is a process.

And much the same way that I view learning how to be a good technician and be knowledgeable about these kind of things is also a process. In either shape or form, experience, education, you know, all of those things influence how well you graphed those things. And so it's just, you know, I think there are people,

going to gravitate probably one side or the other, but there's most people are going to have a balance of those things. And I think it's about confidence to a large degree. Yeah. And there is one thing you mentioned about, you know, you can't teach taste, which to a degree is true, but also I do think our artistic abilities increase as we use them, right? Even if that's consuming more variety of art, especially visual art, exploring more options, things like that. You can, you can, learn the artistic side if you are a more technical mind. But one thing I want to slightly disagree with you on is you said that, you know, learning the technical side is somewhat easy and you can kind of just just do it. I think that, I mean,

you're right. There's much more, much more things that are documented, process-oriented than learning in art, clearly. However, when you are looking, let's say you are the most artistically driven kind of colorist. You don't care about the technical side at all. You don't have any technical background. If anything, the technical background might scare you a little. There are ways to explore the technical side that are dramatically better for learning and understanding and retention that I think are worth exploring. It's a subject that I think about a lot, which is how do you become overall, and I think this affects both your technical side

and your artistic side, how do you become a better conceptual thinker overall? And I want to mention a book that I actually just finished reading very recently. It's by a guy named Richard Hamming, who was the head of the mathematics department at the legendary... You just say Richard Hammond from Top Gear, is that who you're talking about? No, no. Hamming.

I am I N G Hamilton Hamming He was the head of the mathematics department At the legendary origin of our entire modern world The Bell Telephone Laboratory I knew you're going to say that Yeah okay

The book is called the art of doing science and engineering Learning to Learn It's a book adaptation Of a graduate course He used to put on at the U.S. Naval Academy Teaching young engineers How to think in

structured logical ways where you can explore problems and there is so much like deep wisdom in this book for how to think that is completely unrelated to the technicalities of our industry

but I think anybody interested in improving like you mentioned like Colin had talked about where your blind spots of knowledge are this is a absolute massive master reference of the

the method by which you can explore those things. And notice he says the art of doing science because he draws a lot of parallels between the art and the technical. And it's funny. In the beginning of the book, he's like we're going to start out with a lot of math. I'm just using math to demonstrate some things. If you don't like math, skip these chapters. It won't really matter. If you do like math, great. But all of the concepts

you talk about afterwards, you don't need to know the math. Yeah, I mean, learning to learn. And I think we can apply that both to the artistic side, but especially to the technical side if you are more artistic in nature. Yeah, I mean, I essentially what you're describing or advocating is kind of the philosophy of like, you know, liberal arts kind of education, right? Like sort of, you know, learning, learning how to learn. Like, you know, I'm sure a lot of our listeners and reviewers have had this experience, you know,

if they went to university or went to college or whatever, like those first couple years, you're taking like an English class and like, you know, whatever, like classes that have nothing to do with your interest, right? And you're bemoaning the fact that you have a C in calculus or whatever, right? Like, I've been there. I'm sure a lot of our listeners and viewers have been there. And I think they're missing, at the time,

I was missing the point of that too, right? Has nothing to do. Like, yeah, I was never going to like have a practical application of like biology in my, in my professional life, but what that class did was helped me learn about the scientific method. It helped me learn, you know, the processes, like, whatever. And like, there's, like, the same, English class does the same thing, right? The math class does the same thing.

And learn how to learn. I think a lot about, um, the idea of like being a polymath, right? And this is, you know, and I actually, I think on my, uh, my Instagram, I even have the, the, you know, the little title about what I do. It's like, aspiring polymath. Right? Because like, you know, the idea that knowing a lot about a little bit about a lot of things, I think is kind of what you're getting at, right? Is that like, I might not know how to write equations for quantum physics, but I'm really interested in quantum physics and I read a lot about it. I know enough about the concepts. I, you know, I'm not a, I don't know, a world class, you know, race car driver.

but I know enough about the physics of how a race car works, right? Or like, I'm never going to be, I'm never going to get a job as a, you know, systems admin at a giant data center, but I know enough about how that works. And I think that in our line, in our field, I think that anything is that is tangential, even, is education that is worthwhile to helping you either on the creative side or help you on the technical side, right? And so like, when people look at us, you know, look at me and go, oh, well, Rob, all you do is talk about nerdy computer stuff.

And I'm like, yeah, cool. But that nerdy computer knowledge got your 12K, you know, XR sequence to work, right? And it's just sort of like, all right, you know, so like there's, I, I just don't, I just don't feel the need to be pigeonholed in a lot of these conversations. And I, like, I don't feel like the need to identify as like, oh, I'm a technician or as I'm an artist because to me it's like I'm all of those things all at once depending on where the need has and I actually look at people who snub their noses at one side or the other or have an issue as being incomplete somehow as being like they're they're being held back because it's like

look if you look at somebody and go well they can't possibly compete with me creatively creatively like that's that's a you problem that's not a them problem right you don't know that like they might have some of the best creative ideas ever, but you've pigeonholed them and you've applied this tag to them, and now they're just a technician. I think that's a disservice to that person and ultimately a disservice to you if you feel that way. Yeah, and just to play off a couple of those examples,

you said, you know, I'm never going to be a, you know, professional system administrator, but as a colorist, you do need to know how to use a computer enough not to break the thing, right? On the other side, you may never become a master painter, but you can learn about how colors and contrast interact creatively to invoke a feeling and become a better artist. You don't have to master the technique of brush strokes to take inspiration from things like classical art and painting and bring them into your work. So I really do love to go back to the example you mentioned of Colin of looking at where your knowledge gaps are and then making a conscious effort to fill those in.

Now, so far we've kind of talked kind of pretty pie in the sky about all these concepts. I want to bring it down to the actual work of color grading because there's a balancing act there too, because we have said time and time again that the best color grades, the best colorists, and the most high-end projects, you as the colorist need to respect the photography. It is not your film necessarily. your job is to execute the vision of the director and the DP and to enhance and execute what they want out of what they have filmed. Right. So if you kind of look at that doctrine, which we've preached for a long time,

that does limit some room for creativity, right? Like you can't go into a project and say, oh, well, I think it should look like this and completely counteract all of the lighting that was done on set and say, I'm fixing this because I'm the artist, right? No, you need to, even in a completely artistic side of the job, where let's say all your technical needs are solved, right?

You still need to balance how do you respect the photography, but still contribute. You know, I was thinking about this the other day, this, when we were outlining this episode and just, you know, bringing it up. And I was thinking about the role of the colorist in particular. the role of the colorist as the folk the fulcrum on a seesaw right and I was just and I was thinking to myself like that's a that's a good analogy because you know you're not on one end or the other end in particular but you are balancing that out right so like the example right you I think

you're right you know producer director DP comes in with this creative vision they give you a brief on it they explain to you what you want to what they wanted to look at your job as a colorist is to creatively interpret and translate that to use the best set of technology, techniques, et cetera, the technical part of it, as a means to an end, to get to that point where they want it, right? Like, okay, cool, you've been heard.

I understand where you're going for. I'm going to choose this set of tools out of my quiver because I think they will get us to that creative place further. Once you have established sort of a baseline that you can get to where they want or, you know, address some of the concerns, that's where you're now looking at the other side of the seesaw and going, okay, cool.

Well, like, now that we've gotten here technically and we've been able to get to a good place where everybody's in agreement, this is kind of what we discussed. Now I'm putting my creative hat on and going, yeah, but guys, have you ever thought if we did X, Y, and Z and bringing a little bit of your creative flare? Because, like, I think there's, at least in my experience, you know, there's an idea that there are some clients out there who just want the colors to shut up and just execute 100% of what they want. I'm not going to deny that that happens.

But at the same time, I think most people go to- And as long as they pay their bills, that's okay. Right. I think most experiences and most people, people do want the colorists to have an opinion about what they think and what they look. But I think that that's not necessarily at that first step I said. I think so you can leverage the technical part about your knowledge. to get to a creative balance point with the stakeholders, your clients, right?

And from there, once you're at that balance point, it is, okay, what can I do? How can I bring my creativity into this? Now, there are certainly times, and I think this goes to a little bit of our viewers' question, there are certainly times where you have weak creative clients and you have weak technical clients, right, to where you are doing essentially a master class on both, educating clients about, oh, well, this is the format you shot, this is what's possible, these are the, you know, this is how we're going to conform,

this is what a bake means, whatever, right? And then there are our clients who go, oh, I don't know, I just came to you to make it look good, right? And so now you all of a sudden have this, like, I have to be the bar, you know, the harbidary of like what looks good and what doesn't look good. And we've talked about this on and off over episodes, but it's an interesting one because there are certainly times where you are being asked to construct something that didn't exist.

And that's more true than it ever has been with people just go in now thinking we can shoot whatever, however, and all of a sudden... We shot 4K log. With no lights outside and with no flags, no whatever. We shot raw, so we have the dynamic range. Right. You can make this look like whatever we want, right? And so I think, you know, that's where it's those projects, actually,

where I think that this discussion of technologists versus artists really come into a play because it's those projects where I feel the most stressed or the most pulled by both sides of it. I can't just not, I can't just be the technician because they're asking me to reinvent. to basically invent their project. And I can't just be the creative part because there's so much handholding that I have to do on the technical side of things to get them to even to a baseline. So that whole idea of the sees, I'll get back to the seesaw. That whole idea is the colorist as the fulcrum of the seesaw is a great one when you have strong

people who you're working with that are strong one way or the other. But it doesn't exist when you have clients that walk in a room go, I don't know what I want this to look like. and I have no idea how any of this works. It's those situations, it's those situations that you're going to be the most stressed on because it's like, I can't be one or the other.

I have to be both at the same time and I have to be both extremely well. That's hard. And sometimes both sides fight each other. Yeah, right? Totally. Sometimes you might try to get a particular look or a particular style

and then look at it and be like, yeah, but the shadows are technically not exactly where they should be or this or that, and you might not be able to kind of see the forest for the trees through what is a technical, not a creative, or vice versa. Now,

one other thing along these lines I've thought about a lot is, you know, a couple months ago, the very talented, both creatively and extremely talented technically, DP, Steve Yedlin, came out with what we've all seen,

we've all talked about, kind of his expose, if you will, on his opinion on dynamic range, displays, how they work in terms of image artistry. And one thing that I took away from that presentation more than anything is that he kept kind of insisting dogmatically in a good way that the true origin, if you will, and the basis of all kinds of image authorship, whether it be a painting, a photograph, a motion picture, whatever is ratios. It is how much space there is between light and dark,

between saturated and not saturated, right? So if you scale that, as long as you keep those ratios kind of the same, the artistic intent of the image is still relatively intact. And what got me thinking about that related to this topic is, okay, if the client is asking you for, something really aggressive, really stylized, where you may, oh, I'm going to push the shadows super blue, or I'm going to do a teal and orange thing, or I'm going to do a heavy film grain, whatever,

but you still want to follow kind of our doctrine we've talked about of, we still want to reflect, respect to photography and use what was filmed, not try to fight it. What you want to look for, in my mind, is keeping things like ratios where they were. We can put a strong tent and some film grain to make a stylized look on an image. If we don't heavily fight the lighting ratios they did on set, the DP's vision is still coming through to the final image, but you have introduced kind of the creative aspect that you were asked to by the client. The client might not ask you for that.

And in that case, you don't do such things. But the one thing I just wanted to kind of mention is keeping in mind, relative contrast, relative ratios, whether it's between saturation levels or luminance levels or whatever, trying to maintain those with the original artistic intent of the project while you're exploring some creative looks and techniques and stuff like that can be a great way to balance that kind of seesaw of I need to make the image and I also need to respect the photography.

Right? Yeah, you know what? You know what's hard, I think. And again, I often come back to thinking about music and music analogies and stuff like that, is that while there's certainly genres in film and TV, right? There is just way less width of the spectrum when it comes to film and video than there is in music, right? Like in music, you can have some experimental thing where it's like, you know, somebody banging on a pot. of pans while yodeling in the background, you know, with like a Motown baseline. And somebody's

like, wow, that's amazing, right? We tend to, in film and video, like, our range of creativity is, is less in the mainstream. Yeah, you can't just be like, well, what if we threw in some lightning bolts? Right. Or like, or there's lens. There's, you know, you know, God, God rays on everything. Or, you know what? We're going to make everything just neon pink. Like, there's, there's, you know, There's just less latitude for like correctness, I think, on some of the creativity. And so like what it got me thinking about was we have a we have a long time client, this guy, Matthew Taylor, who is a, he describes himself off sometimes as a video, video artist, right? And he has a background in sculpture and all sorts of wacky things.

And he's a good dude. But I think that getting involved. in some really experimental outside of the box stuff that's not like film or TV or whatever is a really good way of flexing both sides of this equation too, right? Where you can get into something and go like, no, we're just going to make this bad shit crazy looking, right? But that also to get there, we also have to do all this fun,

innovative technical stuff, right? I'm not saying that every project needs to be that way, but I say like when I, when I start feeling teetering on either side of the seesaw too heavy one way or another, there are, I think, ways of getting back to that creative release point. And I think one of the ways of doing that is things that are very experimental, very wacky, whatever. And it's not like you have to have clients for this either. And I think that's one thing that we're at a place now where you can go out and spend a couple hundred bucks on a DSLR, even a, God, even a cinema style camera. I mean, go get a, what are the Black Magic Pocket cameras?

Like a grand, you know, $1,500, something like that. They do pro res, raw, the whole nine yards, right? Put a cheap lens on there and just shoot wacky stuff. Like, I think there is a range of, you know, there's a way to also push the balance. I'm really, I'll die on this hill that I really think that mainstream video and film projects are very conservative, right? For the most part, right? We're in this range of, does it have grain or does it not have grain?

Nobody's talking about like, do we make this shot neon orange and this one neon pink? Or do we let, you know, like, that's just, it's wrong in that regard. So I do think that anything you can do to do experimental films, to do things that are just kind of wacky and outside the box can also help this equation. because I think those projects where you can flex both sides pretty hard. Yeah, and that kind of brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is, you know, don't be afraid to try things. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, try five different things for a particular creative problem.

See what works. See what went too far. And then try turning it down a little bit, right? Go to that extreme to see where the boundaries are and then bring it back to something reasonable, right? That's, I feel like a great way to explore the creative side without breaking the technical side and without having to, you know, you don't have to be the most master creative in the world, the greatest artist ever, to explore five different options and then see not only what you like about them, what does your client like about them? What does your client dislike about

them and kind of use that to form your direction for the grade? Yeah, and I think it's very, easy again, I keep, I'm being a dead horse here, but I think it's very easy to fall into the idea that mainstream media content is the only thing that's out there and that's representative of both the technical and the creative,

right? There are plenty of wackadoodle filmmakers out there doing all sorts of super innovative stuff, but the mainstream TV and film world sees that kind of stuff as like just out there, wacky, never

and it's never going to be on, you know, it's never going to be a premiere series on Netflix or whatever. And like, to a certain degree, I get that. But I just think that, like, if you're feeling... Well, that's also why you have 17 superhero movies a year that you can't even name which ones are which. Everybody's afraid of being

crazy different, right? Of being of being, because it's like, oh, if we make it purple, nobody's going to watch our show. So what's that book? What's that book? If it's purple, somebody's going to die, right? Someone's going to die. Yeah. Yeah, like, I just I just really think that from a creative point in time.

And we discussed this when we answered our, a couple weeks ago when we did another audience member question. I just think that everybody is scared of being really creative and really crazy about things. And I think that it's going to take some of the taste makers doing some

really wacky things to bring some of that back, to break the mold of superhero movies, to do really and we see that too. I'll give you a great example. example of this. I think the anthology series Black Mirror is

really awesome for this on a couple levels. Storytelling levels. Amazing. Like a couple, storytelling, the construction of the story and how they piece it together, but also just look at that series again from the viewpoint of wacky camera angles, weird

audio, you know, all sorts of stuff. And it's just like, that's mainstream consumption that's pushing it a little little wacky. And now think about the things that are really extra wacky and there's some really cool stuff out there. Yeah. Watch, if you could pick two episodes of Black Mirror, watch Metalhead, the black and white one with the evil robot dogs. And then watch San Juan Aparo, the bright, beautiful, colorful, only episode with a happy ending that they ever did.

Complete polar opposites in terms of visual style, story style, both absolute masterpieces. but both grounded in the same themes in a just amazing way. And that kind of brings me to what I wanted to close out this kind of whole concept in my head, which is when you get into these deeper creative areas, which you should explore, you know, flex those muscles, go to the extremes if you can, bring them back if you have to, try different things. one word of warning just always let that creativity

I'm not saying limit yourself but I am saying to keep yourself grounded in the knowledge that our job is not to make every shot be exactly what we want our job is to serve our client and help them best execute their vision don't lose sight of that by all means

inject as much creativity into the process as you can or as you feel appropriate, but just be aware that you need to be grounded in what is best for your client, not just you. Yeah, and along the same lines, I would wrap up by saying that not every project is art, right? And I think that there are certain projects where you go into it and you're going to go, lift gamma gain, saturation, next shot, right? And that's the art of it. Getting through it, getting it, getting a paycheck.

you know, that's the art. There are other projects where, you know, I think you can expand those bounds a little bit. And I would also say there are, you know, if you're feeling stuck in this balance line of being the technician versus the creative person, like a little of that work has to go on you too, seeking out projects, clients, etc. That are going to answer some of these creative bounds, right? So, like, if you're like, I just don't get to worry, everything is just, you know, make it, you know, natural looking, very naturalistic, plain Jane, whatever. Like, well, maybe you should go out and find some, like, crazy-ass music videos to do with the director who's like, I got it. We're going to shoot everything upside down and it's all going to be Emerald Green. Cool.

Like, let's have it. Like, you know, some of it is not just going to flow to you. Like if you are, if you kind of do day in, day out, ho hum, I'm just this kind of, you know, in this, this is, I'm sticking to my lane. You're going to get known for that. And people are not going to come to you as often for the really wacky stuff that you might be craving. So, you know, I would say, you know, to answer Camillo's question, you know, the last part of his question, he was about, you know, where do I kind of get, where can I seek out creative work? I would say, you can't let it just come to you.

You've got to seek that stuff out. And I think that, you know, it can also be you make it. You can have fun at it and do it yourself. And, you know, for me, I'm not really all that handy with a camera, but I am with a guitar, right? And that's my creative output, right? So, like, you got to find it in different places, too. Yeah. Very cool.

All right. Well, hopefully this around, beating around the push on Camille's question a little bit. As a reminder, you guys can head over to the offset podcast. There's a little submission button at the top. If you have an idea for a new Offset Podcast show, just let us know there. We're always happy to get viewer submissions and maybe your idea will make it on to a new episode. If you're on Instagram or Facebook, you can follow us there. Just search for the Offset Podcast.

And of course, we're also available on all major podcasting platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as well as the video version of the show is available on YouTube. So good discussion. I always find these discussions really enlightening and really kind of fun. So for the old Offset podcast, I am Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.