The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP064: From Staff Colorist To Facility Owner PT 1 With Nick Hasson

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

In this episode of The Offset Podcast we're joined by friend, amazing colorist, and all around great human Nick Hasson.We've been wanting to have Nick on for a long time and we're excited to finally get the opportunity.  Nick has spent the past 25 years at some of the biggest postproduction & color companies in the world including ILM, Technicolor, RIOT, Company3, Light Iron, Modern VideoFilm, and Harbor Picture Company.  He recently opened his own studio in Burbank, CA called THE ENDIn this first part of a two part series with Nick we talk about his background, what larges facilities taught him and more.Specific topics include:Joining ILM & launching a professional careerMoving to L.A. and joining RIOT & Company3Developing 'soft skills' while at TechnicolorCamaraderie & the early days of D.I. at Light IronThe pandemic and launching a freelance careerAnd more!If you enjoy the topics and discussion of The Offset Podcast you can join in the conversation with our new Discord communityCheck out offsetpodcast.com for our entire library of episodes. You can also follow us on Instagram & Facebook - just search for The Offset Podcast.Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you found it and be sure to check out our growing library of episodes.If you like the podcast it'd mean the world to us if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee -https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcastSee you again in about two weeks for a new episode

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Offset Podcast, and this week we have an awesome special guest. Stay tuned. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and their DM series HD monitors. From set to post to broadcast, these versatile HD monitors are equipped with an industry leading array of features and capabilities, making them indispensable to DITs, engineers, editors, and colorists. Learn more at Flanderscientific.com. All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. I'm one of your host, Robbie Carmen. And with me is Joey Dana. Hey, Joey, how are you, man?

Hey, everyone. Joey, believe it or not, we have a guest this week. It's not just our bloviations. We're joined by a good friend and colleague, Nick Hassan, who's going to share some great insights with us about sort of his career, the state of affairs. This is going to be the first part in a two-part series we're doing with Nick. We're going to have the first part, we're going to kind of cover sort of his big facility career in that path. And then in part two, we'll discuss sort of the challenges of becoming a freelancer, opening your own facility, and some of the stuff that goes on with that, including things like vibe coding, an AI and things he would wish he had known as a younger colorist. But before we begin, some housekeeping things as usual, you can always follow the show on Instagram or Facebook to search for the Offset Podcasts.

You can find our complete catalog of episodes by visiting Offset Podcast.com. We'd love it if you would consider purchasing a virtual cup of coffee with this link right here on screen. Every dollar pledge goes directly to supporting the show. And then as you might have heard us say over the past couple episodes, we've launched our own Discord server. The offset Discord is public and available for anybody to join. We have about 70, 80 members so far on there and some great conversations already happening. So you can join that Discord just by the link right here on screen. All right, Joey, well, without further ado, let's bring on our pal Nick Hassan.

Nick, how are you doing, man? Hey guys, thanks for having me on. Oh man, we're stoked to have you. As I sort of teased in the opening there, you have been someone I've wanted to get on the show for a long time. We first met on a Discord community of all things. Yeah. And we were lucky that our buddy Adam Hockey was like, hey, we got to bring this guy Nick into the community. And once you joined the community, it was great getting to know you there.

And I think that one of the things I appreciate about you, Nick, is that you just have sort of an open, fresh kind of feel to a lot of these topics, not one who to hide behind, you know, that's dark art. We can't talk about that. And I'm also really interested in just sort of, you know, your take on, I feel like you have a good sensibility about the scene, whether that be technology, whether that be, you know, technique and trends, whether that be the business part about it. And so we're going to dive into all of that. But before we do, why don't we start out kind of just giving us, you know, the elevator pitch on who you are, what your, you know, career trajectory has been so far. And we'll dive into some of the particulars. Yeah, sure.

So my name's Nick Hassan. I'm a colorist in Los Angeles. I've been in Los Angeles for the last 22-ish years. Prior to that, I was in San Francisco. I started my career in the commercial scene in San Francisco and then was lucky to go to industrial light and magic, where I got to kind of get into the infancy of DI and the first kind of digital cameras with the F-950, F-900, and the very early beta versions of the Quantel IQ, wasn't even a Pablo yet. And then after that, came to

L.A., and I've been doing mostly just picture finishing, but I've had roles as online, smoke, flame V effects type work, as well as colorist work. And now I do kind of a little bit of everything from start to finish. So I stick to, you know, conforming opticals, effects like that. We have effects people. We send the heavy stuff out too. And then do all the color and deliverables and all that stuff. So it's been a good thing to have a background with a little many different paths.

Yeah. And for those listeners who can already tell the attractive. that we have to Nick and talking to him because he mentioned the word Quantel. He mentioned tape decks. This is in the realm of Joey and me specifically. But also Nick didn't mention that he's also a car guy, which, you know, him and Joey, forget about it. It would be like an hour.

So we have to put that off for another day and another conversation, right, Joe? Yeah. Yeah. But I will just say it's as great to have you here because I think your background, like you said, having dipped into so many different things in the industry, both on the technical and creative side, I think is really advantageous. And I'm saying that somewhat self-servingly,

because I feel like I've kind of done the same thing. I started in the early Quantel days as well. And those systems weren't perfect, but you learned a lot, kind of getting into those and figuring out and problem solving with what you could do with digital images that people hadn't really thought about in the past. Or one level of undue. Yeah, and one video track.

Yes, in one video track. Yes. I still, I mean, I still say editing happens on one track. And if you need more than that, you're doing it wrong. You do say that weekly, yeah. But I think there's a lot of value in that that I, some people that, and granted, I'm not disparaging anybody who's like, I only do color grading. I only do it on this platform.

I am very comfortable in my lane. I'm very talented at this. I've got my clients. I love it. No disparaging someone taking. that approach. That hasn't been my approach. I've used every system under the sun from Sony linear to smoke and flame to Quantel, Avid DS, now DaVinci Resolve. And I feel like I've learned something from all of them along the way, whether it just be not just color stuff,

but conform stuff, little visual effects stuff, little tricks here or there. When a client throws you a curveball, you can say, oh yeah, I have a solved for that because that came up 15 years ago in a smoke session. Yeah. Yeah. I think learning, all those software is great. You learn something different every time, different approach. It makes your brain work in a different way. And even in our current situation of like resolve versus baseline, right? And they're two totally different things. The way those two softwares make you think is completely opposite. Like when I'm on a resolve, I'm thinking like, like just for instance, I'm making changes in a client session. It's make the change, do a ripple, you know, check out the

ripple work where, you know, in baseline you're thinking ahead. It's like, okay, turn on the grouping, get everything offset on, do it all live at once while, you know, literally. twisting the whole scene around line once and then hit play and go through. So it's like just the way those two things think like I'm thinking after or I'm thinking before, even the way things get selected, you know, different groups and resolve versus categories. And basically they just make you work in a different way. And sometimes it's really frustrating because you come back to the one software and you're like, why can I just categorize this and do this? But, you know, often your workflow becomes better as you, you know, hop between, you pick up little things and you merge it into one.

And I've always said that the more different platform systems, techniques, disciplines that you learn and immerse yourself in, even if they don't become your full-time gig, it helps you learn to learn. You know, if you have figured out, if you've jumped from 10 different platforms over your career, when the next hot thing comes out, it's a lot easier for you to pick that up and learn it, Because you've already figured out how to kind of, I consider it almost abstracting the technical usage from the creative desire, right? You know what I want the tool to do. Now I just need to figure out how to get the tool to do it. You know, the people that I think are the best colorists, best visual effects artists, don't ever say, I'm a resolve colorist.

I'm a baselight colorist. No, they know what they want to do. And then they use the system as an extension to make that happen. Absolutely. So let's put our way, our, you know, time machine hats on here and go back to, you know, younger, younger Nick back in the day, teenager, early 20s. Like, you know, I always find it interesting talking to colorists and people in post-production because there's a lot of similarities in path, you know. Some people come to it from, hey, I liked the gear and the technology and, you know, the engineering part about it. Some people come from it from a, you know, a pure artistic point of view.

I'm always surprised. Oh, I shouldn't say surprised, but I'm always, it's always interesting to see how many people have music paths getting into post-production as well, whether that might have been, you know, as a performer or a player, whether that be audio engineering. What's your path? Where did, you know, when you were a young man, what was, what were your interest, where did you think you were going to be? And how did you get here?

Yeah, so I was the teenager with a camera. I always had a camera. I always had stills. at that time, you know, everywhere I went, every party, everything. So that started my kind of passion for imaging, I would say. And then after high school, I was in college and I got a chance to be an extra on a commercial. And so I thought, okay, why not? I'll try this. Somebody had asked me on the street, they're like, hey, you know, we need some kids. Would you do it? And at the time, it was like $150 a day, which at that time was, you know, a lot of money for a 19 year old, 18 year old.

So I went there and it was funny. It was sitting on set and we're waiting. And I'm going, What are all these people? All these people are doing stuff? And I'm just sitting here. This is so boring. What are these guys do? And I got my first look at a real film camera. I want to say it was a Pantaflex gold. And I was just fascinated by the size and the organization. It felt like a Ferrari team in a pit stop. That's, you know, when I first saw it, that's the way I felt about it. And so I kind of changed my trajectory. At that time, I was in San Diego and I really wanted to, you know, accelerate that. So I landed up going to Orlando where I went to both the University of Central Florida and FullSale. So I got a little bit of both sides where I was able to do some of more of the theory.

And then at FullSell was great. It wasn't much theory. It was more hands on. So they were like, here's a Pantaflex gold. Figure out how to thread it. Here's a SR3. Go do it. Here's a beta cam.

So it was good. I got to learn that. And that vernacular and learning acronyms, surprisingly, was, a huge help. So I was able to go into a professional environment and know, you know, what AES was. All these things are probably simple now that, you know, people here at the time, there wasn't the resources of the internet to learn that. So can I tell you that every single kid that I've met that has gone to full sale and has had that experience? I have been nothing but impressed. And I think it speaks a little bit to the, you know, kind of we, as a society, I think we put a lot

onus on sort of like the traditional education traditional college path or whatever and like I'm not saying that like full sales a vocational institution it's not like you know become it but it has some similarities there and I think that that's it's it's it's astounding to me when I when we look to hire people or talk to you coming like there's a clear difference between the person that's like I call them brave filmmakers right you know the people walk around like this all the time and then the people who just get stuff done right and it's like I've always been impressed by that path with especially with those philso kids because as you see said, a lot of that hands-on practical training is usually something that you don't get until

after college in that first couple jobs and you screw it all up. And I've always thought that that's kind of interesting that path because it sounds like, and I think you would say this, that you got a lot of hands-on experience that kids that, you know, young people at your age didn't necessarily have unless they were working at a larger facility or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. No, absolutely. I mean, at the time they had a Quantel edit box. Right. And that was very rare. I think they were over a military. million dollars at that point. And which was a great thing. The school went to Quantel and said, give us a million dollars, you know, and we'll give us a million dollar box and we'll teach all

these kids and they'll go out in the world and they'll know Quantel. So that worked out really well. At the same time, I was in bands, like you mentioned music, music's always been a big thing for me. I played bass. I play guitar and I try to play keyboard. So I played bass through high school and college and bands. And full sale was like a great extension of that. I was actually going to double major in film and recording engineering. And once I got through the film program, I realize that, you know, I probably didn't really need to go through the engineering department because that wasn't what my path was. And that's exactly where I ended up, too.

I actually thought that was my big plan was, well, at first my plan was I was going to be a rock star and then that didn't really work out. And then I was really pulled into audio engineering and the recording arts and sciences, but I had a similar path. I was recording a band in college. And they, you know, one of the guys in the band was like, oh, man, we should do a mute. Like this is still the days of MTV and, you know, music videos and data. myself a little bit. But they were like, hey, man, we really need to do a music video. And one of the

guys in the band had this little hi-8 camera. And he's like, well, how can I be in the music video and, you know, also record? I'm like, I'll record it. And like one thing led to another. And I've always found that intersection to be really interesting because I think that there's, you know, you could argue that we do visual mixing is, you know, kind of, is kind of what we do as colorist, right? And I think that's, it's, there's interesting, you know, synergies between the two, the two paths, for sure. I've always kind of in a very slight way felt inadequate in the color grading world because I don't have a music background. I do a little bit of an audio background. I did some recording and some mixing back in the day. But Robbie's right. There are so many musicians that went into this business. I kind of look at him like, well, wait, what's wrong with me? I could never. I tried in like middle school to play an instrument and I was terrible. Well, when you realize that you don't look good in leather pants and like totally open shirts, it looks. It looks. And no one was going to pay you for it, right? Right, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. I think the thing of those days, though, with the music stuff that really helped me, too, was all musicians want to be filmed. And so the amount of music videos that I made for friends, and that's where I really like, you know, while I was working, you know, maybe at a post house or something, I was taking anything from a 16 millimeter camera or a mini-d-v camera and go and shooting these music videos with friends because they were really simple productions where I didn't have to have sound.

You know, we could just goof off. We could do a couple performances here and there and run the whole thing and then just have fun. And it was about the fun of it and the art of it and about cutting that together, learning how to cut it together, learning what works, color grading it, getting it out to everyone. So that was kind of the, that like infancy. And then while I'm, while I'm, you know, working on higher end productions,

learning higher end, you know, workflows and routes. Yeah, for sure. You know, and it's interesting to me, too, that the, um, the things that you learn about that goof off stage, I think is equally as valuable as like the time that you probably had in your early career at ILM or these other facilities because it's like you're not like you're not under the pressure performing for somebody else. You're taking risk. You're trying things. And like it's just it's low stakes,

but still important education, right? Like that's, I think if you talk to a lot of the best DPs, gaffers, colorist, directors, I mean, they all have a similar experience. Hey, I was just goofing off with my friends and doing this stuff. And that, like that body of work in some ways is more valuable than their professional work could have ever been in terms of their overall learning, you know? Yeah, you need to learn like that. Those projects taught me that how I'm creative and how I have to translate that into working with other people.

And what I mean by that is I often don't know what's right. I will admit that first. But I almost always know what's wrong. And so in that creative process, that's what I learned, which is like, I don't need to be right the first time. I can find it. You know, you can go, I know that's wrong. Okay, let's try this. I know that's wrong.

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And it's also about that's where through that process where you develop preference and the taste and all of that kind of stuff, the things that now in your career, you know, 20 or 30 years later, I'm sure you lean on all the time because of those experiences that you had, you know, way back then, right? Yeah. So you go to full sale, you get out into the world. Tell us about joining ILM because I think a lot of people think about ILM as kind of like, you know, the holy grail of visual effects. And certainly, you know, over the decades, it's been, it is that way. I mean, they've been innovative on so many levels. Tell us a little bit about your time there, what you kind of groanked from kind of the experience of being at L.M. Yeah, so I'd moved to San Francisco.

I had a family member that lived there. So I moved there and was living with him and my brother. And I got a job at a very small commercial production company, commercial post house called Veritel, the time. And it was cool because I got to split my time between tell us. I'd come in and help the online guys finish from four to eight. And then I would go sometimes help the telethany guys start dailies and get going, which is how I got into color. So that was the first start.

Shout out to my homie Chris Martin, who dragged me into this business. And so while I was there, I was talking to ILM the whole time because that was really why I moved to San Francisco. I really wanted to go there. So I got a job there. I got a job in editorial there as a technical assistant. And in those days,

it was a lot of tape-based things. And they had a ton of proprietary, technology. So, you know, when you went in there, you had to learn all these things. And that was a new thing to me that they were like, we're taking this investment in you and we're going to teach you all this stuff. Like there was no gooey on anything. Everything was an Iric shell. And so you had to learn how to do that. You had to learn how to get around. And so it was a really great time because I got in just at the end of model making, which was one of my like favorite things to watch was how these guys would spend months building these detailed,

intricate miniatures and then blow them up in a second, which was always great. And ILM was great for like bringing everyone out. It'd be like, all right, we're like Pearl Harbor. They're like, we're blowing up a one-tenth scale of a Japanese city. Everybody come out at lunch and we'd get to watch them flying a, you know, 35-millimeter camera on a wire wall, you know, all this piratechic stuff. I remember those moco days, like the physical moco setups were just so impressive that you'd have, you know, these big, you said, these big miniature sets.

And then they're just like flying. You think about it now, like, what the NFL does or, you know, those league with all the cable cams and stuff. And like, it's just like, it's amazing that that stuff holds up and it looks so good. I had a, I met Douglas Trimble one time at a, at an event. And he was super, super sweet, nice guy, you know, and he was like, it was a little bit of like hero worship, right? Because everybody was like, oh, he's the VFX guy. And he was just like, I remember him saying something paraphrasing here. He was just like, yeah, comparatively, it doesn't look very good.

but like you have to remember the innovation that was happening at that time. And that's just like, I think about that all the time with things like miniatures. I think about it because some of my favorite movies are the Indiana Jones movies. And I think about like all of the matwork, like the background painting work and all of that, the carpentry, all of those other trades that went into that, that now we just like, I'll just do it on a computer. But like the real physical aspects of doing that back then, we're just, they're mind-boggling to. today.

Yeah. I think it's so cool. Some of the cool things they did with, one of the things I remember was Pearl Harbor, they did wet for dry, dry for wet. And that was something I'd never heard of. And so it's like,

how are they making it look like we're underwater in the middle of a sound stage? And then you go see it. And then you're still like, I don't know how this is going to look. And then you get the film back and you're like, wow, we're underwater. This is amazing.

Totally. Can I just say there's two things that I recently learned that ILM did for Star Trek The Next Generation. I thought was just the pinnacle of motion control and model work. I never knew this, but for next generation, they had, for every space scene where they had ships moving and cameras moving, they would turn off all the lights, rerun the camera with black walls around everything, with little pinholes stuck in them.

So they would get a 3D perspective star field that matched their exact move. The other thing I thought was really fascinating that they did, And it's just indicative of the level of thought that goes into some of these productions. I never knew this as being a Star Trek fan my entire life. It never even struck me until someone pointed it out to me. The view screen and next generation is three-dimensional. It's like a hologram. So if they're showing it from dead on, it looks like a projection screen.

It looks like you're there. But then they cut to another angle from one of the other stations of the bridge. They would match their photography in whatever insert they were doing to put on the screen, they would match that exact angle to all three dimensions. So the screen, the view screen, when they comped in, would look like you were cutting angle to angle inside the bridge and it was holographic. And I'm like, somebody thought, well, wait a minute, it's the future. Of course, we have holographic view screens. How do we do that on a technical level for this entire series? Yeah. And they just did it. Yeah, it was very much like an environment of like I was,

I was talking to someone recently when the ILM documentary came out and watched it. And it kind of went, the first season goes up until just about the time I started. And then the second season is right about the time that I was there. And one of the things that was interesting seeing it so many years later was, you know, back then, we knew what the creative was. We knew what we wanted. You just didn't know how to get it. You had to create that part.

And now it's the opposite way where we have all these tools and we have all these things, but we seem to be working, you know, harder. But the process is not that much different, right? It's still problem solving. It's still, it's like you just move it from the physical. I remember the first time, so I live nearby the National Air and Space Museum out here in the Dolos area of Virginia called Udvar Hazy, which is like a, I think it's the largest hangar in the world, actually.

It is. And we have a friend that works there who had given us a sort of behind the scenes tour, and I saw the first time I had seen the, I think it's 11 or 12 foot long model of the original U.S. Enterprise from the original series, right? And first of all, it's gigantic. And it's, it's on this really cool, like, kind of gimbled contraption so they can, they can rotate it and get under it and all stuff. But the thing I was struck by was that it was kind of green. And I was like, I was like, why is it kind of green?

And then it was like, oh, well, it's because the tube cameras that were used, you know, at the time and the film or whatever. There's a whole thing about, like, we had to bias out the color cast. So when we recorded it, it looked, you know, that gunmetal gray kind of color because it didn't show up that way. And it's like that kind of stuff, again, like we think about, okay, we'll just move the color wheel around now and balance it out and it'll be fine. Couldn't really do that back then, right? You had practical problems that you had to solve. And the only way you could solve it was through, you know, physics, you know, to make things different.

And that area of things has always definitely been fascinating for me, too. It was great to see. It was great to see how much effort went into that. And the model making was fantastic. ILM had a great Halloween party every year where they would give away pretty big gifts. And one of the years, two model makers made a model of the Titanic.

I mean, complete with lights and the little people in the band and everything on it. And then halfway through the night, another guy showed up as an iceberg. And they ran into it. And the ship model broke apart and they spent the rest of the night in two pieces, which is pretty loud.

Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. Very great. So you do your tenure at ILM. what was next on the path? Yeah, so ILN was a funny place because back then movies kind of had, you had two big film releases, you know, a year.

So it was like, you released it Fourth of July or Memorial Day and maybe something in the fall. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of times in the summer, we would be let go for three, four months at a time. And so after a couple years of that, I decided that I didn't want to do that as I was, you know, getting into my mid-20s

and wanted to actually make a consistent living. So I moved to Los Angeles. and my friend Chris Martin knew somebody at a place called Riot. And so I called up Riot and said, you know, here I am. I'm in LA. They said come meet. And next thing I know, I was working for them as a telecineocyst, changing roles for, you know, some at the time, some of the biggest colorists. Didn't Riot do a lot of the HBO, like shows, like the early days of HBO series like Rome and those kind of shows, too?

Yeah. So when I got to Riot, two big things were, there was a lot of music videos. music videos were big, music video budgets were million dollars, they were very big. So there was a lot of guys there that were doing music videos. They also had a big commercial hold. And then up on the top floor, there was a couple guys, Scott Klein and Pongosh that were doing, you know, starting to do shows. And it was, you know, the Sopranos and Deadwood and, you know, a lot of those.

So they, that was the start of it. And that company actually had two different buildings. One was just for color and one was just for VFX and finishing. So it was a really cool environment. And so I worked there for a little while at night, doing, you know, assisting during the day. And then once they got their trust with me, they would have me do some daily transfers and things at night.

And then it got slow. And when it got slow there, you know, I was like, is there anything else I can do? And they said, you know, we have this sister company, company three. Maybe you should go talk to them. And so I went over there and I talked to a gentleman, Stefan Sanovel. And he put me to work like five minutes after meeting me. He said, get in the machine room and change rolls.

And so that was how I landed up a company. and I was there for a while freelance. At that time, they didn't have a DIY department. So I was just doing commercial dailies in the evenings and helping the guys during the day. They had maximized that game at that point. So no film was transferred during the day. You would just throw rolls up.

You would color them. You would pull them off. Then the colorist would go home at 6 o'clock and the junior colors would come in and put the rolls back up and lay off all the tapes because, you know, sometimes it was two, three hours of runtime, you know, that you're laying. tape and you're syncing audio and so it could be a while. So they focused on the grading in the day

and making everything else in the evening. And then a couple months, maybe even a little longer than that, they started building a DIY theater. And I had worked with some of the Quantel guys prior at ILM and a place in between. I worked at a place called the Orphanage in between going from ILM to L.A. And so the Quantel guys came down there to install the IQ and they were like, hey, this guy knows this box and you know company three said what you can you can do onlines too and I said yeah and so I started uh with I think there was about three of us in the DI department and we started with the Quantile IQs and the DaVinci 2Ks doing that path where the IQ would play and record and then that was kind of the start of doing DIY in LA and I stayed there for another year or so and then

landed up hopping over to another company for a while and that was kind of what got me out of being you know, kind of a junior guy and assist into fully doing Quantel and did that for a while, just doing that. So lots unpacked there because you just casually name-dropped the biggest facility in the world.

You also said something interesting too that I thought, I didn't know this about you, about the orphanage. I don't know if you know this, but Joey and I both think Stu Mashowitz is like you know, Jesus level intelligence in this genre. He's such a smart guy.

have admired his work for years. I had no idea that you worked there. That was a cool company. That was like early 2000s, right? So like Sin City, that kind of like that kind of genre, that kind of era. Yeah, we were doing that when I was there, we were doing Charlie's Angels 2. Yep. I think Hellboy.

What was the other one? Oh, Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids 3D. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So we were doing those. And, you know, a lot of times at those days, the house is shared project. So it was like, you know, everybody in the Bay Area, there was them, ILM, escape, there was a few other small places. Now, Company 3 obviously has the reputation as the, you know, the biggest, largest, most well-known facility in the world. And, you know, I'm sure it's Ebden Float over the years.

But, like, walking away from, because I think it's on, it's on the, it's on the dream career path for a lot of, a lot of young colorists is, hey, I want to go work at, you know, the best place in the world. And, you know, you were there for a while. Like, what can you, what can you say that you pull, like, all these. years later, what did you pull from that experience? Like, what did Company 3 teach you as an operator, as a colorist? But even more so, like, I guess I'm asking about a little bit about the soft stuff, because I would imagine, you know, running down those hallways, you're bumping into big-time DPs and directors and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, we always say on the show that, you know, hey, anybody can really learn how to push buttons, right? It's that, it's that soft stuff

about kind of the mechanics of dealing with the personalities and all that kind of stuff. Is that, you know, a large part of what you learn from working at a giant facility like that. And was it also, you know, where you were at your career at that time, do you think it then affected you later on for the rest of your path? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the biggest things being there was that I got unfiltered access to everything because I was able to conform, paint. You know, when we first started, we were doing trailers.

I would conform a trailer. I would dust bust the trailer. I might, you know, then get it into the Da Vinci, make sure it was all notched and okay. somebody would come in and color it. They would leave. I would do the text list, do any additional cuts, the color for, render it all. And in those days, we were so small, I would actually copy it to a firewire drive

and drop it off at E-film for the film out on my way home because I lived in Hollywood. So that unfeathered access to everything was really good. I think you also learn about personalities, good and bad, and how to deal with that. And how you also see, you know, there you see all these different color, and their different way of dealing with it. Like you're talking about the soft skills. Some of them have no soft skills and are very hard in the room. And other ones are like a mayor running for re-election.

You know, they kiss the babies. They shake the hands. You know, they get everyone to like them. So you definitely learn a lot about that stuff. But I probably learned more about those soft skills at my time at Technicolor. Because company three is very competitive. You know,

you talk about that old, at that time, very closed off. Everyone was, you know, had their own thing and was sticking to it. but Technicolor was a little bit more of an open door. And the bigger names that I got to work with there were a little more open to share the process and see those things. So definitely learned a lot more of that stuff. Did you go from Company 3 then to Technicolor? Was that the jump? No, I did a middle stint at a place called Modern Video Film for 11, 10 years, which is where I met my wife.

So that worked out. Yeah, that worked out well. And a lot of really great friends from there. And it's still still. So modern. and then Technicolor, and then I think where you, I don't, I don't fill in the gaps for me. I think where you kind of, for me anyway, kind of came into my, my worldview, was your time at Lightiron? Was that, was that following your Technicolor experience? Or was there some, okay,

gotcha. Yeah, so I was at Technicolor for, I think, seven years and was still really struggling in the big facility. One of the bad things about being able to do a lot of things in the big facility is that you don't build your own identity. So what happens a lot of times is they're like, hey, you're going to get this small show and you're going to conform and you're going to color because you're capable of that. But tomorrow you're going to go do editorial for this huge show or you're going to go do home video for another color. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so that's fun for a little while. You get that experience. And then you realize, you know, what I try to tell a lot of colorists these days is that it's all about relationships. And you realize that you're doing all this work, but you're not building long-term relationships there.

So that's what left me to leave Technicolor and go to Lightiron because I knew Katie Felion, who was one of the founders of Lightiron. And that was one of her specialties or strong points was really being able to get a colorist together and build that, that relationship with the DPs and the studios. It's something that we talk about ad nauseum on this show is that it's a people business. It's a relationship business. And, you know, I think that's, I think that's something that's lost a lot of the time that I think if when when these companies are, when smaller companies, midsize companies are talking about technical capabilities and that kind of stuff, it loses sense of that, no, like, you know, you might not be the best colorist in the world, but you have a

great way of handling yourself. You're honest. You have a good candor with clients. Like, oftentimes, that can be 10 times more valuable than somebody who can, you know, run circles around you and resolve, right? I mean, it's like that kind of stuff that builds up the trust factor that you can only get through those relationships. You don't really earn trust by, you know, oh, I rotate the offset knob just a little bit better than you, right? Like, that doesn't really happen, right? No, you learn that, especially on the big end, the big, the big high-end colorists get by on one or two things. They're either incredibly talented and not that great in the room. So it's completely 100% the work that they're putting on screen is getting them those jobs.

And then there's a good section of them that get the jobs because they're so personable and they make these relationships. And maybe they're not, they're great colorists, but maybe they're not the best. But that relationship is, you know, they want to work with you. And, you know, I always say it's like you want them to, it's like having someone. want to date you. That's the way the client relationship is. It's like you need to have them want to be with you. Even if you look at it from our side, pick someone you want to spend eight hours in a dark room with. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and Gaia Collar AutoCal and Analyzer. Accurate calibration and routine verification are critical in our industry. And Gaia

Color makes the calibration process both fast and convenient. Available across supported DM, M. P and XMP C-Series monitors, Gaiacolor allows a wide range of compatible measurement probes to connect directly to the monitor for automated calibration and objective performance verification. Without an external computer or calibration software, learn more at flanderscientific.com. I think the value, especially for the younger colorist or the younger anybody in post-production, is a lot of times now, you know, the going up through a a big post facility is not the only option like it used to be. No.

And it might not be the best option for everyone. But I will say this, having kind of grown up in what was at the time, the largest post-production facility in Washington, D.C., all of those things really helped me transform from having almost zero people skills. And, you know, I've talked about this a lot in the past. I tried to evolve my people skills as best I could. And I think the big facility environment, one, forced me to, but two, really, really helped me in that particular regard. So if you are, you know, a young colorist, but you're also just a really personable kind of person and you get along with everyone, maybe you don't need that big facility experience. I was never that. I like to think I'm much closer to that now.

but the big facility experience and seeing all of those different personalities and how they bump into each other and what works and what doesn't work on that soft level was invaluable to me. Yeah. Yeah. I think the big thing that I would tell any colorist young color is coming up, you know, about going and working in one of those big houses is go there for a year, maybe two. It'll instantly teach you a lot about workflow about what works. And that'll also help you filter the noise on the internet because, you know,

that's one thing I don't think you need to work at a facility anymore to be successful. But I think for someone coming up through that, not through that path, it's hard to know when you watch some of these things online. Is that real? Is that really going to work? And sometimes I see those things and I think, wow, that's really going to get somebody in trouble. And there's a lot of great information on the internet too. So I think that little bit of experience in that environment can help you, you know, kind of for the rest of your life, filter out what, what noise is. And that's the hardest thing about learning stuff from the internet is you're right. There's stuff that's really valuable and there's stuff that's complete garbage.

But the problem is if you don't already know the stuff, you really don't know what's what. And that could be really difficult. Well, I also think that the one thing that is missing from our current sort of pedagogy of education in the post-production world is that, and I'm sure, Nick, you had this at all these facilities you were at. You had somebody who was senior to you, probably snap at you a couple times for a mistake, kind of slap you on the hand for something dumb you did, right? And one of the problems with the internet-only education path these days is that you don't have somebody slapping your hand and telling you that you're an idiot and you ruin their day and all that kind of stuff. And that sounds like a toxic bad workplace. And I'm sure in some cases it might be. But like what I'm speaking to is more of that that hands-on teachable moment is harder to get now outside of that big facility path than it's ever been.

And I look back on those opportunities in my life and I go, man, that guy, was a real ass, but you know what? I learned a lot from him or her. Also, just to add on to that, a lot of times in that kind of environment, that mentor is taking some of the hit for you. You might not realize at the time, but they're going to smooth over your mistakes with the client. They're going to smooth over your mistakes with the management, stuff like that. If you're completely on your own, sometimes your mistakes kind of have sharper teeth. Yeah. So the best thing about being on your own and the worst thing about being your own are the same, which is, it's all on you. Sometimes it's great because you're like, I can do this my way. I don't have to have manage it

involved. I want that $50 plug in. I don't care. And you can do it. But then when things are going wrong, it's bad. So you go from sort of the high pressure, high stakes, you know, company three. I always think about company three, by the way, as like a lawyer's office. I don't know why I think about it like that. Remember that show suits that was on for popular for a number of years? That's how I think about Company 3. I think that like there's a Harvey and then there's like the lower, like I don't know, maybe that's wrong. But you make you jump from there.

You go to Lightiron. And I remember being so like I remember I saw Michael Chione speak one time at NAB like like right after Lightiron had launched, right? And I remember being so, because this was the days of, you know, here's the red camera. And it seemed like, you know, the red and the DIY workflows and then the Pablo and like some fancy marketing. It just seemed like that was the future. It just seemed so cool to me as a bystander from the other side of the country watching that kind of develop. What was it like being in that time? Because I imagine it was exciting and it was also stressful, of course.

Speak a little bit to that experience because I'm always been fascinated about that because Lightiron at the time at the time seemed like a disruptive force in kind of the model that was Hollywood Post at the time. What was your experience like there? I actually really, really, really like my experience at Lightiron. Can't say enough about, you know, the colorists that are there. Combrottery. It was the first facility I had ever walked into where I didn't instantly feel like I was in competition with everyone. And you instantly, your shoulders went down, your guard, you know, came down, and it was about the work and not the office politics, which was great.

You know, every morning I would come in and sit with. Ian and Corinne and numerous other people. And we just have coffee and we'd be around, you know, 20 minutes before our session starting, we'd be talking about what we were working on or maybe a cool little trick that we found and, you know, they're in baselight and I was in Resolve at the time. And so that was always kind of an interesting thing. Well, how do you do that? Okay, so can I go back to the Resolve and figure that out?

Or I would mention things and that, you know, so it was this great like volleying of ideas. And so I really liked my time there. It was also a very different feel in the sense that they were doing that high-end work, but they didn't have the background of some of the facilities. So things were done differently, a little more scrappy. You know, so it moved a little bit faster than some of the other facilities, which was great at the time. And yeah, I wish those guys, I hope those guys, you know,

now it's under new ownership and I hope those guys kill it. Yeah, for sure. Let me ask you this about that kind of general era of light iron and those years because that kind of really, like Rob said, coincided with the beginning, to the transition to digital cinema cameras, right? Yeah. The red was coming out and just becoming, you know, from early beta is just a concept to the Red One, which, you know, Red was like, this is the replacement for film, but it wasn't

quite there yet. You know, like you mentioned earlier, some of the earlier Sony's that were not really ever going to be a replacement for film because they didn't really shoot in any kind of raw or, you know, camera negative format. But on the technical side, we saw this explosion of early digital cinema cameras, like the Airy D-20, the D-21, the red camera. What was the Genesis? Yeah.

A lot of them were, they had a lot of hype behind them. They were amazing new technology. But at the time, they were not really on the same technical level as well-exposed, well-acquired, well-scanned film. How was that going from a primarily film background of everything kind of... Everything was filmed. Obviously, there's bad film. You know, there's badly exposed, there's problems to solve, but your problems now become, one, across the board, no matter what, because it was inherent to the technical format of the cameras.

But also, visually, how do you, how did you bridge that gap between, okay, we're used to film, we don't really want to change our aesthetic and have it look drastically different, but we've got this new technology that we're really champion and we're really bringing into the workflow. Was that difficult? I remember, because I just, I remember my very first Red One project and trying to make. make it look good. And half it was my ignorance, but the other half was, it was really tough. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're always only as good as what's shot, right?

That's always the key. But I think, you know, in those days, we did a lot of testing. Testing was like weekly, probably. You know, when I got to Lightiron, that was the first time that we were really, I had a place that was like, you're going to set the looks for these shows. And you're going to, we're going to do that before a daily start. And we're going to test these things. And so we would find that, you know, and I think when you find that with the client,

and they're part of that process, they get to that end point and love it with you, even maybe if it's not as good as film, you know, or not as good as what they thought, but you've gone through that and you know you've gotten the best you can and then together, you know, march forward. But that was,

it was just always testing. I mean, at that time it was like every week you'd have another. It got to the point where you've done so many of these tests that's, you know, another DP would come and go, I'm going to test the red versus the Sony versus the airy class and you'd be like, I can already tell you, you know, what's going to happen. Yeah.

I'm going to happen because we've done it. But now, today, it's just all the cameras are great, you know, which is a luxury. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, now I'm always telling people it's about lensing and lighting, you know. 100%. It's, that's what it's about.

It always was, but at the time, those early cameras each had their own idiosyncrasy. So they might not have been the right choice for each project or each, you know, this lighting configuration might show up badly on a red one versus a Genesis or something like that. Yeah. That's really not a thing anymore. All the cameras are great. Yeah. all the cameras are great. They really are. They all do so well. So that's what I'm only telling

people, focus on the lighting, focus on your lensing, you know, the rest. If you have that down, everything else will be easy. Yeah, I mean, those days were crazy. And I have a similar experience with Joey of just like being like, this is supposed to be amazing. And it also seemed like there was something like, a lot of those camera companies, I think, like promise there was a messaging gone wrong. Like, it's like, you have a camera now that can shoot raw. And a great many people took that as we don't need lights. We don't need, we don't need grip gear. And that, it was, it was ugly there for a while. All right. So still a problem. It can still be a problem. Okay. So then I think, correct me from wrong, your, your, your, stop after that was with

Harbor Picture Company. Is that correct? After. Yeah. Things have changed at light iron management. And it was the very busy time and I was working way, way, way too much. And, you know, that's one thing I will say about the big facilities, being a colorist is a big facility, you are a horse pulling a cart. You are the way they get their product out. And so, you know, all these companies, rightfully so, they're trying to get through, can sometimes push you too hard. And my priorities in life changed drastically during the pandemic. You know, when I went home, I was at light iron. Everything was going great. And literally the pandemic shuts down. And they're like, here's your X300. Here's your Mac Pro. here's your advance panel.

Bye. Go home. And so all of a sudden, I'm working at home and I had a, my daughter was three at the time. And so I started working this kind of different way where I would get up very early in the morning and I would work for four hours and then I would go in the pool and play with her and do things. And I would come back at 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the afternoon and see what was left and finish up the day.

So my priority started to shift. And, you know, things wanted to go back to the office at that time. You know, things were starting to move that way. So I landed up, Harbor offered me an opportunity to work from home when I wasn't supervised. So I took that and I did that for three years, which was a good time. I switched to baselight. So that was a big jump there. So learning that and spending my time there.

And then unfortunately during the strikes, things slowed down to the point where I didn't have enough work. And so I was furloughed for a while and then eventually cut, which was both a blessing and a curse at the time. you know um so my path to from employee to freelance wasn't necessarily my choice but everything after that was very deliberate and very very uh and uh forceful no yeah and i want to we're going to do a part two just for those of you were watching along we're going to we have so much more to talk about with nick so we're going to do a part too but i want to wrap up this part by sort of sharing some some sentiment about that era too because it was remarkably similar for us obviously different you know being in a much smaller market, but, you know, we, we invested in new office space in the fall of

2019, right? Built, spent, you know, 100 grand or whatever it was for build out and this new facility. And then it's like, right when we got the permit sign off, it's like, hey, guess what? The world is ending. There's a global pandemic. And it also forced us to change. And I wanted to ask you just knowing what we know now, like, what is that scene like in terms of, you know, If you could generalize in L.A., are there still a lot of colorists who are working from home doing their thing? Or is everybody kind of moved back to, yeah, no, we're full-time back to the facility just like it was, you know, 2015 or whatever.

I think it's like a, it's a big mix. So there is a lot of colorists. I mean, in L.A., traffic time is a thing, you know. So if you can avoid two hours, three hours in the car, you know, people will do it. So I think it's a big, big swing. you'll see anyone that's obviously doing theatrical grading is in a is back at the office and they're there but i think a lot of people are doing the unsupervised at home and the client stuff in the office i think that's probably the biggest thing i see is and and the facilities i think like it because they can

take the weight off of the rooms they don't have to have as many rooms they can have you know six colorists at home and two you know three rooms maybe four rooms a little less rooms and they can rotate it becomes like a present it comes like a presentation space rather than a working space necessarily. Yeah, yeah. So I know there's a lot of a lot of the guys at the facilities that do that. And then some of them, some of them go in every day. Some people prefer that. So I think everyone's kind of found a little bit of their balance, you know, and obviously the bigger name and the more money you make, the more weight you get to do what you want. You find that. So if you're, of course. If you're billing $3 million a year, they're going to

let you work at home. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Very cool. Well, we're going to, like I said, we're going to continue on this conversation. We have a lot more to talk about with Nick. We're going to talk about the jump to freelance, running his own facility, and some of the, just state of the industry stuff. We're going to pick that up in part two. Just as a reminder, you can follow the show on Facebook and Instagram. You can just search for the Offset Podcast. You can go over to the Offset Podcasts to find our entire library of episodes. And, of course, you can find the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and that kind of stuff.

So stay tuned. We'll be back in just about two weeks for another installment with Nick talking more about some of that stuff. But Nick, thanks for joining us on this first part of the first part of the stuff. the conversation. Really, really, really interesting stuff and I can't wake to pick it up with you shortly. So for the Offset podcast, I'm Robbie Kornman. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.