Creating Looks - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 459

great.' So I lit the scene in silhouette, and he goes, 'I can't see the actor's face.' I go,
'That's because he's in silhouette.' And he said, 'Well, can't we have some fill light on
him?' 'Well, then it wouldn't be a silhouette!' A silhouette means a dark shape against a
bright background. But some people think a silhouette means a backlit person with very
dim lighting on them. So that's 'silhouettey' but it's not in silhouette.”
NOT Doing a Look
Veteran colorist Mike Most explains that not every colorist “does looks.”
Colorists often have niches. Most explains, “Look creation is not really
my big forte. Everybody's got their forte. My forte is fixing problems and
I'm really good at continuity. Making sure that scenes play consistently.
The whole look creation thing: that's the Bob Festas of the world, the
Jais Theirrys of the world, the Beau Leons of the world, the Stefans of
the world. They're really heavily into taking something and making it
into something that it wasn't. I've never been that guy. For me, what
always came naturally was just bringing out the beauty of something
that's already been shot and try to make it more than what it was but not
something that it wasn't.”
Plug-In Looks
With editors being pushed into service as “colorists” more and more with-
out any formal training, many vendors have seen a market for prebuilt
looks and a kind of automated look generation based on plug-ins for com-
mon editing software. One of the most common of these is MagicBullet
Looks 2, which is available for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro,
Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Sony Vegas. There were also prebuilt looks
from Graeme Nattress and Bob Sliga for Apple Color.