Miscellaneous Wisdom - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 463

or talks out loud what I'm doing. A lot of my clients actually like that
because as I'm doing it, I'm talking my way through it and explaining
to them what I'm doing. That's a habit that I picked up very early in the
business when I was working with guys like Nick Dantone and Howie
Birch, who were the principal owners of Manhattan Transfer, and I spent
years assisting those guys. I always found it to be a very good tool. I con-
sider myself not to be a technical colorist. There are guys out there who
are really technically inclined. Chris Ryan is one of them. He knows these
systems inside and out.”
Pep continues, “There are two aspects to color correction. One is being
able to emulate the aesthetic look or direction that the DP or director
is expressing to you and that's essentially your primary objective, right?
That's what you want to do. Somebody comes in and they have a visual
idea of what they want and you try to give them that. The other one is
being able to have the 'room savvy,' and what I mean by that is being able
to communicate effectively with the client. It's a personality thing. I try
to be personable.”
You have to have the personality to sit in a room with an A-type
personality, understand what they want, and give it to them.
- Chris Pepperman, NASCAR
Having hung out in a session with one of Pep's clients, I agree: “People
like to hang with you.”
“Exactly. And I feel that's one of my strong points—why people like to
come here. You definitely have to have talent, technical-wise, to be able to
interpret what they want visually. But you also have to have the personality
to sit in a room with an A-type personality or a B-type personality, under-
stand what they want, give it to them, and all along keep them comfortable.”
Company 3's Stefan Sonnenfeld agrees that the interpersonal side is
critical: “I think this business is trickier than most people think,” states
Sonnenfeld. “I say half the people who are doing this really struggle to
get what they end up with, because it does not come naturally, and there
are technicians so to speak who know how to work the knobs but have
a very tough time translating either their own thoughts to the screen or
somebody else's thoughts to the screen or a mixture of the two, which is
why some people just take forever to get something.”
I ask Sonnenfeld if being able to communicate in the language or with
the terminology of a DP is important. He answers, “I do not need that kind
of specificity. Some people do come in and say, 'Tell me what I should say.'
It does not matter. There are people that I work with, like Michael Mann,
who give me an emotional rundown of a narrative. Then he says, 'Okay,
go.' Here is the story I am trying to tell, here is the emotion that is trying