Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Encore's Pankaj Bajpai thinks that the most important communication
tool he has is visual. Bajpai elaborates, “For me, it's not so much 'talk' as
to be able to show options. The toolsets that I have been drawn to are the
ones that typically allow you to
show
, because a picture is worth a thou-
sand words. So instead of saying, 'Hey, this will look really contrasting.
This will look great. I will crush the blacks or goose it up.' There are all
these terminologies that I'm sure you have heard, but there is really no
substitute for showing it. It's like you see that in the context of the images
that you're working with, so for me to be able to very quickly display
what it is, even if it's not completely finessed, to get the sense or an idea,
and that's how I come to a common understanding of what we're doing.
The truth of it is that the skill of coloring is about 50 percent of what
you do . . . a very huge chunk of it is people management.
- Pankaj Bajpai, Encore
“The truth of it is that the skill of coloring is about 50 percent of what
you do. Navigating when people are not around and keeping people's cre-
ative visions and eventually making it all homogenous and whole so that
everybody says, 'Yeah,' and they're getting what they want, is the trick in
the episodic world. I think a very huge chunk of it is people management.
Being able to take ideas, sometimes on the same page or sometimes a very
contrary idea and then somehow coming up with a solution that works
and being able to cut through the esoteric-ness of it all and then coming
up with a solution that is artistic, that you know you can maintain, spe-
cifically in episodic.”
I ask Festa about the trend away from telecine color correction—in which
the image that is being manipulated is coming directly from the film—
toward corrections done from flat data transfers on central servers or
from flat transfers to D5 or some other tape. The episodic world of color
correction has already turned towards this workflow, as have many digi-
tal intermediate workflows. The TV spot world seems to be the sole hold-
out, and I wonder if spots will join the rest of industry in this regard. (This
question was asked back in 2005. Since then spot work has indeed gone
file-based.) As Festa is definitely a veteran of the industry, I expect some
resistance from him on this point, but he surprises me.
“God, I sure hope so,” Festa exclaims. “I really don't know what
it's going to take. I really think it's going to be an application like the
Color app, where people are exposed to it on a fundamental, early level.
The youngsters who are familiar with Final Cut . . . today's runners or
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