King Kong and The Lord of the Rings are Aussie Dave Cole's colorist calling cards. Now he's ensconced in LaserPacific Media's DI theater in Hollywood, half a world away from Down Under. Cole, who has a Computer Science degree from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, established Melbourne's Digital Pictures digital film division in 1998, including writing software to manipulate LUTs. At LaserPacific, Cole is currently finishing up Captivity, directed by Roland Jaffe and shot by Daniel Pearl, ASC.
You say the modern-day DI started with The Lord of the Rings? Why?
Up until that point, grading had been done with hardware-based color correctors. It was almost like "telecine on steroids" at that stage. But then with Lord of the Rings onward, computers became fast enough to enable software color-correctors. Software-based correctors still weren't real time like the hardware-based ones, but they afforded flexibility and power that didn't exist before.
Are DIs different in the US than in Australia and New Zealand?
I've only been in the U.S. for three months, but I can say that there's a lot shorter turnaround. With Peter Jackson's films, my experience was at one extreme. I was on King Kong for 15 months, and six months for Lord of the Rings. Here, I've now done one preview and three DIs. One DI was seven days and the other two were 15 days. I've always been fast, so it's not that much of a problem. And having a good team around you on the back end and a DP with a vision really helps. I can focus on the task at hand, which is color-correcting the film. But you really have to pump it through.
One thing I really love at Laser Pacific is that we have really good grading theaters, big 30-foot screens with 2K projectors. It's a great environment for grading. For King Kong, we had a theater, but it was multi-purpose, so the bulk of it was graded in little rooms. It's been my dream to grade in a big theatre. And you should grade within the environment in which an audience will see it.
What are the different ways you work with a DP/director?
Sometimes I sit down and watch an offline of the movie and discuss it as it is going through and make notes, much like the traditional approach of lab style timing, and other times we just load up the first reel and start. When the director/DP has a particular look in mind, we can usually get there pretty quickly, but sometimes its more of an interactive creative process, as we explore and find where we want to go organically. I think its very important to be able to relate to people, and get into the mind of the director and DP, so you begin to feel what they want as opposed being told in words what they want, which is sometimes very hard to do.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years from now?
That is hard! I had this wild, big dream that I kind of hit. I don't have grander plans. Hopefully I'll be accepted in the industry here and people will want to work with me and continue to work with me.