Mike Sowa, senior colorist, LaserPacific, wanted to be an editor, but once he stepped foot into a telecine room, he was hooked. With an art minor in college and experience in drawing and painting, Sowa saw a beautiful synergy of the technical and the creative in telecine. Sowa says he learned a lot from colorist Lou Levinson when they worked together at Universal's HD Center. At LaserPacific, he most recently completed the DI for Black Dahlia, directed by Brian DePalma and shot by Vilmos Zsigmond.
DK: Black Dahlia had already been colored (at Post Logic) for previews. When you did the DI, did you start from scratch or use the preview version as a jumping-off point?
MS: Frank Roman had colored it for previews, and I did use it as the jumping-off point. The main thing that changed was the color space. It was originally timed in a 709 color space, and the version we switched to was P3, which is digital cinema color space. Because this is a digital cinema master, it theoretically won't be shown on a monitor, but on projectors set up for P3 color space.
My original job was going to be very simple – just to trim the movie to get it back to what it looked in the previews. Then Vilmos [Zsigmond, the cinematographer] came in and I made changes based on what he wanted to see now that he had a chance to go back through the movie again.
DK: What did Vilmos want in the grade?
MS: I worked with Vilmos for a week, and a lot of his changes were subtle. We spent a lot of time creating shadows and colors with power windows, for faces, walls, whatever. There were hot spots in the frames that he wanted to bring down, and track through the shot. Every shot was tweaked in some way. I don't think we let one scene go through without doing something – usually power windows and changing the density of the shot.
DK: What were the big challenges with Black Dahlia?
MS: I did a lot of building and tracking windows. There's a scene with pillars in the room with people walking through. I built power windows to bring down the light on the pillars, but then people were walking around the pillars, so I had to track and morph with those windows, so the people walking in front of the pillars weren't affected by the change in lighting.
DK: What gear did you use and how did it help you?
MS: Lustre. I couldn't have done the morphing and windowing and keying that I was doing on any other system that I know of. It's a software-based system, and Lustre gave me the ability to draw shapes for power windows. With hardware devices, you're limited to circles and squares. Here, I could draw any shape I wanted and soften the edges so it could blend. I could affect the luminance or a specific color, put plug-ins or effects within the shape. It seems limitless what I could do. I'm still learning things the box can do, and I love it.
DK: What should filmmakers know going into or preparing for a DI?
MS: They should know the digital color-timing process so they'll know what's possible. I've had some filmmakers come in that have only worked in color timing in a film lab. To a certain extent, that's what I'm doing, but I have to show a lot of these guys that I have the ability to do things. If they knew the tools available to them, the process would go quicker.