Light of Day's Natalie Wollmann Sees Things in a Different Light
The Light of Day colorist, one of the few women working in the craft, explains what's so appealing about the many-hued world of color grading.
Light of Day's Natalie Wollmann Sees Things
in a Different Light
One of the few women in the profession, the Light of Day
colorist says that it takes a special breed of person to
thrive in the isolating world of color grading.
It's a man's world, James Brown once sang. He might have been referring to the world of post production and visual effects, where many of the industry's best known artists are men.
There are exceptions, of course; women are well-represented in the craft of creative editorial, and there's a good representation of women managing some of the top post houses in the US and abroad.
But when it comes to the role of the colorist – that highly subjective, finely-attuned ability to look at an image and almost intuitively sense what hues and shades will work best to serve the story – women are hard to find.
At Light of Day, the New York-based visual effects studio founded last year by Managing Director Amy Taylor, Creative Director Colin Stackpole, Creative Director of Development Charles Nordeen and Senior Smoke Artist Josh Williams, you can find one of the few women colorists working in the business today. That would be Natalie Wollmann, who joined the studio earlier this year and has since lent her finely-tuned color grading expertise to work for such brands as Miller Beer, Van Cleef & Arpels and the Express apparel line. Before joining LOD she graded work for clients like Pantene, Volkswagen, Pepsi, Toyota, Nokia and Chevrolet.
The colorist got her start in the industry in her native Germany. Well-schooled, she holds university degrees in English, German, math, physics and fine art. She held her first art exhibition at the age of 16, and at 17 a short art film she made won the Bavarian Film Prize. She cites as one of her mentors Touria Arafat, her boss at Bavaria Film Postproduction in Munich, who gave Wollmann her start as a colorist. "Not only did she believe in me," Wollmann says, "she also supported me on a lot of levels with her advice and knowledge."
Wollmann was also mentored by the world-renowned colorist Frank Doerken and trained under Kevin Shaw, the London colorist whom she describes as "inspirational."
SourceEcreative recently talked with Wollmann about the subtle nuances of what it takes to be a successful colorist and whether her being a woman has any impact on how she approaches her role in the post production process. Excerpts of that conversation follow.
You may be the only female colorist working in New York. Why are so few women drawn to this profession?
There are several reasons. A lot of people don't know about this profession, first off. And it's a very technically intensive practice that demands understanding of complex equipment. Colorists need an incredible knowledge about the systems and equipment that they work with, and this is really challenging, not only for women. Only when you've mastered the technical aspects of this can you start being creative with your equipment and fully utilize it. You have to be confident and mature about what you do to be really good, to break rules and cross borders, but only if you're aware of what you're doing. Because it might not work on the next scene, and then you're screwed.
But more to the point, usually women are very social, communicative people, and the job of a colorist is not a teamwork job. It's a very introverted job, where you have to master the machine on your own, as well as the clients. After all, the role women play in parts of the media industry isn't all that good. How many female DPs are out there? Or how many female directors or screenwriters do you know? It's a tough industry, and you have to prove yourself with the job every single time. The pressure is high, and I guess not a lot of people, neither men nor women, are cut out for it. You have to like spending days sitting in a dark room manipulating colors!
And yet, this job is perfect for me. It continues to blow my mind and surprise me as I work to improve the beauty of films.
Is there any particular sensibility or aesthetic you bring to your job as a woman that might differ from what a male colorist delivers?
Let me explain how I start a session, maybe that will answer your question: If time allows it, I try to "play" with the material as I prepare the job. That means looking at the footage, trying different gradings to connect with the material, testing borders, etc. Then the clients arrive and I listen to them. I believe I am in the fortunate position of having a very fine-tuned understanding of other people and what they want: to feel or sense how I can achieve their goals for them. Dealing with colors is a very emotional, deeply subconscious metaphysical power, and you have to try to balance between the light frequency at which the material was shot, the frequency of what the client has in mind and your own understanding of how to manipulate the material to get the best and most clean image possible.
My personal preferences are always very cold tones, preferable white skin tones with a hint of blue, and some other isolated, popping colors. But this is a "look" which does not always serve the purpose of the film. So at the end of day, the goal is achieving the best look for the commercial or film, where you only feel its excellence, yet don't notice all the effort or the intense colors that were tweaked or graded.
What's a typical day like in the life of a colorist?
It always starts the same way. Either I or my assistant will load the color prep into the Lustre. Light of Day is an entirely Autodesk-based company, which provides an easy and very sophisticated workflow, since all the machines communicate with one another.
Then the fun begins: I work with wonderful creatives from the best agencies in the world. They come in and sit down in the dark room and share their vision for their commercials. I listen to them and, based on their input, try and discern a look for the commercial. It is very exciting and inspiring to be working with innovative people, and I love the conversations we have and taking the thoughts of my clients and turning them into reality.
If there are days without clients – which doesn't happen very often – I usually spend my time experimenting with the Lustre to improve my creative skills. Especially with the new plug-ins available, there is an entirely new color universe to explore. It opens the doors to amazing creative grading opportunities which need to be tested and explored before I use them on regular jobs.
How is color correction – now referred to more commonly as color grading – evolving from a creative standpoint?
It took us 80 years to get from the first three-strap colored movie to the tremendous, almost infinite possibilities we have today. Engineers are constantly working on improving and developing new tools to work with and enhance our creative possibilities.
Actually, real color grading as we know it now is less than 25 years old. Before that, it was (and still is) mainly used for correcting and balancing the shots of the sequences in a film. Yet the work we're capable of doing today is so much more diverse and exciting than it was in the past, and more challenging at the same time.
To be honest, I think a lot of clients out there don't use the full creative capacity of color grading. I wish they would take a little bit more time to explore together with the colorist their options for outstanding color grading. If they do, their work will stand out like an exceptional piece of artwork in the TV jungle.
There are quite a few women editors, but few women in visual effects. Do you feel more women will pursue careers in this field? Or will color grading and effects remain a male-dominated side of the industry?
Looking back over the last decade, I happen to see more and more women entering the post production world on the level of an operator/ artist, and I hope that there's going to be more in the future. However, the entire media and production industry is a male-dominated field, and women have to work twice as hard to get real recognition.
I have graded over 3,000 commercials, a couple of feature films and maybe a hundred TV series episodes, yet I've only met and worked professionally with two female DPs and three female directors
In the area of coloring, women might have an advantage over men. Normally, people have three types of cone cells for daylight, for detecting different colors. (Cone cells are photoreceptor cells in the retina of the eye that are responsible for color vision.) But some women (not men) can see extra colors, as they have four types of cone cell receptors. They are called tetrachromats. Compared to them, everybody else is color blind. Since only women seem to have this genetic mutation, I guess perhaps the future of colorists lies in the eyes of the women!
At the end of the day, to make it in this industry you have to be exceptionally good at your job. I believe that we all profit from the synergy of working together and enlightening one another, and doing the best we can to produce excellent work, no matter whether we are male or female.
Published 3 July, 2012
Membership
