We spoke to colorist Colin Travers about his recent work for Spindrift Soda and Good Culture, and how DaVinci’s latest tools are transforming what’s possible in a color session.

Can you tell us where you’re based, and what your setup currently looks like?

I'm in a home studio in Brooklyn, in South Slope. I'm running on a Mac, using DaVinci Resolve and Louper for live sessions. I mostly work on commercials right now, but I've done features, documentaries and music videos. Here Alone and Welcome to Pine Hill are two films I’ve done. Those are more portfolio pieces, things that your name's on forever, right? Commercials are my bread and butter, but I would like more opportunities to do feature films. You just have to finish them at a facility with the correct viewing environment. You get up to a certain point of review and then there's usually a few days of reviewing in a theater, in my experience with films.

With feature films, you have more time to get into a look – the viewer is really being immersed in the world that you're creating.

Absolutely. I still have to create looks and worlds on the commercial end too, but the deadlines are shorter. You have a day or two, and the feedback loop is quicker. But I do absolutely love doing music videos and films as well. So I hope to do more of those.

Let’s look at the Spindrift Soda campaign. It's got such a lovely refreshing feel. Can you talk about the team that you worked with?

The agency was Working Assembly. They reached out and sent a PDF treatment with the shot list and references of what it would look like. They specified up front that they wanted live supervised-remote sessions.

I had photos from set to match to: the campaign wasn’t just the video, they also took stills for a variety of advertising uses, so I could work to that. But these are photoshopped images from a 50 megapixel DSLR. It’s always a challenge when you're matching to stills. You're stretching the image quite a bit to match what’s been shot and then Photoshopped stunningly by a top retouch artist, no pressure!

Then they also sent me the Pantone values and the RGB values, so I was really digging into each can and drawing mattes. And there's more than one shade of orange on that orange can, so how do I grasp each of these hues of that color and affect its density or level of saturation? So this also involved DaVinci's ColorSlice tool, which is a newer tool. And that helps you deal with the density of a color and its saturation in a different way. It's just different maths in how it's affecting color. It can give you the cinematic reds like you would get in old films. It’s a very deep, dark red, whereas with video cameras now, it's just like popping, saturated… it doesn't have that same density.

I think we got to like version eight or nine, with changes on certain shots. Sometimes it was just  the stream of the liquid, like “everything’s great but can you individually control the stream of the liquid?”. It was certainly challenging, but it was fun.

They were the type of client that wanted to talk about it and scrub through the file themselves. They loved reviewing files in a room, because they could control the playback and they could draw on the file and write on it. And they were like, “wow, this is like Frame, but we're live”. So that was kind of cool. And then we hopped between the live stream to do the tweaks, and then I’d post another file and we’d go over it together in our Presentation room. And that was the workflow: jumping between live stream and files and review links.

You know, once they were a little acclimated to using Louper, they were really comfortable using Presentation Rooms and Review Links.

As a colorist, it's so important to manage the mood in the room and keep people feeling positive and inspired. How do you keep that energy up?

I just try to be upbeat. Most people have their cameras off and muted and I'll do the same, they're looking at emails and put the phone or an iPad to the side with Louper going in the background. And so I'll just unmute myself and say, “whenever you get a second guys, if you want to hop back in”. Keeping it lighthearted, obviously you try to make it fun and a good experience.

And I think trusting the equipment you're using, trusting that it's color accurate is part of it: you need to set them up for success. I recommend they review in one place - either just on an iPhone or iPad or just on a laptop. I’ll ask them to turn off True Tone, put their brightness about halfway. I try to do that all before, to make sure that they feel comfortable and that it looks like what they've been reviewing up to that point.

A lot of times I start by sending off some stills based on the references they gave me. Or they might just want to jump on a kickoff call. And then when it's time to review live, maybe after the first round of stills or something, I just send them the link to the Louper room.

What is the balance between hosting remote live sessions and working fully remote, where you're sending links and getting comments back? Do you still do in-person sessions?

It's mostly remote for me. I still do in-person, but it's maybe once or twice a quarter at most. And if it's in-person, it's because I'm coming to their calibrated environment; or as a freelancer, I’m booked to work at a boutique color grading studio.

The majority of my work is just reviewing asynchronously, using Review Links. So live-supervised sessions is maybe 30 percent of my workflow right now.

I like less back and forth. I do miss sitting with people and working in an office with other creatives. And I hope to get back to more of that. I think to be doing episodic and feature work, you definitely are at more of a facility with some infrastructure, and a certain level of assistance.

How did you hear about Louper, and what were the main reasons you decided to subscribe?

With my previous streaming platform, I had jobs with a big room of clients where no one could connect, because there were firewalls in the agency blocking the live stream, and it didn't look good. In that instance, the work-around was sharing my screen in Zoom, which is totally not color accurate. I can't have that happen.

Some colleagues I follow, like Matt West and Calvin Bellas, had spoken about Louper. So I picked both of their brains really quick, just on Instagram chat, like “what is your experience?”. They had nothing but good things to say.

So I went with Louper - I needed a solution where clients could join with just a click. Clients don’t want to create an account, they don’t want to download an app. There was a bit of back and forth in the beginning for me, but I found the LUT in LDE helped get the look right. And really, it paid for itself immediately, just in the first job. It was a no-brainer.

Let’s look at the Good Culture spot… the colors here are such a hero in the piece. What kind of brief did you get for this job?

The agency was &Walsh, they also had Photoshopped stills from the campaign, so the ask was really matching to looks that were taken and molded on set.

Sometimes clients just tell you “we want it to be bright and fun, go crazy with it” and you get to create your own looks. That's fun too. But I guess the scientist in me is a bit nerdy and I love being like, “here's what we shot and here’s how we matched to it”. It can be challenging though. Depending on the lighting or the way they shot it – how easy it is to match can vary.

I can imagine. You’ve got strong color backdrops, but you're also working with skin tones and you’ve got the product in there too.

For sure. I was fighting a lot of bounce from the backgrounds, there was blue spilling onto skin on some shots. I used tools like Depth Map. That's a tool in DaVinci that helps you separate the foreground character from the background if you can't pull a key, because maybe they're wearing red and the background is red too and they're moving quite a bit. You don't have time to roto’ it out, you’re there just to color and they don't have a matte to provide you from VFX. So that was a tool I used on this job to separate some of those same colors and not affect skin tone. I also use Magic Mask, another tool in DaVinci, to mask some difficult to grab elements.

I was also given some Pantone colors. So in DaVinci, I put in the RGB values and create solids to A/B against my gallery. Like, is that yellow of the product label the same yellow? And then there's things moving past it, so some stuff's got a shadow and there's a bit of back and forth with the client and the ad agency about what hues and colors can we attack and what would I need an elaborate VFX mat from a flame artist to do. And often you just don't have the time or budget for that. So there’s some negotiation that has to go on too, to be able to reach enough of the desired look and color without making other things look bad, basically. So having a live way to quickly get approvals on these adjustments and avoid more back and forth was a critical part of this job for sure. And Louper gave me the confidence to be able to do that. And the client, everyone loved it. They were like: “Louper’s all in one? Nice!”.

Are there any fashions or trends in color that you've picked up on?

Yeah, I think deeper blacks, like really good contrast is back, which I'm enjoying. But also the ability to still see things in those shadows with some of the higher-end displays that we have access to now. I think that's only going to improve as more more colorists have access to HDR tools. Other color trends beyond deep, rich shadows are more filmic looks, and really embracing more texture. And I think the tools that we're using are also getting better and better to be able to see detail in those shadows and eke out more information.

The tools that I was using on both of these jobs weren't available three or four years ago. So that's also a big change. The level of control that you can now have in a color application like Resolve, allows you to do some bigger, heavier lifting in color grading, whereas before you needed more VFX mattes. Some of that stuff I'm now able to do. Not all of it, we certainly still need VFX, and I still work often with VFX departments that are using Flame or After Effects and Nuke. That's not going away, if anything, it’s improving the communication between these programs. Some of the open format language has just become available, with DaVinci now able to work with Nuke and Flame a little bit better. So I think between that, increased Internet speeds and these live remote options, it's just going to continue to evolve. Being able to do this more efficiently and confidently, since upgrading to Louper, has been a game changer for me for sure.

Colin Travers is a freelance colorist based in South Slope, Brooklyn.

Check out his site to view the Good Culture and Spindrift spots, as well as his long-form projects.

Colin uses Louper to livestream DaVinci Resolve color sessions.

Visit our Docs site to view detailed setup guides for color workflows. Colin uses a conversion LUT in his workflow, find out how to add a LUT to LDE here.

Still images from:

Spindrift - A Real Modern Soda. Agency: The Working Assembly

Good Culture - The Obsession is Real. Agency: &Walsh