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Building Creative Trust with Colorist Jeffrey Chance

Tatjana Meirelles Penfold

February 04, 2025

Case Study

8 min read

Case Study

We recently chatted to Jeffrey Chance, a passionate colorist and educator, on nurturing client relationships, making sessions fun, and supporting a new generation of young filmmakers.

Can you tell us a bit about your background, how did you got started in the industry?

Ever since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to do film. I went to school for video art, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. I knew a little bit more about color grading than other students, so I started teaching my own classes on color grading on the side. When the chair of the film department found out, he went, “Jeffrey, that's illegal. You can't do that!” But he was very supportive, he said they could hire me to teach workshops. And that's how I paid for my tuition.

After college, I moved back to New York, started freelancing and then I joined Irving Harvey in 2022. I was a colorist there and that was probably the crux of grading for me, I learned so much from Matthew Greenberg and Sam Gursky. At Irving, we went from using Streambox to Louper. So when I set up my own studio, I used Louper too.

A director might work with, let's say, two colorists in a month if they have two projects. But you could work with two directors in a day. So your network needs to be bigger. How do you build those client relationships as a colorist?

I have so much gratitude for my time at Irving Harvey. The way Sam and Matt approached client relations is something that I now take everywhere: we're not doing brain surgery here, we're grading a film, so this should be fun. This should be light. Let's bring that to the grading session.

It's taught me a lot about client relations and the artistic side of things. If a client says: “I want this scene to look ‘poppy’”, it's really important to understand what they mean by ‘poppy’ and to navigate the predisposed notions of color that they're coming in with.

It's also taught me to be more assertive. We're working with so many people and that can bog down workflows… It's important to have one unified voice coming from their team so that we can give them exactly what they're looking for.

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I loved the Sherpa Crocs piece. It was so cool, really fun and cheeky!

Yeah! I work with the creative director, Thom Kerr, on a lot of projects. In a session he’ll say “Jeffrey make this look mad crunchy, but sexy” And I know exactly what he's saying because we have that relationship. He trusts me to make it artistically coherent and gorgeous.

It’s fun dissecting grades in terms of what a high-fashion client is looking for: we want a clean look, something that's not too degraded, something that's high key. Versus a narrative film, where the viewer will be invested longer, so those aesthetic qualities of a full print emulation can really come through .

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I can see that in the look you created for the Crossroads Church “Manifesto” film. The unexpected meeting of messages there was interesting too.

It was one of the most unexpectedly exciting projects I've worked on in so long. I'm personally not religious. I work on a lot of crazy, kooky things. But Jenny and the team were so amazing, trusting me to craft the look. We needed to create a juxtaposition between the aesthetic of the 1960’s Moon landing, and a gorgeous grounded feel to the contemporary footage. It was fun comparing the archival to the live footage side by side, and seeing where we're going too clean or where we're going too dirty.

But for both high-fashion and narrative projects, I approach it with a similar workflow: I always do the look development first. I used to use Frame for look setting, but now it's so much easier to do a remote session, and get the look-set done right there in the session. I take that time to communicate with the client, just to see where they are before before we start getting into the grade.

I've been using Louper simultaneously as a streaming platform and as a critical platform. So if a client needs a note on a specific area, they can easily just circle that area and then I can do the change there. The big crux in my workflow is that I want keep things simple for myself and for the client.

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Let’s look at AMG "Love Letter". What stood out for me is that the colors of the cars were unusual. How precious were they about those colors, or were you given free reign to kind of play around?

The creative ask was making sure that the footage had this beautiful, clean look, where our highlights were gloomy and really dramatic, but still had that cinematic edge. So that was really fun. There’s some intricate mask work to make sure that the color of specific cars were accurate. But outside of that, it was like “go go go”.

You also didn’t have to manage any skin tones! Does it change your approach if there are people in the project or not?

So for a car commercial that car is the visual focus, that's our hero. I approach it in a similar way where I'm assuring that all of my details pour toward that, so things that are meant to be consistent can be consistent. Especially with products, clients can be pretty intense on making sure that the product matches one-to-one. With humans, accuracy is more ambiguous because if someone's a little red, that could be a skin tone thing. They might just be more red, or subjectively, the client might just want them to look less red, so diagnosing which is which is a fun little game!

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In your KitchenAid spot, you were working with skin tone and product, where the color itself was the hero.

Yeah, that was another one with Thom. The important creative ask there was to make sure the costumes they're wearing match the KitchenAid product. And ensuring that those colors are accurate, but also keeping this sleek and gorgeous look. And then the ask from Thom was “Jeffrey, let's spice it up a little bit!” And that's always fun.

Can you talk about how you run your lives sessions?

My favorite part about Louper is it's really easy to set up a room and just send that email link. I normally keep Louper sessions to a 40-minute time limit. With high-fashion sessions and with commercial sessions, it's important for me to keep things moving as fast as possible, because if you don't, you can sometimes get caught in the weeds.

Clients are looking at this on their iPhones, their laptops, what have you. But I need them to have the trust in me, that this is graded with a color management system to give them the standards that they need. It looks good in a calibrated environment, everything else is outside of your control.

As a colorist you also need to trust the platform or device that you are engaging with, because these tools are your career, and you want to ensure that these tools are the right fit for you. It’s my responsibility to make sure that the agency can report confidently to the client. I have my reference monitor, and then on my laptop I have the Louper room open so I can see what they're seeing as well. Louper has that edge: in a live session you can give the agency final confirmation that these colors are accurate. I think that's only helped my career longevity because once the agency folk are happy, they keep coming back. They know they can trust me with a project.

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In many ways, you were lucky to get started when you did, while people were still working together in office spaces. It must be quite hard for anyone coming out of college now, with so many people working remote.

I'm really lucky because I was making good money teaching, so I was able to afford the tools I needed for this career. But those tools are very, very expensive. The cost of a reference monitor is the cost of getting your foot in the door.

My big thing now, is accessibility.

I still teach workshops to the masters of fine art students at MICA. And I tell them how important interactivity is to working in this industry. Everyone in the MFA class is their tribe: some of them want to be directors, colorists, sound engineers… So these are the people you will be working with. It's early steps like that, that build and build and build. You cannot come up just by yourself anymore. It takes a village, more now than ever.

Jeffrey Chance is a colorist based in New York, he’s been using Louper since 2022. Check out Jeff’s work at jchancecolors.com

Projects featured in this story, in order of appearance: Lil Nas X - Sherpa Crocs. CrossRoads Church - Manifesto. Mercedes Benz - AMG Love Letter. Kitchen Aid - Color of the Year. Fujifilm - The Promise of Spring.

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