On Hope4NC, DP and Colorist Tim Snider used Louper to livestream his agency reviews, saving the team time and building relationships in the process.

Tim - you've had a really diverse career, can you share a bit of your journey with us?

I came from a tech background - I studied computer science and started a company with a couple of guys in the late 90s. It did really well, we ended up selling it and I just decided to do something different. I felt like film production was kind of a calling and I wanted to learn it. I’m basically self-taught, I just went to a lot of conferences, read books, made a lot of mistakes over 23 years! I had a production company and we did all kinds of branded content, worked for a lot of great clients. And I sold it to an ad agency and went to work for them for about a year. Now I’ve started again with Snider Films.

Do you feel like the industry has changed over the last few years?

I think there has been a shift from larger productions to smaller productions. It seems like most companies are looking to do more with less. If you can be someone that can deliver high quality in more than one area, I think that gives you a leg up. The thing that always confounded me was color. I realized that that was a mountain I needed to climb, I needed to get better at it. I went down that rabbit-hole and practiced, watched everything I could on YouTube. I became obsessed with color. Now I color every day. 

Stills from 'XtremeAG' documentary.

And since doing more coloring yourself, has it changed the way you shoot?

Yes, it absolutely has. I now think more about art direction, about complementary colors, and the way a shot is going to come together. I know what I can and can't do with windowing, controlling exposure, pushing cameras in a specific direction. It makes me want to shoot with cameras that give the most color information possible, to give me the most options in post. So yeah, it has definitely affected the way I shoot.

You've shot a number of documentaries with farmers, fishermen, ordinary people going about their everyday work.

Yeah, I love the documentary world, I really do. I like telling people's stories, capturing the candid moments. I think documentaries have an opportunity to move people, to help people understand the world, to clarify or change an opinion on something. I think that's what really drew me into the business in the first place. The commercial world is fun in a different way - it's a piece of art and you're really solving a business problem for that agency or that client. That's fun too, especially when you have a happy client, and when you have a piece of work that you're happy with. But there's some kind of satisfaction that comes from the documentary world that is just different.

Stills from 'The Bay' documentary.

Let's look at your most recent project, Hope4NC. Can you tell me about the history of this piece?

Hope4NC is really an effort led by the Department of Health and Human Services in North Carolina. Hurricane Helene was a huge disaster here in North Carolina and people are still picking up the pieces. Lives were changed forever. The hurricane dumped 100-year-flood-type rains in the western mountains of North Carolina and it just destroyed businesses, homes, 108 people lost their lives. So it's been a huge recovery effort for our state and this was an opportunity to help participate in this effort, to let people know that if you're still struggling, there's hope. The Department wants to assist people looking for mental health help, financial help or food help. It was a real privilege to get to work on it.

Still from 'Hope4NC'

At what point did you come onboard?

The ad agency for the Department of Health and Human Services is Avenir Bold. They’re a great agency in Raleigh, North Carolina and I've had a relationship with them for several years now. They reached out to me and I helped set the approach and film the project, and then came back and dialed in the color.

Were there any aspects of the job that were particularly challenging?

Yeah, we were shooting on a day that was super hot, we were in a small house, it was one continuous shot. There were a lot of technical challenges there. We wanted to haze the room, but it was so hot and the air conditioning just kept recycling the haze so we couldn't get it to be constant. We had to nix the hazer so that production team and the client would be comfortable, then I just used the Light Rays effect in post. So when you see the final product, there was some of that there.

We used a 14-foot speed rail, the longest length that you can utilize, with an underslung dolly on a Mitchell offset. We decided to put the video into the television in post, so there was the technical challenge of tracking a screen onto something for so long, that you eventually shift focus away from it. So there was a lot of manual tracking of key frames once focus shifts away from that television to our person sitting in the room. Then it was just dialing in the color that really represented the mood of the piece. I wanted the viewer to feel the despondent, hopeless side of the person we're seeing in the shot. And so when I was creating the color, that is the feeling I was trying to convey.

Behind the scenes on the 'Hope4NC' shoot.

How important were live Louper sessions for this project?

I can't say enough about Louper. Most of the people in this industry are freelancers, right? And if you're a small boutique shop and you do color or editing, you can't always have the client with you in the room. My studio is about 90 miles from the agency, and even within the agency the senior art director lives in another city and works from home. And in this particular edit, there was a lot of nuance around the timing of sound design, the music levels, all things that you really want to be in the same room for. 

In the past, I'd have to take a stab at it, put a revision up on Frame.io, let them review it, and then you're playing this tennis match where you're constantly back and forth with cuts. You're talking about very small changes in music or voiceover timing, because it's an emotional piece and all of those things are subjective. And we were on a fairly short timeframe to get it delivered.

Louper allowed us to be in the same room together. It reduced what would have taken us a week to do, down to a few hours, because we could adjust timing and I could play it back, we could adjust color and I could play it back. The agency was super happy that we had this workflow where we're just working together seamlessly. It's a great piece of technology and I'm thankful that you all developed it.

Had you tried other platforms in the past?

I love Blackmagic, I'm a huge DaVinci Resolve fan, but their remote monitoring software just didn't work for me. And it required the client to download a piece of software to run it. Whereas with Louper, you just send them a link and start streaming. There are other solutions out there, they're just a lot more expensive. And I'm just a single guy - it doesn't make sense for me to pay that kind of money. Louper's pricing is very friendly, with the different tiers of plans.

I even started moving stuff from Frame.io over to Louper, just to go through the review process all in one platform. Once we were done editing live, I would get off the call, make a final version of that, upload it to Louper, and then share that with the agency to review. They could pass that on to other people and get more feedback or comments, download it. It’s great that the feature is there. And I know that other features are coming, like version stacking. I look forward to seeing that there as well.

Still from 'Hope4NC'

What is your current setup with DaVinci Resolve and Louper?

I'm running Nobe OmniScope for scopes, as a lot of colorists do. Nobe will send out a signal via NDI and then that goes to LDE. Then I also have a stream deck and I mapped a couple of hotkeys to be able to switch between scenes in LDE. So I can switch to the user interface in Resolve so the client can actually see what I'm doing and see the changes I'm making on the timeline. And then I just hit a button and that goes back to the actual signal. That was the techie nerd in me coming out!

That's great. Not everyone realizes that you can set up multiple scenes. It's so useful.

Yeah, I like being able to switch scenes. So when you're watching a cut, you're sending them the signal from your card. Then when they have a suggestion, I like the ability to switch and show them my GUI so that they can see what I'm doing. I think that helps them stay engaged, the senior art director was really impressed by that as well.

In this industry, we’re all pressed for time. By taking the back and forth out of the equation, and just having them join me in the room, we were able to grow the relationship on this project. There's nothing more important than making your client happy and making them feel involved in the process. I wish I'd had this years ago. It would have been great.

Hope4NC Public Service Announcement

Client: North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

Agency: Avenir Bold

Director: Scott Scaggs

Writer: Joe Tolley

DP, Editor, Colorist: Tim Snider

Gaffer: Matt Hedt

Producer: Cindy Snider

Tim Snider is a director, producer, DP and colorist based in North Carolina. He used Louper to livestream his color and edit sessions from DaVinci Resolve. 

You can stream from DaVinci Resolve to your Louper Room using LDE, Louper's Desktop Encoder, to pick up either a signal loop from your Blackmagic Hardware, or an NDI output via Nobe Display.