Color Grading Animation with Seasoned Colorist John Daro

Welcome to the Color Time Podcast.

I am your host, Vincent Taylor.

This is the show where we chat to professionals

who work with color.

Today I'm speaking to

season colorist, John Daro.

Seasoned, he's not, he makes him sound old.

He's younger than me, but

he's been in this industry

for a long time and has

worked on some incredible projects.

I really want to chat to him

about working with animation

because he's done some amazing projects.

And I find that a bit of a dark art, so let's go.

Take your seats because the

Hourglass is about to turn.

We are entering the world of the micro podcast.

Explore the craft,

creativity, and science of professionals

who use color to tell stories.

Welcome to the Color Timer with Vincent Taylor.

John, hi, thanks for joining me.

Hey Vincent, how's it going, man?

Good man, you look like you're doing your

satanic worship in that dark darkness.

I live in the dark, this is all I ever see.

Don't take me out into the sun.

I have bumped into you a

number of times at different events

and I keep threatening to get you on the podcast

and I've been true to my threats.

So welcome, I said to you off mic,

I don't actually have specific stuff

I want to talk to you about.

I want to talk to you about everything.

But before I get in trouble with myself,

I'm gonna start my sand timer

to get the game show happening.

And I've got a question for you.

You're gonna love this one as an icebreaker.

And try not to think about

it too much before you answer.

Just go knee jerk if you can.

It's a nasty one.

What would you say is one

of the most beautiful things

you've ever seen?

Oh, sunset, Pismo Beach, done.

Wow.

That was easy.

Wow.

Wow, and was there a specific sunset?

It was up there for my birthday

and it was just one of those ones

where it was like perfectly clear

and you watch that sun just

disappear over the horizon

and it's just stunning.

There's nothing better than that.

That's life really.

Like that's like--

Yeah, it is right.

Yeah, and doing the rural moments.

Do you, you know, in nature and things like that,

you're a colorist, man, you're a colorist.

So you're looking at colors all the time.

Are you conscious of that?

Are you, do you kind of go outside of yourself

when you see something like a sunset

and you go, oh, look at the graduation of that

or look at that, or not really?

Do you just kind of soak it up?

It depends, in that moment, no,

you got to be in the moment, right?

But then there's some times

where I had this one client

and he kept getting on my case

for having the skies too magenta, right?

And I remember I was taking out the trash

and another sunset happening.

I looked at the sky and I took a picture

and I sent to him, I said, hey, magenta sky.

So sometimes, yeah, of course,

you do think about these things.

But you try not to, right?

You try just to, especially

if you see something beautiful,

try to be in the moment.

I had a mentor once that,

this was when I was editing a lot.

And he said, you know, you've matured as an editor

when you can just watch a film

and don't have that inner

dialogue in your head thinking,

oh, that was a nice cut, or,

oh, that bumped a little bit.

Yeah. So I think there's two modes

that you can oscillate in

and you kind of need to live in both.

Yeah, I find, because folks ask me that,

they say, oh, do you notice color grades in films?

And I tend to notice them

if I'm not enjoying the film.

Like if I'm not in the film, you know?

I just work with the work that no one notices.

Yeah, yeah.

There's exceptions to that where you,

I went to see the Joker film the other week

and I did really enjoy it actually.

But there was moments there where I'm going,

oh man, that looks so beautiful.

There was moments where I

just wanted to dive into it.

Your career, I was stalking you

and I was looking at all the things you worked on.

You worked on so many things.

And I did want to talk to you about animation,

about, I've probably only graded maybe one or two

animation pieces in my whole life

and they were really, really small.

But I wanted to talk to you about how you approach

an animated project versus a live action project

and the differences or the similarities.

Sure, I mean, I think that the first thing

to talk about there is like, that's my home, right?

My father was in

animation, you know, so growing up,

the very first thing I ever did in this business

was he brought home a cell

and we painted it together.

Right, and I was like, I like this, this is fun.

And then from that, I remember him taking me

to a telecine session

where they would get the film back

from the animation studio

and they would bring it in.

And they'd have to tweak the color

because you have a bunch of animators

and nothing exactly matches.

And I remember walking into the telecine bay

and looking at that going,

it looks like Starship Enterprise.

That's what I want to do.

Wow.

And I also remember going,

you can have whatever you want for lunch,

like whatever you want.

It's like, yeah, you can get whatever,

I'll have a hamburger.

But I thought that was very, very, very slick.

So, you know, it being the family business,

I think that I'm predisposed

to being able to, you know,

talk the talk, speak the jargon.

But also if you think about color grading

and what we do often,

and I'm not talking about just setting a base look,

but the nitty gritty of it, the tracking shapes,

setting keyframes, doing dynamics to connect things

so that they don't bump editorially.

A lot of that goes back to

those original dope sheets

that I'd watched my dad doing on the kitchen table,

where he'd be, you know, he'd have the audio track

and he would, you know,

reverse forward, reverse forward,

and basically be timing out the animation.

So like, okay, this is gonna take six frames.

And he'd be just setting the keyframes

and he'd send it off to the in-betweeners

and they would build the animation.

It's not a whole lot

different than what we do right now,

where we have mattes and we're tracking them

and we're, you know, enhancing certain areas,

making certain areas recede,

we're setting those keyframes and then saying,

All right, computer, you're the in-betweener.

Figure out between these

keyframes what it would do.

So I think that it was a really good foundation

for me, you know, growing up.

It's funny, because it was something

I used to be embarrassed of.

You never wanted to be a Nepo baby,

but now in my older age, I'm like,

"No, that was the best upbringing,

"the best childhood I could have possibly had."

Yeah.

So, you know--

That specific memory though,

that you started just a moment ago,

that's beautiful, man.

That is so lovely. No doubt, no doubt.

You know, and it's funny too,

because the big ones that I remember of him

were Heathcliff and then the Ninja Turtles.

So being a child of the 80s,

having your dad work on Ninja Turtles,

that was pretty cool.

Every single Ninja Turtle

toy you could ever imagine,

all I wanted was like a Transformer, a GI Joe,

but no, no, it's always just

the free ones from the studio.

But, you know, to your

point about grading animation

versus live action, the two big things is,

live action, you're working with the DP,

you're setting a look,

you're setting a vibe, right?

Typically in animation, that stuff has been done

by the art director very early on,

and it's been a three year process.

So they've been living with this.

So it's more about getting the tires

like the ones on their car, right?

I just want tires like the ones on my car,

please just get me to what

I've been seeing for so long.

So one tip that I can recommend is,

if you can start early on and make sure

that you're part of the calibration process,

make sure you're part of the color pipeline process

so that everybody is on the same page.

So there are no surprises when you get to final DI.

I think that's step number

one and very, very critical.

I think the other thing is,

if you can work with the animation studio

and get the matte packs in an efficient way,

make sure that you're

consistent with the matte naming

so that it's easy to throw

grades, easy to organize.

One thing that we do on almost every animation show

is we take the key characters

and we give them categories, right?

So then we can sort in the Baselight,

show me all of the shots of this character

and make sure they're all consistent

throughout the entire process.

But then you start taking some live action

that maybe is heavy visual effects based, right?

And you have all of those

mattes and it's photo realistic,

but it's still done in a computer.

If you think about it, it's

photo realistic animation.

So when I'm talking about like a heavy VFX film,

there's not a whole lot of

difference between those two.

But I think that the other thing

that from the live action side,

there's color grading and there's color correction.

You don't really have as much color correction

and animation as you do in live action.

You don't get a cloud and animation that comes by

and makes everything a little desaturated and dark.

And you have to fight that a little bit.

So I think that there are differences,

but at the end of the day, it's still the same.

You're still trying to tell stories in both.

And you just want to make sure that nothing bumps

and that everything is consistent

and that it's beautiful, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And this is, I'm gonna prefix

it with, excuse my ignorance,

but in my brain, I kind of see, okay,

they've designed the shot of

the scene and the animation,

they put the colors in, they put everything in.

Isn't it how it should be?

Why do you have to then

mess with it on top of that?

Because you never done, Vincent, you're never done.

You just run out of time.

So even the art directors

and the directors of the animated films, right?

there's always something that

could have been better, right?

And that's really what finishing is.

This is the last step before

it goes out into the world.

So if you think of it from that point of view,

often it's, well, what

didn't you get in that render?

Tell me your deepest desire, right?

Maybe I can do it, maybe I

can't, but let's take a crack.

Do you got five minutes? Let's try to spend.

I remember a few animated films.

Often there was the director was saying

that the main character was too angular, right?

Too harsh, right?

And I don't know if that was the lighting

or if it was built into the model,

but one of the things that we went ahead and did

was we started to take that

and using the texture blend

in Baselight, basically blur part of the image,

composite it on top, right?

And then take certain

frequencies and knock them back.

And then at that point,

then you're tracking the face

and comping that back on top.

So in a weird way, it's like the final composite.

Yeah. Yeah.

I was something stuck in my

head about color correction

versus grading.

So for something like, you

know, you've got a Scooby-Doo movie

and you've got Shaggy's

shirt or something like that,

which is X color.

Would that be then consistent

and you wouldn't have to

worry about getting that same tone

or do you still have to?

You hope it is, right?

But the thing is that, again, you

have many different animators working on it.

And if you think about--

there's 2D animation, right?

And then there's 3D animation.

And 3D animation really kind

of works to the same physics

that normal, traditional live action works.

You have lighting.

That lighting is bouncing off

various things in the scene.

That light then bounces onto a shaggy shirt.

And then it bounces back to the virtual camera.

So there are things that will cause it to be what

we call off model, right? So here's

the model. This is what Shaggy shirt color is. This

needs to be the same across the board,

but you also want it to be integrated in the

environment. So you do have correction to

do to make sure that, you know, these characters,

these iconic characters that we've lived with

for, you know, 50, 60 years still represent as

themselves, but are also integrated into

the story that you're telling into the environment

that they're playing in, in that particular scene.

This is a question I ask a lot because I get

overwhelmed sometimes when a project starts.

Where do you start? So sticking in the world of

animation, what's, what's the first step

for John Daro?

I think it's different for

different, different projects, right?

Obviously, the best thing,

And I know that this is beating a dead horse

because everyone says this, but start, start

super early.

It starts in pre-production, right?

Whether it's an animated show

or if it's a live action show.

If it's a live action show, you're starting with

hair and makeup tests, usually lens tests,

that kind of thing.

And you start to build the look

with the director of photography.

And how I tend to do it,

is I have a web page that

we start with V1 look, right?

Typically, if it's like a film look, let's say,

you start with a pretty generic Kodak or Fuji

or something that's pretty standard,

and then you build from there, right?

If it's in animation, you

kind of tend to work in ACES

just because it's easy,

and if you have a lot of different animation houses

working on the same

project, it's really simple to say,

Hey, everybody work with this set.

It's built into most

software. Everybody's on board.

So from there, you can start

to build that color pipeline,

and that's really critical to get that early on.

In animated shows, I'll typically,

on the ones especially through the studio,

I'll be involved in the lighting reviews,

and that was very, very critical

because you can get a lot of work done upfront

and save time on the backend, right,

by making those corrections in that render

before it comes out.

Another really useful thing, this is back in the

days of 3D, it's not so important anymore

because we don't tend not to do stereo films as

much as we used to. But if you see something like

a lens flare and you say that could be a problem,

make sure that that is the same in each eye so

that you don't get retinal conflict.

Catching that kind of stuff

early is obviously a benefit.

With the live action, then

we get into dailies, right?

And I'll usually supervise the first week of

dailies, make sure that everybody's on

the same page, and also work with the studio to

make sure it's like, no, it's okay.

This is going to be a...

It's dark on the dailies, but don't worry.

We built in a stop down under the LUT.

Here, if we take this off,

look, you have a ton of range.

It's a very thick neck.

You got everything you need.

It's okay.

Totally, right?

Yeah.

And then once that's rolling,

then I kind of disappear for a bit, right?

Right.

Right.

Right.

Gets into editorial sometimes, you know,

in editorial there'll be some things,

hey, can you send this one scene?

Can you just make sure that this is,

can you smooth this out and send it back?

Just to make sure that the edits kind of are happy

and that they're gonna get

what they want in the final.

So we'll go through that.

We'll do preview versions,

especially for, you know, audience reaction,

that kind of thing.

It's usually a very quick pass that we'll hit

maybe a day or two.

One thing that I like working on the Baselight

is being able to take that and, you know,

back in the day, you used to throw away that work,

but if you can convert

that into your working space,

a lot of that work can track to the final.

So that's a benefit that's--

I missed that or I zoned out.

What do you mean by that?

Okay, so like, for example, like, you know,

15 years ago or so, right,

you get these preview versions,

but you're working in 709, you know,

off of like a typical like, well, OMF Avid output.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, nowadays we can kind of convert that,

put it into the working space.

You might not have the range, but you sometimes

will reconform and actually match the edit

and be tracking that

through to make a preview version.

But in doing that process, if you can do as much

upfront that will get to the final, that's

obviously the best move, right?

Because you don't want to just do work that is for

a one-off screening and then throw

it away, right?

Everything should always be

gaining towards that final.

Every minute that you spend should be going towards

the direction of the director and

DP want to get to at the end.

And if you're putting in the work, if you can track

that all the way through, that's

a huge benefit.

And then you get to the final grade and then

everything from that point, hopefully you

kind of had made a lot of those decisions upfront

where it's sitting in a nice spot

that everyone agrees on.

And if you can get that balance done very quickly,

then you can get to the what I call

like the icing on the cake, the tweezing pass, the

stuff that's really value add, sharpening

eyes, working on bringing out key story moments and

enhancing certain elements.

Maybe there's a color value that is kind of like a

character and you can kind of start

to work that through and build a theme.

And all of that work goes on

top of that initial balance.

So the faster you can get to that point, I think

the better value add is there.

Yeah.

You mentioned 3D and how

it's not as common anymore.

I mean, are you still doing 3D passes or?

We do.

We do.

It's typically for

international markets these days.

And you know, that's a it's a

shame because I'm a big fan, right?

I think that-- Oh, you are?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now that was early days, I

was early money on the 3D game.

But I think that going forward,

we're gonna be more headset driven like HMD,

Vision Pro, or even augmented reality

as far as the stereo work goes.

So I think that for the theatrical experience,

it's still huge, it just

never really took off in the home,

the glasses were always kind of funky,

they were never charged, right?

They always like went on the fritz.

So it just never really caught on

like it probably could have.

But I still think that there's nothing like that,

you go to some of these IMAX theaters

and it's completely immersive and you put that on,

it's like, wow, that's that extra dimension.

I consider that in the sound world,

you have stereo mono sound, right?

But then you have Atmos

and Atmos is so much better.

That's like our version of Atmos.

That's so interesting.

Once again, people are

gonna get sick of me saying this

about me breaking my own rules,

but my time has run out, so we're out of time.

But bonus round, because I

always have all these extra

things that pop into my brain.

I don't know how else to say this,

but you've got your fingers in a lot of pies,

like you're a member of different societies

and you're really active in the industry.

This is a pretty broad

question, but what's going on?

What do you see going on in

the industry at the moment?

That is kind of peaking

your interest or concerning you

or standing out, I guess.

No concerns other than I think that there's a lot

of different outlets.

It's never been a better time

to be an aspiring filmmaker.

maker, the democratization

of the technology is huge.

You can really make a film with

very minimal equipment these days.

And the software has never been cheaper, right?

You can put together a pretty good kit for, you

know, back when I started, it was like,

you know, you needed about, you know, 700 grand to

a million to get going, right?

Now, you know, a pretty powerful laptop and, you

know, decent camera that you can pick

up for, you know, $10,000 bucks,

you're pretty much off and off and rolling.

So that's huge, right?

But I think that with

that, you have a lot of noise.

So now it's a lot harder to do something original

because there's so many people doing, making

content, which is great, right?

That's what we do. We tell stories. But I think

that something that is going to be a really huge

benefit to getting more work done efficiently is

some of these machine vision tools. And when I

talk about that, I'm talking about auto

segmentation or some beauty type work that can

kind of auto detect the faces and be able to track

with it as it moves around in 3D space.

So I'm really excited for that. One thing as a

society that we need to kind of do as a

colorist group, I want to start working with the

Academy, the ASC, the different guilds,

and SMPTE and kind of come up with a standard.

Because right now it's the wild, wild west for

these models. And as we start to integrate them

into our tools, it would be really nice to kind

of standardize on something so that when we're

training these models that take a ton of time

and energy to put into them, we want to make sure

that they're usable across multiple different

platforms. So very similar to how like a shader has

been used in the past, I kind of look at these

different models as sort of like the new v2.0

shader. And so if we can start to kind of

standardize that and be able to use them across

platforms, from visual effects all the way through

to finishing, it's going to be a really powerful

tool and kind of get us to that next level

of color grading. Yeah, wow. I am I'm going to

finish off with a pretty easy one. They've all

been pretty easy. You're an 80s boy. Your favorite,

your favorite film from the 80s?. Oh, oh, gosh,

that's that's that's a loaded one. But you know,

I'm a big fan of ET, ET is fantastic also came

out in 1982. So did I. So I think that that's a

that's maybe why but that one's great Goonies.

Come on Gremlin. I see they're doing another

Goonies film. Did I read that right?

Yeah, I think that was a hoax. And it was kind of

like, yes. Oh, man. You have a ticket sold. Do it.

I think it was. Yeah. John, thank you so much.

The time goes so fast. But but

yeah, absolute pleasure to chat to you.

I'll see you around Vincent. Cheers, mate. Cheers.

Cheers. John, thank you so much for joining me on

the podcast. It's a great chat. And as usual,

you know, I had to stop on the record and we kept

talking about so many cool things afterwards. But

look, yeah, thanks a lot. It was it was cool. Thank

you to you, the listener, for joining me

as well. And for those crazy people who actually

bought color time and t shirts. Thank you so much.

If you want one, there's a link somewhere in the

show notes or something. I think there's even

hats now. It's going crazy. But but joking aside,

thank you so much for supporting the show. It

means a like. It means like it means a lot. I quite

like that. It means a like. It means a lot to me.

And and thank you to my executive producer

MixingLight.com. If you are watching this or

listening to this on their website, you already

know what they do. If you don't check them out,

MixingLight.com. They can help you all things in color

And yeah, look, I'll see you on the next

one. Thank you so much. See ya.

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