Building ‘Crayon’ – An Artist-Focused Color Grading Boutique

Hi everyone this is Kali Bateman for Mixing Light and today I am thrilled to be talking with esteemed colourist and colleague of mine Daniel Stonehouse who has been colouring in Melbourne since I started and probably well before and we were always very aware of one another as we were coming up and is now the founder and owner and colourist at Crayon which is a studio that is also representing myself so full disclosure everyone. Nepotism alert.

Yes that's right so I'm very thrilled to be on the books at Crayon now and Dan and his team have made me feel extremely welcome and have looked after myself and my clients very very beautifully through the transition so I've been a Crayon colourist now for coming up to six months which is hard to believe how quickly that's gone. Six months already. Amazing.

Yes it must be coming up soon and so yeah just absolutely thrilled to have Dan here today to talk to me about running a boutique colour shop that not only has a physical presence in Melbourne but also is remotely representing a growing roster of colourists including myself and doing a beautiful job at it so welcome welcome Dan and thank you so much for joining me.

So I'd love to know you know we came up together I remember always seeing your work as a junior and an aspiring colourist and thinking wow this guy's got it and how does he do that and I wish I could do that and always being slightly jealous as one is. Well look vice versa I can I can remember a particular music video that you did I think for Courtney Barnett I'm remembering probably. Oh yes.

The very gritty dark one in the caravan and I was like why didn't I get to you know I do all this bloody happy shiny shiny colourful stuff you know and you get the like the dark bleak you know depressing one why didn't I get to do that you know so yeah I think I think we're of a similar generation and a similar set of experiences is

coming up. I always date my start to about when Apple Color came out I'm sure a lot of people in my generation do too I always think of that as sort of being around the time the Canon 5D came out as well and those two things are quite linked you know that there were all of a sudden a lot lots of new DPs and directors and also lots of new colourists and we all sort of work together in the early days doing our best with Canon 5D footage you know. That's right yes it was

the beginning of the democratization of colour grading I suppose because you know all of a sudden there were new emerging cinematographers who had this sort of easier entry into the market didn't have to buy a hundred thousand dollar camera to start shooting and so they were able to work with people who weren't as established like yourself and myself giving us the the very important 10 000 hours that we needed to become

good at this crazy personal job. Absolutely and the fun task of just seeing what we could do with

fairly low bit rates h264 footage. Absolutely and I remember those days the sort of the digital revolution was happening and there was a new digital format every sort of other day and I remember being given hard drives and told hey we need this in the system tomorrow and you'd be like oh well there's no programs that I know of that can read this file format and it doesn't seem to have time code or real names so it was a period of great trial and error and stick to itness

I seem to recall. Absolutely if I scroll all the way back you know I'm one of these people that has my iPhone photos going back you know pretty much to the dawn of time but there's a a particular image of a one of the old Apple cinema displays with an early version of Red Cine on it holding up an iPhone you know a very early iPhone for some banking ad so you know we were trying to work out how to use red footage and how to transcode it and how to get the best out of it

you know before you got it into the grading system because you couldn't work with the raws and yeah it was it was a time of a lot of experimentation a lot of learning for everyone. Yes and I think it produced people who are good problem solvers didn't they? Well you had to. And you were willing to sit down and just nut it out but just for the just the listener or the the audience out there so to give a bit of context would you say this is roughly sort of 15 years ago

that we're talking about? I mean I've been look I've been saying 15 years for probably longer than 15 years I should really I should really get my my dates and time straight look I think I think Apple Color came out around 2007 which

was a big deal because Apple just bought the whole company and chucked it in with the Final Cut suite and so all of a sudden you had you know like a commonly available program that could do secondaries that wasn't just the old three-way color corrector in Final Cut or whatever After Effects like to think of as color tools you know so all of a sudden there was this readily available program that was enough like you know the big things that the the posthouses were spending millions of dollars on

where you could actually really sink your teeth into and learn the craft I mean I'd done so I had worked in an animation studio I was working in an animation studio at that time that was sort of had evolved from being very scrappy and doing some production and doing some animation and basically winning jobs and saying yes to things and figuring out how to do them on the fly so I definitely graded footage before without really knowing what it was you know I'd taken stuff and

made it look better but then all of a sudden there was this sort of context to do it in and it just really felt like a great fit you know like the the time scale the collaborative nature of it the fact that there wasn't really a right answer but there was there were answers that were righter than others yeah I just sort of did it and did more and more of it and fell in love with it and realized that there was like a like a craft depth there that I could

quite happily explore for a really long time yeah so that was kind of my start and you know working in an animation company it sort of started to not make sense to say like oh hey we're so and so and we represent animation directors and then there's Dan who does all this other stuff as well so my employer and I decided to start a sort of a sister company that I'd be a partner in and around that time as well you know my my a building was bought that we're still in to this day and that was a

big part of sort of the the birth of crayon as a company we were big fans of BEAN in Sydney,

Ben Eagleton and Andrew's company they were very forward thinking they were doing things like yes sending hard drives to clients you know like they'd send a big a big raid over so you know they could you could get the footage on something fast enough to work with and and they just had this very sort of modern and nimble kind of brand and reputation and that was a big inspiration for us you know in some ways we were trying to do a version of that in Melbourne but with a colorist who is a little

bit less experienced which was stressful you know for me but stuck at it yeah BEAN, BEAN is a company in Sydney Ben Eagleton and Andrew Clarkson and if anyone listened to my interview with Fergus Rotherham those are his mentors and if if you're Australian or potentially anyone would know Ben Eagleton's work I'm not sure if BEAN was before or after Ben's stint in LA

do you know Dan? I can't remember the exact timeline of it but you know they've had a beautiful reputation they did and still do to this day even though I don't believe BEAN is is still the same scenario that it was Ben is freelance now and I believe he has just BE so I may edit this out because I should get my facts straight before I open my mouth in any case they're they're colorists who have had a huge impact on the Australian industry and also in terms of philosophy to be role models I

think that generation of colorists were role models for mine and Dan's generation coming up they were people that we could say well look here are people who are really doing it to a world-class standard and you know there's absolutely nothing that can go wrong if we aim for that and I think to us especially they represented a new way of doing things you know I never worked in a post house I sometimes that's good good distinction because being... being a boutique.

Yes. Exactly right I sometimes like to joke I've never been in a grade before because I haven't you know I I was definitely of the generation that was sort of completely self-taught and you know I could I can remember you know in the early days the other colorists I encountered you know like on on one hand I could count them and some of them wanted to talk shop and some of them didn't some of them very much didn't you know so that was also that sort of another thing that shaped my thinking

is the difficulty of sort of doing it on your own and the solitary nature of our work sometimes and how to sort of encourage solidarity and sharing and sort of escape the competition mentality you know that that crafts people can sometimes have with with others in their field you know yeah so I'm not sure if I answered the questionnaire with no no no all kinds of tangents no I think there's a few really interesting points there because you know we touched on it earlier that you and I had a bit

of healthy jealousy of one another and I think that's part of being in the same generation as your colleagues and you know especially in Australia sometimes you can feel like there's quite a small pie and there's not enough slices to go around and you know there's always people with opinions about whether or not you can or should be pursuing this very niche career and some people aren't particularly shy about letting you know whether or not they think you have a place in the industry

and I don't know whether or not that goes away or whether or not you just develop a tolerance and a thicker skin to it as you mature but it is something that can shape you as a colorist and you know whether or not you get one of those coveted assisting roles in the big facility or not there is a pathway there and not everybody needs to do the same color job or have the same approach because if we all did you know every client would also have to be the same and they're not so

you know there was definitely a niche for crayon in the market that you found and modeling it on BEAN like what a great company to say hey they're doing it let's do it too so you know you really did go straight into that boutique market and dealt with the challenges that anybody has coming up which is you know how do I find somebody who's willing to teach me and how do I teach myself and where do I find those resources so you know did did that what kind of effect did that have

on your sort of approach to grading or your philosophy around grading did that shape that at all I think going back even further you know I've always been the kind of person where if I if I'm interested in a subject it just becomes all consing and I will follow my taste I'll explore it and you know I'll usually there's there's a famous Ira Glass lengthy quote about creativity essentially being that the problem is when you start your taste exceeds your ability

and maybe you actually never catch up you know in some ways but you you can get a bit closer after after your 10 000 hours you're you you might admit to yourself that some of your work is is actually okay but yeah I guess in high school I got really into photography I was a I was a terrible skateboarder so I got into photography so I would have something to do while everyone else was doing more impressive tricks than me but then that led into working as a photographer

shooting local bands working for street press and things like that funnily enough to the point where I felt quite jaded by about sort of 16 or 17 like I'd been I'd been spat out by the industry and you know 50 bucks for film and and a and a name on the door wasn't quite enough anymore and then I sort of followed my interest into graphic design similar kind of thing just sort of got quite obsessed with it self-taught thought I was going to study design out of

uni but then maybe didn't realize that those courses were actually quite hard to get into there's a little bit cocky about my chances but my point being that when color came along you know I'd sort of been in this I don't know like this long period of of finding new loves new crafts and teaching myself about them so in that era resources were very scarce I was saying to someone the other day like there was that one blue book you know the art of color

correction did you ever see that it was about the only thing the Alex Van Herkman one yeah a classic of the genre you know every very small genre yeah but I mean that was that was like I don't know that was like discovering treasure or something because you know yeah there'd be the odd tutorial or the odd website and you'd pick up bits and pieces and you'd read manuals for software like like like they were novels you know hoping someone had slipped in a little bit about you know

the actual work we were doing not not just the technical but the process the why's that that information was extremely hard to find but there were bits and pieces here and there you know so I guess I just sort of took that kind of quiet desperation and and kind of hunger for education and I just move it up absolutely everything I could you know and would piece bits and pieces together and and just try and make it work you know you'd you'd you'd get a little hint about a technique like

and and you'd implement it you'd you'd go what the hell is cineon space oh okay it's how film scanned why is it so soft oh you've got to use an s-curve you know you just piece all these things together and and put it together but yeah it was it was pretty slim pickings in terms of resources for learning wasn't it I seem to remember it kind of it was fx phd that blew the

lid off it for me yeah because I'd always had this interest and I'd been looking for ever since I was at uni and got to go and get my films graded at what was it called that place in south melbourne where Vincent worked no no it wasn't that's Complete Post Complete Post of course yeah Dean McClellan and Vincent Taylor were working oh lovely other amazing colors working there I know and I remember Dee graded this really terrible zombie movie that I was short film that I made and she made it look

so much better it was shot on mini dv and she made it look like it was something and I remember thinking my goodness how do you do that but like you you know I was sort of out there on my own going where do you find the information and I think now with you know websites like Mixing Light and the availability of being able to reach out to actually ask colorists internationally on you know panels and social media and just just how sort of global it's become and how accessible it's

become it really was a different world when we started out so I'm just having like a secret society you know it really was a secret society and you were sort of knocking at the door like thinking you're wearing the coste the right way and then being scared that you weren't you know and that you weren't gonna get laid in with the stone cutter's handshake but I mean that it's still something I sort of tell people these days especially younger people who who want to break

into the industry who want to be a colorist like the trick is really just not stopping you know like there's no there's no other way to do it apart from that like you are a colorist until you

tell yourself you're not and inevitably opportunities will come your way with persistence but I mean sometimes it takes a lot of persistence you know the you know it is certainly a bigger field than it was and you know the sort of customers the consers the clients like have a much better understanding of what it is we do and why it's necessary but you know we're still specialists you know so really anything you can do I couldn't agree more and not listening to the people who tell you that you

shouldn't or can't and you know getting back up when you fall down is all a major part of it I'd say maybe 80 percent of it but I mean just thinking about the difference between that and now you certainly wouldn't have had a client pull out resolve on their laptop or ipad and you know grade a couple of shots in your session and say hey can you make it look like that you know it was a lot it was a lot more secret yes and the systems were extremely expensive and yeah

fortunately apple color came out and and gave you that in and I mean it's it's all about the color not the tool right so if you're an amazing colorist it doesn't matter what you're in it doesn't matter what tools you're using you're going to get results that pleasing whether it's in apple color or resolve or well yeah I mean

you know you're grading with your brain and your eyes ultimately you know sometimes dismissively when mostly when I'm trying to encourage editors to use DaVinci Resolve I jokingly say it's well it's just rectangles in a row right like does it you know like does it really matter what program you're using but color is kind of the same I mean look there are niceties to different systems there's performance benefits there's some tools that are just brilliant and

wonderful and open and you know other things where you find yourself little dead ends and cul-de-sacs but ultimately it's your eyes and your hands you know and your brain that's the those are the tools you're color grading with and you can adapt you know like no one likes that period of time where you're like oh I know there's a button for this somewhere I just don't know where it is that's never a fun week but that's not really the big problem of our work right the

big problem is like why like why are we doing what we're doing how are we corralling all this sort of technical knowledge and this instinct and you know perception and taste how are we corralling that all into sort of getting from one end of a project to the other you know successfully with with happy happy clients who feel listened to and like they've participated that's really the the tough part probably tougher than the more obvious part of technical knowledge you know but

yeah you just have to keep on doing it and then eventually you hit a point where you're like oh this is less stressful than it used to be not always every now and then you know you have a you have a day or you have a week or a project but mostly it does get better but yeah these are just yeah so tell me about like how you transitioned from colorist and partner in a sister company to an animation studio and then had this current iteration where crayon is

yours and you're an artist but you're also the business owner which I have to say from the side of somebody who's represented by a company it does have a different feeling to to being represented in a business where the kind of top-down ownership is an artist it feels a lot different to the top-down ownership being more producer or production based you know not to say that one's better than the other but it certainly has a different flavor and it is quite

lovely to know that it's the artist concerns that are the most I don't even know what the right word is but they're they're top of mind really artist concerns yeah exactly how did you how did you find crayon's current iteration

yeah it was an evolution I mean there's there's some stuff that's just sort of in our DNA so you know crayon was originally founded by a director who became an entrepreneur you know who and and a colorist and I think the idea was to to create a space that clients actually wanted to be in you know to you know you'd hear like a lot about people going to the big the big main post houses and essentially not having a good time you know and we wanted to be sort of new school and nimble and you know

leverage that our experience you know like our background and experience was broader than just color you know that that I we both had design backgrounds essentially and and we sort of use that sort of foundational way of creative thinking we could we could sort of translate that into different jobs but at the same time it's like someone needs you to type set a title you can bust out the old design skills you don't have to go okay well you need half a day in smoke and that's

going to cost you and your producer needs to talk to my producer like we could just be a bit more nimble and fluid and and kind of client friendly so that's in our DNA and then sort of the evolution of the business my business partner ended up heading overseas and starting an absolutely huge successful tech company which definitely took up most of their time so there was a period of time where crayon was sort of just it was what it was it was what it was

designed and it was continuing in that direction you know there were some times where we we dabbled with representing editors for a while and sort of being end to end but we also always sort of came back to this idea of being you know what we'd like to call these those color focused right that we it's not only color but it's it's it's it's a business that's sort of focused on that part of the process and the things that surround it and you know after a few years of

me being the only colorist here I started to think really heavily about new models for how crayon could grow you know we were in a world where almost every colorist in Australia was freelance you know there were there was a time where I'd joke and say like I'm the only colorist with the job left you know... It is true... yeah the industry had sort of you know

we'd we'd left that big post house era and we were in a new world where everyone was freelance and so everyone was sort of on their own you know and already kind of at times lonely or at least you know individual job sort of I felt like we were getting broken down into smaller and smaller pieces you know and I think there was some good stuff you know some that was lost in the move away from the big post houses yes you know like a certain amount of like just pressure caused by money

you know caused by costs caused by the costs of the rooms you know the kind of rock star mentality you know I think I think it's good that we've sort of moved on from there but you know we sort of threw out a whole bunch of stuff at the same time like we threw out institutional knowledge we threw out you know the glue in between all the stages you know you you see it now sometimes where where like in ad agency for example we'll sort of throw a an editor a

colorist and a you know an online or a flame or a smoke artist together and it's sort of like that's not a post pipeline for a job like I mean we're used to it we can talk to each other and we can make it work but it's not the same as you know the glue that holds it all together and I mean I think another thing was I'd always had the benefit of having a producer my entire career I had some form of producer in the early days when I was dabbling we had people who you know

like I never had to send an invoice in in my entire career which was a great luxury and yeah as the industry sort of got it gotten broken down into into freelancers I was like how do how do people do it you know like how do you... a stressful full day in a commercial and at lunch time the job from yesterday is hassling you about a new shot and someone wants to shift the booking you know from tomorrow to the day after meaning you have to shift another book like I just didn't understand how it was

possible and certainly it is possible because people do it but I don't know I just yeah it's also not a skill set like personally that producing skill set it can seem easy when it's being done well and you know I I came up in facilities and I was used to producers who are very very good at their jobs managing everything and so you would think well what's the big deal it can't be that hard and then of course when I had to start doing it for myself I was like oh my

god this is really difficult it's a full job with a full set of skills that aren't in my wheelhouse and I've never learned and I just don't even know where to start like put me in front of an excel spreadsheet and I'll you know I'm a bit better now but at the beginning I was like I felt like a newborn baby like what do I even do here where do I click so you know and those are the sort of things that you don't think about but recording you know and this is like a little bit in

the weeds but when I was doing my own producing I would always do the bare minim that was required to secure a booking and then invoice at the at the end but I didn't take down job names properly or the names of people who were in the suite so when it came time to be like oh wow I did this thing and now it's been released how do I go about promoting that on social media well I don't even remember the director's name so now I've got another big job of trying to work

out and backtrack and retrace my steps and you know just those systems right that producers just think to do in the moment I learned a lot doing it myself but I never got good at it ever well it's impossible it's impossible to be good at it as a as a busy colourist right because it is a specialist skill and there's just not enough time in the day to do it effectively and as you know our lives change and we get older and we have kids and all the rest of it I mean I just I

just sort of saw things being made very difficult for people in our role and I guess I wanted to think about like how could how could I add people to the roster how could I grow the business but also how could I make that a fair exchange you know like what can I offer colourists what can we do together that is is impossible on our own you know so I was very very lucky in that I met an incredibly talented young colourist Abe Wynen and I had a theory about a model a business model that was sort of

you know still allowed the colourist to be you know like their success to be connected to money to you know to to not be this kind of old model of like here's a salary and then we're gonna work you to the bone to make that money back you know so yeah an experimental model Abe came on board and this was sort of around the same time where I took over the business fully and always going great and then of course

COVID happened about a bit less than a year after I'd fully taken over so that was fine I mean look especially in Melbourne where we were I don't know I think I think in terms of like lockdowns and you know stopping of work and all that kind of stuff I think we were one of one of the more impacted places around the world like COVID so that was obviously a bit of a setback you know when you know when you're not allowed to leave the house you're obviously not shooting tv

commercials but you know we got through that and we're even able to grow a little bit adding producers working with two colourists and just sort of like push things forward from there the model seemed to be working you know Abe was Abe's career was was just absolutely taking off you know I would like to talk about Abe a little

bit just as a sideline because he's somebody whose work I really admire and he seems like a really nice person absolutely which I think goes a long way and he's actually somebody I'd really like to speak to yes he'd be a great person to speak to so he's over in Canada now he's a senior colourist which to be honest personally is a term I've never liked because it's a to me it's you know implies a a wise old old man or woman you know like a Gandalf type you

know like you're shaking your fist at clouds maybe but I mean hey if you're going to be a senior colourist I'm pretty sure before he's 30 that's that's a pretty good that's probably a pretty good title I know unbelievable I can only think of one other person who's pulled that off and she also was a Toronto based colourist ex-melbourne Toronto based colourist yes exactly yes yes it's absolutely kicking goals for anyone who might know the secret code but Abe has recently

taken on the heading up the Colour Society International Canada chapter yes yeah with Eric with Eric Whipp another another guy good guy to be hanging out with yes so congratulations to both of them yes and you know congrats Abe if you're listening yeah for just yeah kicking so many goals I'm really following with interest all the cool stuff yeah and incredibly incredibly talented and dedicated colourist and you know I'm super proud to you know to have like kind of to work to work

alongside him and to share ideas and to learn from each other and yeah super proud of everything he's doing now but yeah so he that was sort of an experiment that worked you know I had I had a model that I could see a future in and then the next challenge was thinking about I guess I guess one of the problems of our

industry has always been that it's it's it's traditionally local right like and that goes back to the big post house days where you know you'd spend a million or two fitting out of room and people would come to it local people necessarily would come to it but you know in you know in a modern world it's interesting to think about like how you break down those geographic boundaries of our work right it's happening organically COVID the COVID time sort of

advanced it but we don't have to be limited by our location anymore either where the colorist is based where the clients are based and and as we're learning where the production team is based versus where the colorist is based so I spent a lot of time thinking and planning and building infrastructure that would again you know like I always wanted this to be almost a collective right like to a way of pooling resources pooling connections pooling influences to sort of be able to

the colors to be able to sort of achieves more than they could on their own yeah so spent a lot of time planning workflows and you know kind of boring database infrastructure and things like that just just to allow that to work and it's been you know really thrilling for me to to see it working that's one of those things

that not every colorist is interested in and it's something that as a freelancer because I'm tech savvy to the extent that I need to be but I'm certainly not excited about SQL databases and you know it's it's just not a itch that I feel I need to scratch and I think that's one of the things that was lost in the the move to freelance was that IT department that the big facility had that that could go and glue everything back together again so you know that is of a huge benefit to

the the less it's not even about technical aptitude because everyone can do it but it's how interested you are in it I suppose yeah and if you're not interested in it then you know to have a broader team and I know that I certainly utilize this on our slack channels you know like hey I want to do this but I have absolutely no idea how can somebody who's interested in this stuff give me their opinion and when you're treating other colorists as competition instead of

colleagues you don't get that cross pollination so it is very nice to to shift that thinking a little bit a pivotal thing for me about that

that type of thinking I think you've talked about it with a few other people from Melbourne we have a really good culture here the colorists we get together once or twice a year we we drink a little bit too much we have some nerdy conversations you know we share some mutual grievances maybe and try not to turn into a winch fest but yeah we we get together and we talk and we we we know each other's spaces we know each other's names and just through that

it really helped me realize that we're not as in competition with each other as we might think you know like a lot of it is just sort of the psychology of a craftsperson right of it's almost like the dark side of of appreciating the craft is that you know you can get jealous or you can you can see other people getting opportunities you want and and wonder why it isn't you or you can see a beautiful piece of work and you could doubt that you'd ever be able

to do it and just through you know having that connection to fellow practitioners that yeah that was like a big seed in my thinking because it made me realize that you know especially in the short-form world right we have we all have these like intense hard won forged in the fire relationships with clients you know we're we're all people's go-to's you know like we have we all have clients who trust us implicitly and you know absolutely are at the top of their list for every job you know

because we have the power to stuff up a project you know like we actually have like a really a really intense responsibility sometimes when you think about the labor and the creativity that's gone into any project that we get to touch you know just the person hours and the care and the sacrifice and you know we're the ones who are responsible for making sure all of that turns up on screen right and and when we're when we're doing well we actually have the power to sort of amplify that

but at least at least we have the responsibilities when sure it turns up on screen so I think I think we all have these like really intense trust relationships with our clients and that when you get a group of colorists together who are like-minded you know that those that influence those relationships they kind of amplify rather than just stacking up on top of each other yeah and like a lot of that came from yeah just just those Melbourne meetups with

colorists of yeah of of realizing that we're you know that there's this kind of solidarity there that's really nice and it's not something that we you know for people listening overseas who have an experience of of still having those post-facilities or those grading shops that have a stable of maybe you know 10 local but possibly 50 international colorists who are at your fingertips it's it's not something that in Australia we have anymore and I think there are pros and cons of course to

both but it is nice that you know even if you're not in a facility or if you're working as a freelancer or maybe you're emerging in your career you can try to think of of people who are doing the jobs that you want to be doing not as somebody who's blocking your ability to succeed but as somebody who can help you get there a bit of healthy jealousy a bit of healthy competition never hurt anybody because it helps you raise yourself but there's a difference I

think and this is getting a bit philosophical between going oh gee I wish I did that cool thing hey well done mate like good job I loved it there's a difference between that and the moments that I think we've all had where we're looking at our work and we're going my god I just have no place here you know like there's this is terrible and how could anybody you know possibly want me on their job and it's and it can be very difficult to pull yourself out of that spiral when you're

soloed you know when you're just on your own and and you've got no one who you can say hey like sos I feel like shit you know I need I need to remember why we're all doing this crazy thing that we do yeah absolutely so mental health shout out there but it's just better together I think yeah yeah and and I think I think it's it's it's not just colorist I think it's quite common across like most creative industries or practices there's certain core things like you lack

perspective on your own work or you have too much perspective on your own work you know you're just dealing with a different set of information to everyone else the comparisons are always tricky you know insecurity can manifest as jealousy or yeah or resentment you know very early on I identified like I have this I have this emotional arc about my work which which actually doesn't really happen anymore but in the early days you know it was very predictable

about four o'clock I'd be thinking okay maybe I can talk to my producer maybe I can start again tomorrow we'll just throw the whole thing out you know like like hard work about that time that's how I would feel and then you know the next day I'd feel like oh I barely got away with that and then down the track I'd feel like oh maybe I did get away with it and then three months later I'd look at it and I'd go oh that's pretty how did I how did I do that I don't know how I did that you

know and so you just identify your emotional arc and that can help you just put it out of your minds you know because it all goes back to just keeping on doing the work you know and that idea of getting away with it I've heard that from other colorists as well that I've assisted and yeah I'm not I'm not sure how many people have that feeling of like they've just robbed a building as they leave this session but you know we've definitely all been there we are lucky in in

our work that there is a tradition of limited time I think right yes I think that is actually a blessing although sometimes it can not be but you know the fact that it's like do what you can given the circstances given the you know the individual problems and the personalities of every job do what you can make it look better and get it done by five o'clock you know or six o'clock or you know maybe seven sometimes but you you know it sort of I also freeze you from like

having to do a perfect job you know like you you've got these boundaries and you've got to you've got to do it within those boundaries and yeah I think it's actually a blessing good pressure yeah as well like I know that I'm certainly all revved up and ready to go when I know that I've got a four-hour session and I've got more to do than I can possibly do in four hours and then somehow somehow you called off you know caffeinated and I am feeling good I am

like we're gonna smash this and if you don't think too hard sometimes you get out of your own way when you just have to get it done sometimes you go you know I certainly know that when I've got all the time in the world I'm there doing what Dave McClellan calls fiddling yourself into a corner which you know I think is it's really stuck with me yes you just get out get out of your own way and let your hands do it like you're an amazing surgeon who doesn't even have to think

anymore just put your playlist on and go there's a there's a lot that's been written you know about the flow state and I think we get we get to spend a lot of time in that state right like I love it possibly I mean I don't know I don't know what it feels like to be a painter or to be a sculptor you know but I imagine we get a little taste of what that's like you know it has our jobs you know and we're getting paid for it it's pretty incredible like we're quite lucky

do you have any just speaking of flow states do you have any sort of hacks or techniques that you use to get into that flow state because I know that when you've got a certain time restriction on your session you can't muck around for three hours and then get into it you have to get into it I actually actually think that the time restriction is the the best one I used to be a classic procrastinator a creative procrastinator you know all of my school projects were the

night before and you know I was somehow able to pull it off and do okay but I think color taught me how not to be a procrastinator because for one it's very hard to procrastinate when someone is literally in the room with you you know like there's not a lot of like doing your usual lap of the websites you like to check out you can get away with when when people are in the room and expecting results yeah so I think the the time limits actually really help music is is a great

tool and to be honest it's probably one of the best things about our jobs right like I always feel for editors you know we we actually get to listen to music while we work which is incredibly lucky and we also get to inflict our taste in music on other people which is always fun too so certainly there's sort of different types of music I go to at different stages of the process different times of day you know it could get pretty intense towards the end that little last

push before getting render what's intense what's intense for you oh I mean it can get pretty intense like like like very very aggressive rapping but I have to just make sure everyone in the room knows I'm not necessarily agreeing with the sentiments you know like Kanye said it not you well I can't Kanye might be a little bit of a bridge too far these days but yeah or like some fairly intense electronic music yeah you know the start of the day can be kind of

instrental or piano or but yeah I think that's always fun too the the room management side of the work can also help you get into that flow state of the actual you know work on the tools I would encourage you to make a crayon Spotify playlist yeah or crayon mixtape maybe you know yes I would love to hear what everyone else is listening to in their session oh look you could always make a film and I'll grade it for you that's that's that's an option I want to put

that out there to anyone listening as well if you have a really great grading playlist I would love to know all about it because I'm the same as Jan and I I turn to music for that flow state and I'm always looking for something new because I often will reuse the same playlists just to get into the flow state there's one called Unwind 80s that I think I must listen to like daily for maybe five years now yeah that is just way too too many 80s songs so I'm looking for something new everyone

I mean these days I have like an Apple TV on my client monitor and I will quite often launch into you know a history of the best music videos of the past 20 years or you know if anyone shows a vague interest in skateboarding it's like I'll check out these skate videos but you know I think I think it's they're all like your clients should should enjoy coming to see you right like they should have a good time and you should gel with people and you should be able to

talk about the references they're talking about and you know photographers filmmakers TV shows music culture art you know my favorite references are when people talk about painters or sculptors or you know because it's it's it's not specific and it is at the same time you know so I think yeah you've got to be a good host as a colorist as well that's really important and you've got a painting and

photography as references is I love them because they're such distilled ideas you know when you're given like a feature film as a reference and it's like well which shot you know which scene yeah how specific are you being you know like are we whereas if you get like a painting you can be like well I can see exactly what you're after here and we can look at you know you can go from there you can go outwards instead of going from something large back in yeah yeah whenever I'm

given stills like TVs or TV shows or movies stills I'm always trying to extract ideas from them I always prefer it where someone will give me you know a folder full of images or a pdf you know with with a couple of things tiled and then you can kind of navigate them as a story and take ideas from them because I mean this this this circles around nicely to a very

antique look right like I don't like the idea of looks in grading you know interesting I think the look is a result rather than an element of the process you know if that makes sense you know it's almost like if you're sort of I don't know I feel like for my work if I'm if I'm thinking about a look it's like I've got hold of the wrong side of the equation or something you know to me to me it's like a look is sort of like it's your taste applied to the project in an appropriate

way if that makes sense and you know you can certainly have elements or ingredients you know you can you can talk about contrast and you can talk about saturation and density of colors and you can talk about techniques and approaches you know but the way like my favorite my favorite projects are the ones where my work disappears into the project does that make sense where no one's looking at and saying like what a beautiful grade I mean maybe they might say that

to me if I'm lucky but you know just being polite but you know like like good color grading really looks like great cinematography you know it looks like great filmmaking you know so I think I'm always very wary of style you know sort of applied on top of things right I mean yeah

I would love to explore this a little bit further because I think that it's like a very oh a philosophy based kind of thing but also like super tangible to what we do and it's not something that I've really been able to have a huge conversation about before often I will grade under a look so I'll have everything grouped and that group is my look and I even call it look and I'll have you know I'll look at the references and I'll use a few tools to generate like a contrast level across the board

and maybe like a certain treatment of a primary like okay for this look we've got a deep filmy kind of ectochromey red but only in the reds because it's digital and we can do whatever the hell we want so you know then maybe I've got instead of that kind of like yellow green that you would get an ectochrome maybe I keep like a nice fresh green that I'll use a few nodes or a layer or two to give us that look and then underneath that then I'll do the grade basically

yeah yeah and I'll balance and I'll match and I might be pushing it in the wrong direction to make it look right under the look if you were to take the look off you'd probably go oh my goodness what on earth is that terrible looking thing but because it's all graded under the look it's all integrated look I'm doing the same I'm doing the same thing I'm just probably using different terminology but so the way I think about it is gosh how do I think about it I okay so like as a as

a as a baby colorist I think you know your first aha moment right is when you realize that to get a bunch of stuff to look the same you need to do different things to all of it right like we all start out we all start out with looks right you know applying a transformation across a scene or across an entire project and then you know and then as a baby colorist you then discover like oh okay I've got to go on I've got to go in and balance it all so it makes sense

you know and then you start to realize like oh okay this scene needs its own treatment it's it's underwater it's it's a cool moonlit night it's you know and before you know it you're sort of doing all kinds of different things to all kinds of different shots or scenes or elements you know to get them towards this ideal thing that is the result you know so I always try and work from sort of the decisions of of broadest impact down to the small details but I'm also not scared of small

details like I spend a lot of time on small details so you know like when I'm starting a project probably the first decision I'll make it's akin to a look but it's sort of I think of it as the transform like how are we getting from what was shot to a result that has the characteristics we want in broad strokes you know and then I'll usually start trying that out on different shots refining things again broad strokes and then you know then you go through

and you start balancing things underneath that but a lot of a lot of what I do I think is very photographic and subtractive right is the word I've been thinking of a lot about lately I mean there's you know like the apocryphal story of of like you know how do you make a sculpture of someone will you take away all the bits that aren't the sculpture but I do think about that in my work a lot like I am not scared to jump straight in and put a tiny window in the corner

of frame to move something that is very distracting and very much dragging the attention in the wrong place you know you know I try these days instead of bringing things up you know to be taking things away if that makes sense and then the other thing I'm always thinking about like I think color grading is this dance between you know especially in this modern era where you know we understand color management and we understand color spaces and you know a lot of that kind of color

science fundamentals you know it's a dance between you know people in a room under light over time you know and you use that to you use that to help things match essentially you know you you I mean C-mode is one of my favorite buttons in Resolve which is where it sorts the timeline you know into you know the you know the project order into the shooting order essentially and you can use that to kind of oh okay that's why that shot doesn't match it was

actually shot at the end of the scene where the life had changed but then at the same time you've got to be comfortable throwing out that relationship completely when it makes sense you know for the story for the projects and especially for the relationship like I think I think fundamentally what we're doing is is about relationships between shots you know like I think I think if you imagine you've always got to remember that this thing will be watched sequentially and that we're the

ones you know jumping around and looping and jumping from the start of the scene to the end of the scene you've got to remember that everything we work on will be watched linearly and so I always kind of imagine this little diminishing graph of relationships between the shot I'm working on and the shots around it if that makes sense you know you can you can you can feel the importance of matching kind of trailing off either side of it yeah so I mean I think I think that's something

I think about a lot is is context and relationships but ultimately the big thing I'm always thinking about is story right like yeah I'm not actually a particularly visual person I've been in these visual fields my whole life but I'm you know I'm very narrative based I'm very word based so I think story is like a superpower as a colorist understanding filmmaking understanding the language of cinema understanding the language of editing understanding composition and color and

you know all this great stuff that we we absorb from the other other craft disciplines that can actually be your superpower as a colorist because generally that's the language that cinematographers and directors think and speak in if that makes sense so as a colorist if you can understand that if you can read that if you can speak that then you know you'll have collaborators for life right because you they might think of you as a technician and all of a

sudden you're a proper collaborator you know like you are invested in the same things as they are and you're making decisions for the same reasons that they are you know so I think that's story is kind of a superpower so just watch a lot of films you know I love that so what I'm what I'm seeing

and and I think this is very much a you thing overall is that it's a very pragmatic approach to the shot where maybe if you if you looked at it as like oh but there's a look for this whole thing so this shot needs to have cool shadows and warm highlights but that's not actually serving the story or that doesn't look good on that shot that you're willing to sort of throw out the look and serve the story serve the serve the shot as long as there's a coherence and a thru line

that you can that you can weave so maybe that's something in the contrast or maybe it's a particular color that can take you through from shot a to shot b over to shot c even if they have different really different ways of of getting to that end result yeah absolutely not going to be limited by a workflow and go well computer says no that's it no I mean no one looks at your resolve projects you know like once it's done it technique and neatness and proper workflow and order of

operations all of that stuff matters a lot right up to the point where it doesn't you know and so I remember spending you know a fairly tortured period early on like wanting to do everything properly wanting to do everything properly and you know I remember I'd often I did a lot of surf projects and things like that and so you know you'd often encounter footage underwater and footage underwater it never works with a look you know like it it is you just have to grade it you

know the the person in one shot can be 10 centimeters further away from the camera and the color of their skin completely changes it's just how water works you know and so like a lot of that water stuff taught me that there are times when you just have to chuck it out and put some nodes in a row you know and that's not cheating or lesser or a bad workflow you know you're working on images and the images in the order that they're going to be seen like

that's the ultimate result you know so yeah don't be afraid to sort of chuck it all out when you need to you know I think that's great it's sort of that whole thing of learn the rules and then break them certainly know why it's important to have one contrast curve or one transform across the board but remember that it's about your eyes and it's about what the audience is seeing at the end of the day it's not about how clever you might be as a colorist

and all of those are really important philosophies that you have drank the Kool-Aid for you know just because that's the style at the time it might not be it might not be what's appropriate for the image so I think that's great advice to anybody and I know that I can certainly get myself wrapped up in but like oh what if you know they cut another version and the shots are in a different order and I better make sure that they match even if it's making one shot look less aesthetically pleasing on

its own I better really make sure that you know shot two matches shot 47 just in case I mean

look sometimes you do have to kill your darlings you know like sometimes the most beautiful shot in a scene needs to come down a bit to be closer to you know the one that's not so great but yeah I mean one of my least favorite things is just being given a bunch of footage out of context and saying like great this it's like well the reel yeah like how well why like I can yeah I mean okay it's all a bit magenta I can sort that out but that's not really what I'm interested in doing

right I want to make these images sort of speak to each other and if they're not in order how can you do that you know it's very it's impossible you know like you don't have those relationships and that's kind of one of the most important things and one of the things that we haven't mentioned but is really implicit in everything that we're just talking about is that Dan a

majority of the work that you do is in the TVC space where you have the time to finesse one shot and and really work it yes I definitely came up sort of mostly doing short form yeah I remember you do you do crossover now oh yeah yeah yeah I think I think we're sort of we're past those days where it's so segregated which is great I mean I've been doing a lot more long-form stuff recently like a a couple of feature docos and a couple of feature narrative projects and you know I was

I was definitely nervous at first because you know you you you look at the shot count and you look at the time you have and you do some maths and a number comes out that just seems ridiculous and so you ignore it but you do start grading straight away yeah yeah but it's all just grading right like like you you know you can be working on the most technical dry thing it still has a story and it still has a coherence and it still has scenes and I think yeah all

the different disciplines sort of have you know they use the same muscles in different ways you know you have to change your emphasis a little bit you know certainly on a on a long-form or an episodic project you know you you lean a lot more on structure and on you know setups and you're very happy when you encounter those things that are just two shots of people talking to each other for a long time because you're like wow okay I just graded 80 shots and that's you know yeah but

yeah I think I think one of the things is I've gotten more experiences as a colorist that is hard to put into words I don't I don't know how I do it but I just sort of it's easy to land jobs in the sense that you know you might finish you finish on time or you even finish early sometimes that never used to happen to me

I think it's just sort of experience and like making the right decisions more than the wrong decisions getting caught up less you know getting stuck on small details that don't matter and sometimes getting stuck on small details that really do matter you know it does I think it just goes back to that idea of like it's what we do is is technically very hard and it's a lifetime craft but it does get easier after a while you know like if you just keep doing it it does get easier yeah I know

keep doing it it does get easier yeah I know exactly what you mean about landing a project and and being surprised when you get to a point where oh my goodness we're approved and I'm happy with it and what am I going to do but then it does it does come out of the blue every now and then and I had this the other day I was working on a motion control tvc where they'd shot with a robot program for camera moves and they'd done a couple of takes that needed to be stitched together and there were

several versions of it and it was all a one take shot but there were maybe eight different - versions of the TVC... and I thought well - Sounds like fun how hard could that be you know we've we've only got 16 shots to get through and we've got a full day to do it and you know I was sweating at five pm going oh my goodness I'm gonna need more time and you know it hasn't happened to me for a very long time that I've had to message a producer and say hey how do you feel about me wrapping at seven

instead of six because I reckon by the time I finish these tracks I'm still going to have an hour's worth of handles to do and it took it took me by surprise but I realized well I don't do motion control jobs very often and I've made decisions to put 25 windows into this shot - And you realize there's 17 passes you need to - And I need to get those tracks to match track them through with handles and the tracks should match pretty well and well how do you

control that and so you know I I just had to say to myself well next time I'll I'll remember this and I'll say to myself this is motion control maybe don't reach for the window see how else you can solve that client request I'm a window reacher I always reach the window I have I have weaned myself onto softer elipses a lot more though yes I like the softer elips oh just looks like light doesn't it you know getting the darkroom tools out yeah no I mean yeah anytime you find

yourself like semi-rotoing something you're probably barking out the wrong tree but every now and then you have to you know every now and then no that's so right but just you know you have to know when that moment is and I think if you're doing similar types of work you look at something and after you know your 15 years of doing this kind of work you can say I know the client I know the agency I know the director I know the DP I'm pretty sure they're going to want this approach and you can get

cracking and you can get to a point where everyone's reasonably happy without having to get two hours into the session and then completely reorient yourself so you know there is a lot to be said for just that knowing people yes yeah and sometimes it's driven by the clients as well like sometimes they know you and they trust you yeah true and they're coming to you because they're like your approach is what I want on this one absolutely

yeah yeah yeah and I think there is a bit of a Dan Stonehouse look to be honest so well it is interesting because I you know I do you know I I am now recruiting colourists and so I look at colourist work and I sort of I think you know I don't look for style but I think everyone has their tendencies everyone has their tastes and if you look at a a large body of work from a particular colourist a good colourist it won't all look the same but you'll sort of start to

have an idea of their concerns of the things they think about you know it's very hard to judge colour even as an experienced colourist right because when it's done well it sort of does disappear and you don't have the context and you don't have the offline so you know you don't know whether it's one of those you know just beautiful like passes you know I'm trying to think of the sports metaphor here but I'm not a good sports metaphor person you know like passing an alley

into the pool goes in the net or the hole or whatever you know because the cinematographer was just ridiculously talented or the jobs where they've had to do absolute bloody surgery you know but if you look at a colourist work together you can see tendencies and you can see thought right like you can see a point of view and I think that's much more interesting than style you know like style is a very sort of shorthand way of summing that up you know but you can you can see

evidence of like of original thought or something like you can see you can see handprints or fingerprints or something it's a lot more slippery than just style but but there's something there you know so that's that's always what I look for when I'm looking for colourists. I was having a

when I'm looking for colourists. I was having a look at some stills from a recent job that you posted on Instagram you'll have to refresh me as to the name of it but it was a collaboration job it was like Apple and oh yes yeah I mean I think was Office Works first Apple seconds but nonetheless okay I thought those stills were so beautiful and I thought oh here's here's another classic Dan grade where you've got really clean pure beautiful colours like you've just thought

today I'm in love with yellow and I want a symphony of yellow and I want it to be the most enticing gorgeous yellow and it's not really

yellow is the colour I tussle with the most I think yellow is the trickiest colour right I really do I think I think it's the narrowest it's the narrowest like technically you know on one side you have this sort of like yucky green sort of NTSC kind of crevasse and then on the other side you have this sort of magentery like magentery orange kind of situation yeah actually I really spend a lot of time thinking about yellow it's it's troublesome I mean that's an interesting one

because that job yeah right that that job was I was like it's a 15 seconder this is a bit of a stretch you know there's not even enough shots to get good stills out of you know like is it really an apple job not sort of not really but yeah no it's that's really nice again it's that thing of you just don't have perspective on your own work you know like instagram is a funny thing to to throw your work into because yeah every now and then something will take off and you're like okay and then

something you think is fantastic will just absolutely flop you know but of course there's there's there's an algorithm you're tussling with that no one really understands so you can always blame the algorithm this is true this is true you posted at 2 30 pm not 3 o'clock pm or something yeah yeah so I should probably wrap up shortly although I have been absolutely loving every second of chatting with you I suppose before I do

what do you see next for crayon and that's a that's a bit of a wild card question right and also an annoyingly open-ended one but where where do you where do you want to steer this ship that you've created the the thing you still need a lot of money for is a theater right so I can see that at some point in our future because you know definitely as an individual colorist you're not going to have a theater but as a group of colors together it's possible I want to keep on developing

cloud workflows sort of like both official and unofficial I think you know look it's going to get to the point probably in our careers where we won't have a computer on our desks you know we'll be spinning up a bunch of machines and an underground lair somewhere with a zillion graphics cards you know when we need to render and and half a zillion when we don't but I think I think there's a lot of interesting stuff still to be done with technology but technology like this was something I was

thinking about before but I don't think I mentioned when you were talking about the technology and being nerdy about you know Postgres databases and all the rest of it I think colorists are extremely good at thinking about creativity in an efficient way about about workflow about getting to a good result quickly right I think when you take that mentality and you apply it to technology when you really start to think about like how these tools can be used you know from the

perspective of someone who you know like there are tools I don't use on my panel because it's two button presses instead of one you know like that can be the difference between something I use regularly and something I don't you know so when you take that kind of hyper obsession with like creative efficiency and you you you sort of start looking at technology through that lens you know it can it's not easy to come up with new ideas but it can certainly be very interesting

to come up with ideas that benefits that benefit all colorists right like that whether sort of inside our organization or outside yeah so bore like somewhat boring tools like databases and things like that you know when you think about them through the lens of ease of use and like problems that we keep on facing it's it's yeah it's really it's really interesting proactive so we want to keep on coming up with like tools that people would think are nerdy but other

colorists get excited about you know it's nice having a captive audience to appreciate invention in that area you know and I mean look

a big a big part of what Crayon does which we have not really talked about is is the production team is the producers right we have we have a lot of producers and we have a lot of sort of technology and infrastructure that allow them to sort of effectively work with a lot of different colorists and I think that's probably like the secret source of of of what what we're doing and and why it's working you know it's about it's about helping colorists do the things they're best at

and not have to do the things that they're not the best at but it's also about you know applying that kind of colorist thinking to the producers roles and to the tools that we use and and how to make that collaboration as frictionless as possible right I think I think that's a really interesting problem to solve you know anytime anytime a colorist hits a problem over and over and over again it's kind of you know you can you can rail against it or you can

sort of turn it into yeah a problem to be solved or something to adapt to or a workflow change and it's it's it's sort of really interesting to be able to apply that thinking to yet to to all aspects of of the work we do right like that it isn't just about the grade session it's about sometimes the weeks of discussions and negotiations and planning that happened before and the stuff that happens after you know from from invoicing to you know making it easy for clients to pay versus tricky

like you know there's there's all kinds of technology you can use there to you know building workflows to make sure you've generated the stills for the the job the colorist really wants to post and a way of getting that to the top of the list so the producers you know can can action that passively like all this all this pretty dry stuff I find really interesting and it's a nice sort of it's a nice way of of using that colorist thinking but in a different context I

really enjoy it so lots more of that yes I mean from from the perspective of somebody who's represented by Crayon I have to say that that's again nepotism alert nepotism alert well I know I know but like I never say anything I don't mean and yes I'm a I'm a bit I'm a bit like I'll say it to your face but I I do think that that's been

one of the main benefits in coming on board as a colorist as a Crayon colorist is having those systems in place and it took me a little bit to get on boarded. It's a lot there's a lot of a lot of - esoteric stuff we've developed - There are systems, right ?

yeah and and I have to try to understand those systems and you know there are still a few things that I just put in the too hard basket and I will get to once I have some brain space but to to have a team of people who know what you need as a colorist right now which is beyond just getting the session booked in and paid for but also that you need to have some stills for for publicity afterwards you need to know who to credit in those stills and who not to you need people who understand why

you may or may not mention a director's version to an agency what director's version yeah exactly all of those sorts of things and and to know that yes it's really important for our for our brain space to see an offline ahead of time at least the day before and so we can you know be in the shower the following morning and have you know those thoughts just going through of like okay I see a challenge here I see a challenge there I'll be able to possibly use this tool to solve that yeah yeah

just being able to gently sneak up on a project is so nice yeah rather than like getting dropped in the hot seat on the day yeah and I know that when I'm doing my own producing that's the last thing that I'm thinking about I'm just like going in you know it's it's like every day is just putting out fires spot fire management and it's like I all right I've got I've got it in the schedule at the right time and I'm there job done I'm not thinking about getting the off-lines the

day before I'm not thinking about recording any information about the job itself it's just get in there get out get it done is everyone happy okay phew what's next so it is nice to have that sense that you know there are people who are recording important information and are thinking about things that I don't want to think about and who is the name of this director you know well you know it sounds it sounds stupid right because like I love the directors that I work with

but sometimes you don't know the people sometimes it's not the director who's got you involved you know Ant then you're sitting is a dark room with people - you don't necessarily get an introduction - no exactly I always say... it's like you know you you sit in a room with people sometimes new people every day and then you look at a whole bunch of other people the whole day you know and and then you know you bump into someone getting coffee and they know

you really well they know the back of your head really well and you you're just like gosh what was the like what was the job you know when did I work with this person before oh that's right I can always remember the job so you know and we all have to compartmentalize so much to to get what we need to do done that there's only so much that you can actually physically do with one person so yes yeah exactly there are finite resources of an individual person and and you

know sort of if you try and go beyond that you very quickly find yourself running a small business and yes you know it actually gets easier in my experience like once you get beyond that sort of one two three person scale you know but having having had to go through that myself I would like to help other people not to have

- to you know yeah and resources. - Just a quick shout out before we wrap up and I really do need to go because I have a session about to start and I'm seeing a message that somebody has actually jped into a zoom a little ahead of time so we should wrap this up yes but I just wanted to shout out to the other colorists at Crayon absolutely and you know Sam McCarthy who is on instagram Sam Sam in person it's just what I call him in my head no I know I have directors I have

directors who I just think of by their like instagram handles as well you know yeah so Sam who's based in Melbourne with me Kali Bateman obviously up in Brisbane shout out to you and the recent edition of Max Ferguson-Hook who has just moved from London to Auckland who we're all very very excited about learning from and used to be with time-based arts over in the the esteemed time-based arts yes yes and Dan and Max are currently having a really great time

putting together Max's grade suite well I feel like I'm costing that I'm sending him towards esoteric furniture yeah but also sending him towards like Facebook marketplace bargains so you know it kind of evens out something Dan's exceptional at. I do I do I do love a bargain

so I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's work as as we move forward as a little coloring team little coloring family yeah and I and I do love having this little peanut gallery to say you know give each other a little bit of egging on and reinforcing the great work that everyone does and also having people to help troubleshoot the inevitable things that go wrong the the classic terse message from in the grade about like have you ever seen this problem before you know

and then everyone immediately like assembles like Batman to to to log suggestions...

Turn off caching is usually the answer yes absolutely so look I better I better finish up and jump on the zoom but thank you so much for joining me Dan pleasure yes I'm sure we'll speak again today and I hope this comes across as a podcast podcast not just like a a rambling conversation between some colleagues but yeah they're the best ones thank you so much for Mixing Light I'm Kali Bateman and I'll see you all again soon bye @wearecrayon on instagram give me a follow all right see ya bye