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. The color timer, a micro podcast experience.