Some believe dramatic work is where all the glory is, but Gary Shaw of Vancouver video post house Command Post/TOYBOX West begs to differ. The senior colorist still often collaborates with producers and directors in setting up the initial style of tv series, but he is also getting a lot creative satisfaction working on spots.

‘I’ve been doing [commercials] for 17 years and it’s always interesting to me,’ he confides. ‘I like the collaboration. I think it’s more about interacting with clients than about working with the negative.’

Shaw admits, however, that the pressure of doing a film-to-video transfer rises incrementally with the number of people in his suite.

‘It comes from trying to respond to the hierarchy of the room,’ he says, adding that the dynamic is different in his hometown than in Toronto. ‘Toronto’s somewhat unique in the respect that you work much more with an editor. In Vancouver, you work with the art director, the director, the agency, and with the producers in some cases. There’s a lot more interaction here with different people.’

Shaw has been in the biz long enough to have established comfortable working relationships with these local creative types. TOYBOX West has also seen a lot of action recently from the Chicago, New York and Los Angeles agencies shooting in town, due in large part to the Screen Actors Guild strike in the u.s. He observes a different attitude from his American collaborators.

‘They treat people very differently than on our coasts here,’ he says. ‘[They are] maybe a little more aggressive, but that’s not a problem.’

Spots feeding off each other

Shaw mentions a recent example of rival Vancouver post house Rainmaker Digital Pictures coloring a series of spots for Telus that cloned the familiar Gap ad style. He doesn’t find this method of imitating an established look artistically stifling – in fact, he’s thankful when the client provides a reference point.

‘It gives you a place to work from,’ he explains. ‘In the best-case scenario they bring in a board covered in photo clippings, and they might have a tape. They give you this huge montage of images and want you to come up with an essence of all those images.’

In his time Shaw has witnessed many transfer styles fall in and out of favor. For a while, many commercials went for a cyan look, followed by the phenomena of the ‘soft fuzzy’ spot. Lately, many clients have sought a style similar to the ‘bleach-bypass’ look of film – that is, the technique of silver retention in the image creating a stark, almost monochromatic look.

In video, Shaw explains, the same effect is achieved far more easily on a telecine, ‘provided a reference is available. The biggest challenge is to go far enough with it, to a point of no return.’

He observes that commercial producers want to return to the way transfers were done 15 years ago, when a lot of them came from a film print.

‘Everybody’s looking for a harder-edged, contrasty look, and luckily the equipment today allows you to do that from negative. Right now 40% of the jobs I get want some kind of bleach-bypass look.’

Shaw adds that he has done numerous spots lately that employ actual film processing techniques.

‘What there is more of now is people taking Kodak Ektachrome 100D 5285 reversal film stock and cross-processing it. You’re running this print stock through a negative bath and what you end up with is intense contrast and saturated color.’

Shaw has spent up to two hours doing color correction on a single shot, but often he can finish an entire 30-second spot in that time. The overall process sometimes takes five to six hours, as in the case of food commercials.

‘If you’re doing a spot that’s ‘lifestyles’ or ‘real people,’ you have tremendous freedom and flexibility in helping determine the look,’ he explains. ‘But with food, you have to be accurate and true to what was shot and at the same time make it look better than it is. You have to sell it, and that can be difficult.’

Shaw makes it all possible on TOYBOX West’s recently acquired Pogle system from u.k. manufacturer Pandora International. The Pogle is a high-definition color corrector which employs up to six windows that pop up on screen, isolating areas within the overall image that the telecine artist can then manipulate. Updates of the Pogle will be able to easily de-focus selected areas of the picture as well as colors – in essence creating electronically what a swing/shift lens would do on the set.

A few years ago this style – part of the image sharp, part soft – was all the rage, but Shaw reports its use lately has been more restrained.

‘The point is not to create some wacky, half-in-focus look a lot of the time,’ he says. ‘For example, if you’re trying to focus on a girl on a swing and there’s a lot of distracting color or contrast around her, we’ll [soften] those areas to draw your eye to where you want to go. Sometimes that’s very hard to control in photography.’

TOYBOX West is also equipped with three da Vinci Renaissance 8:8:8 color-correction systems, which allow colorists to finesse one windowed area at a time.

Shaw questions HD

TOYBOX West recently purchased new tape decks to handle its increased volume of commercial work. The acquisition of more hd-capable scanners will rise with more hd shooting, which is at present more prevalent in the world of mows. Shaw does not see the hd revolution overtaking the commercial biz just yet.

‘I think we’ll start to see a demand by the beginning of next year, possibly as late as the fall,’ he forecasts. ‘I know [toybox in] Toronto did a big series of Ford jobs in hd – that was their first big one. It’s certainly moving in that direction.’

Shaw expresses some concern, however, over the potential impact of Sony’s HDW-F900 hdcam, which is economically attractive to producers because it records at 24 frames per second, like a film camera, yet dispenses with film stock. The problem is the hdcam does not offer off-speed and variable shutter options.

‘When was the last time a commercial was shot strictly at 24 frames?’ Shaw points out. ‘I don’t know a director who doesn’t shoot at 60, 120 – I did a commercial recently that was shot at 1000 on Photo-Sonics. [The HDW-F900] is only capable of 24fps. Would we see the death of slow motion in commercials?’

Shaw acknowledges that it is only a matter of time before the camera manufacturers remedy the situation, but he is still holding out for a long future for the film medium.

‘There are some clients who don’t want to spend the money on film anymore,’ he laments. ‘But I think it’s going to be a huge creative loss, because those commercials we find most beautiful are the ones that show us something that can’t be seen with the normal persistence of vision, and only high-speed film can do that.’ *

-www.compt.com (Command Post and Transfer)

-www.davsys.com (da Vinci)

-www.pogle.pandora-int.com