BIOGRAPHICAL

Continuously working in the San Francisco Film Industry since 1975
(not counting one screenwriting Spring in Paris)

While taking lower division undergraduate courses in my home state Illinois I noticed that the experimental films, music, and literature I was drawn to were often made in San Francisco. I hopped an Amtrak train to work my way through college at San Francisco State University's cinema department.

I call what I do motion picture color finishing, the enhancement of cinematography in the post-production process, but it has many other names from its long history. The craft of color grading motion pictures began in the photo-chemical era of the film laboratory. In the United States the practice was called timing and elsewhere grading. That's where I got my start, too, as a timer at W.A.Palmer Films, San Francisco's premier film laboratory, in 1975.

Color grading advanced into the electronic era with the development of telecines and computerized color correction. I jumped to the telecine trade in 1984, first at Diner+Allied and then over to Western Images in 1991 where I worked on television commercials, Lucasfilm's ABC television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and other broadcast long-form titles. I have worked as a free lance telecine colorist since 2001 at San Francisco telecine houses including Varitel Modern VideoFilm, American Zoetrope, Retina, and Spy Post.

The digital era of color grading has ushered in the enormous creative potential of the digital intermediate. I participated on PIXAR's digital intermediate color grading team on Brad Bird's The Incredibles using the discreet lustre station in 2004. That year I also worked on the restoration via HD Digital intermediate of the 1974 film The Grateful Dead in collaboration with David O.Weissman of Video Arts. In 2005, I helped Monaco Digital Film Laboratories inaugurate their digital intermediate department using Assimilate's SCRATCH station to color grade Finn Taylor's feature film The Darwin Awards.

Since 2004, I have been working on ways to make my craft affordable, practical, and a creative advance for filmmakers especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Please visit my Recent Work page for a list of projects and clients from the third act of my career: The Digital Cinema.


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