In the sparse motel room, the Los Angeles police detective confronts his lover and seeks to know her role in the mutilation murder of a young actress found cut in half in a vacant field. As portrayed by Josh Hartnett and Hilary Swank, the characters are lit in muted brown and tans and yellows. The only other colors in the room are the green of the blinds and red reflected from the motel sign through a window. The look of that scene from “The Black Dahlia” may have been conceived by director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond but it was digital intermediate colorist Mike Sowa who made it possible. “The look they were going for was a de-saturated sepia period piece,” Sowa said of the film released in theaters Sept. 15. “We created that look sitting with the cinematographer and we came up with it and make sure that look is translated through the whole movie.” The position of colorist has been around the film industry for decades. But advances in technology have caused this job and other behind-the-scenes film positions to evolve into taking on greater responsibilities. New technical requirements have also created new positions in the industry. Sowa, a Westlake Village resident who works for LaserPacific in Hollywood, describes his position as colorist as one that has “morphed” because of technology. The role has also become more involved in the production side than it had in the past, he added. The use of digital cameras allows for more immediate viewing of footage. No longer does a director or cinematographer have to wait for film to be developed to see what they shot. Nor do they have to wait until the post-production process to have footage manipulated to give it a certain look. “We have built color corrections systems that end up on sets to put a look on the signal before it hits the video monitors on set,” said Marco Bario, vice president of Technicolor Digital Intermediates, in Burbank. Technicolor has long been seen as a film lab but the rise of digital filmmaking has led to new job opportunities as production and post production switches to a digital workflow. The digital content still needs to be processed color corrected, archived, synced for sound and made into dailies screened following a day’s shoot. Those positions tend to be more technical in nature resulting in an adjustment and enhancement of skills, Bario said. “It is bred out of video post-production more than film lab technologies,” Bario said. When a movie, television show or even a commercial is shot digitally, the footage goes directly onto a disc drive rather than onto film. That advancement resulted in the creation of the digital media assistant, the person responsible for making sure the image is captured, stored and backed up. “They wrangle all the data within the system and make sure it’s all where it’s supposed to be,” Sowa said. Another new and important position is that of the digital imaging technician, also called an image capture engineer. This person translates what the director of photography wants into a language that the equipment can understand, said Kristin Petrovich, chief executive officer of HD Expo, a Burbank firm that sponsors trade shows, workshops and online education for filmmakers working in digital. “The relationship between the cinematographer and the digital imaging technician is critical,” Petrovich said. “The cinematographer is really entrusting this technician to take his message and deliver it technically through digital.” But technology in entertainment can also have a downside. By using digital rather than film cameras the number of productions undergoing the process of transferring film into a digital form that can be altered goes down and that impacts post-production facilities and the number of colorists they have. “If there aren’t that many filmed shows, you don’t need that many colorists,” Sowa said. Mary Jo Markey, an editor who has worked on ABC’s “Lost” and this summer’s “Mission: Impossible: III,” said that using computers to edit films and television shows slashes back on the number of assistants needed in the cutting room. And that in turn negatively affects the apprentice-mentor relationship in which an editor would instruct the assistant in what they were doing and why they were doing it. Now the cutting room assistants are often more like computer technicians than film assistants, Markey said. “All the stuff they used to do with piles of film hanging around cutting rooms, being organized and re-rolled and being put away all that’s dead, all that’s gone,” Markey said.
