Colorist Block – When Nothing Looks Good

Colorist Block – When Nothing Looks Good

I’ve been incredibly lucky in my grading career.

I got my own grading suite in November 2013 and every weekday since then give or take a few holidays and the occasional outside the grading suite adventure, I have been grading full time.

Of course that means new clients, new jobs and new challenges and at my facility it’s usually all three of those each day!

One thing I’m particularly proud of is that I’ve have always been able to find a look that both myself and the client could really be happy with at the end of the day.

Until yesterday!

What happened yesterday was I hit a complete creative roadblock and couldn’t grade a music video and get it to the point that either myself or the director were happy with.

I was pretty damn frustrated and did pretty much everything wrong for hours.

Finally after almost 3 or 4 hours of grading I managed to reboot my brain and the looks and grades started flowing again.

Sound familiar?

We’ve all been there and while Pat and Robbie have shared some great Insights about how they overcome a creative block, I thought in this Insight, I’d share my story and how I managed to get over my frustrations and lack of creativity and hopefully this will help you find a way to overcome similar situations in your own work.

My Block

In this particular case, I was working with a director I have worked with many times before named Michael Holyk. He is also a good friend which made the creative impasse less of a disaster and more just frustrating as I could be honest with him about what was going on in my head.

See the thing is I know what we’re capable of doing as a team which made my frustration….well…even more frustrating!