Filmmaker and frequent co-host of This Week in Media John Flowers has posted a detailed article on his blog about color correcting and entire feature film in only ten days using Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks.
The film is Wasting Away, a zombie comedy that won the Audience Award for Best Film at ScreamFest (beating out 30 Days of Night). It was shot with the Viper camera, and Flowers finished the entire film in Final Cut Pro using the color correction tools I designed for Red Giant Software. As far as I know, this is the first feature film finished using Looks and Colorista, and I feel like a proud pappa.
Frequent readers of ProLost and The Guide will notice two things about the above: First, Flowers finished his film in his NLE, which is something I somewhat notoriously council against whenever I get a chance. Secondly, Flowers chose the Colorista/Looks solution over Apple's Color. I've gone on record stating that I admire Color's feature set and don't consider Colorista or Looks to be in direct competition with it. I've also stated repeatedly that Magic Bullet Looks in itself is not a color corrector—it is designed to create a look
on top of already corrected footage.
Often a company needs its customers to tell them what their product truly is. "Magic Bullet" started as a code name for a frame-rate conversion technology, but the independent filmmakers who couldn't live without it turned that codename into a brand. Users of a next-day package service called "Federal Express" informed the company of its true name: FedEx. Who really designed the user experience of Twitter, the developers or the user community?
So if you read Flowers's excellent article and see his screenshots and ask yourself, "Is Stu listening? Does he realize that filmmakers want powerful and easy-to-use color correction tools that turn their NLE into a proper finishing tool? And that they're already using Magic Bullet for this, despite his intentions?"
Well rest assured, the answer is yes.
