Colorist Eric Whipp joined Gordon Burkell to answer questions about Mad Max: Fury Road, Color Correction, and give career advice. Eric talks about his workflow while working remotely, as well as the delicate balance of working with clients. If you want to learn more directly from Eric on his processes, his insights and his vast amount of experiences; check out our online class with Eric here.
Eric Whipp was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and raised in Australia. He became a colorist in the 1990s and helped George Miller with his Oscar-winning film, Happy Feet. Today he is a Co-Founder and Senior Colorist at Alter Ego in Toronto, Canada. He reunited with George Miller for the ground-breaking film Mad Max: Fury Road. He most recently finished The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.
Gordon Burkell (GB) - Hi everyone, I'm Gordon Burkell from Filmmaker U. At FilmmakerU.com we create courses for film professionals to deepen and diversify their existing skill set. Every week on Friday at 2pm Eastern time we go live with a film professional to give you a chance to ask your questions. Now today we're joined by Eric Whipp, and Eric's the colorist for Mad Max Fury Road, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Happy Feet I & II, and he's also one of the Co-owners of Alter Ego post here in Toronto. Hi, Eric. Welcome to filmmaker U live.
Eric Whipp (EW) - Thank you.
GB - I guess I'll start off with a question about which section of Mad Max: Fury Road was the most difficult for you to color?
EW - Good question. It was it was the day for night section when you going into the movie that that was going to be was challenging because the the whole scene was shot during the daytime and it was two to three stops overexposed so it looked nothing like night. So that was a challenge but we had a great method. The idea of it was to overexpose the footage by a couple of stops, which means you have lots of range in your shadows. Then but you don't clip your highlights, make sure that if someone was on set watching scopes and making sure nothing was being clipped. Then in the grade we were able to take that shot, expose it down and got a nice creaminess to it but then we can go in and isolate anything we want in the shadows and lift them up and get all the little bits of detail in there. So you end up with a very, you know, affected kind of look, but it works really well. But to do that It requires a ton of more though. So it took, you know, we knew it going into it. So that was we were like, alright, that aside a few months here, and we'll work on that scene.
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