If you count the moment I stumbled into Phil’s grading suite for the first time to see him doing magic with Baselight, then that was it.

The most memorable experience was watching Phil grade a feature film with the incredible cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. That’s when I got to see all the possibilities in colour grading: how to bring creative visions into life.

The second memorable moment was colour grading my very first job all by myself: an Opel Astra campaign. That was in 2016 at nhb Hamburg, and of course with Baselight.

First, that it is a cohesive system. You get everything you need – the panel, the computer, the software – from one company. Whenever you need help with any of if you just need to make one call. FilmLight takes care of it.

That also means you get to work closely with the developers of Baselight, who are so fierce about their work. That makes it so special and so well-thought-out, and it is great to feel I’m contributing to that process.

I also love that the system is built for professionals. It is clearly created for the best possible performance on high-end projects. And that gives a freedom: everything is possible and there are no limits to what you can achieve.

Sometimes, people think that you can’t be any good just because you are young. Some clients would come to the grading session and have low expectations when they enter my grading suite. But as soon as we start and spend time together, you can see the distrust disappear and they realise: all right, he knows what he’s doing. I must say I enjoy the moment when it turns around and you can see they are blown away by your work.

I may not have 20 years of grading experience on my back, but I make up for it by having an untainted, progressive approach, by being up to date on new techniques and receptive to new ideas.

At first be sure this is really what you want to do, because the competition is hard and the working hours can be crazy.

Get into a post house that has a well-equipped Baselight suite with a great colourist. Start as an assistant, or get an internship.

Learn as much as you can, and if they need to work all night, stay until they leave too. The hardest hours at the job can be the ones where you learn the most crucial lessons.

There are many who have inspired me along the way, if only with a little side note or with their love for the job.

There was Phil Schmidt, my teacher from day one. He is a maniac when it comes to film. Whenever I thought “this is it, I’ve outsmarted his techniques”, he came right around the corner to show me something even better, something new, always blowing me away again and again.

Also Maxine Gervais is very inspirational for me. We met at the Baselight Colour Days in Amsterdam and were discussing Baselight techniques. We stayed in contact over email and she would always answer all of my questions about her way of working, like the way she uses colour spaces and Base Grade, and how she sets up her operators. She is a very open person and likes to share her knowledge: I admire that.

Although unfortunately I have never got to meet him, Yvan Lucas’ style, his look and his thinking are just on another level.

There are far too many to list all of them, but let’s start with the most amazing ones. Among directors:

Alejandro Inarritu – The Revenant
Wes Anderson – Grand Budapest Hotel
Gaspar Noé – Enter the Void, Irreversible
David Fincher – the dark look of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is absolutely awesome
Roman Polanski – Chinatown
Martin Scorsese – Taxi Driver, Wolf of Wall Street
Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan
Zhang Yimou – Hero
Quentin Tarrantino – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Park Chan-wook – Old Boy, The Handmaiden
Jean-Luc Godard – Le Mépris
And among DoPs:
Darius Khondji – Too Old to Die Young
Benoit Debie – Enter the Void, Irreversible
Emmanuel Lubezki – Tree of Life, The Revenant
Roger Deakins – Blade Runner 2049
Rodrigo Prieto – The Wolf of Wall Street

Most of the time I work on commercials. Sometimes music videos or small feature films.

On commercial projects I usually get involved after the shoot. Because I am interested in workflows and also responsible for the colour pipelines, I get involved in the early stages in post when the VFX team does the preparation for the project in house.

I’m currently based in Hamburg, where I work about 75% of the time, but in December I’m moving to Berlin. Each of our offices has its own charm and advantages.

As for dividing the time, there is no hard rule. Sometimes I fly to Munich twice a week, or even stay for two weeks straight. And then I might need to be in Berlin for a month. There are days when I might fly to Düsseldorf for about six hours and fly straight out again. It always depends on the project and workload.

Berlin is a cool city with crazy people and a great film scene. I love it there. Living there fits in well with my career and my personal life. Also, I’m looking forward to living closer to my Dad, who also lives in Berlin.

I had the great opportunity to do the grade for the Anthem commercial with the agency Anomaly in Berlin. Every short film had a different colourist and director working on it.

The Anthem film brings all the stories together. It has parts of each short film plus some additional material.

The interesting thing here is that the Anthem film consists of raw film scans that were also used in the short films, raw film scans that weren’t used in other films, already graded footage, and completely newly shot footage. So, the challenge for me was to get all this in one consistent movie, with the agency having their own colour vision in mind but also not moving too far away from the other movies.

I had to grade on top of already graded footage, making digital footage look like film, and imitate grades from those short films, But that is pretty easy with Baselight, because everything is possible. There are no boundaries. If you can imagine it, you can create it.

As a final step there was a final grading session with the agency to get the desired look they wanted.

One recent interesting project was for the BMW X Range, that involved James Bamford as the main colourist. James started the grade with the director, and I continued with the agency. It is a huge project with over 500 vfx shots and many different versions as well as material for other areas like launch films and social media alongside the commercials.

So a classic commercial workflow was not possible here. Too often the grade got changed: the edit was not final when the grading began, and so on. So we needed to come up with a feature film-like workflow solution for this project, and we relied heavily on [FilmLight’s render-free portable format] BLG. This allowed the effects team to comp on the RAW footage and easily exchange the grades on top of it, without cycling the comp versions and new edits over and over through the Baselight.

The production time was only six to eight weeks, which was challenging but it worked really well. We could not have done it without BLGs – otherwise hundreds of night shifts would have been needed. So nhb has now fully integrated the BLG workflow, and we use it on every VFX-heavy project. It took some time to develop it and getting everyone on board, but now it works great and everyone is used to it.

I work very closely with the VFX department, because I am interested in workflows and pipelines. We saw early on the potential of the BLG workflow, using plugins in VFX and also in editorial. I worked alongside Nuke and Flame people. Together we did many tests, and got Daniele [Siragusano, FilmLight image engineer] on board – always a great help – and finally completed it and presented it to the company.

I am currently recovering from an injury, but will hopefully get back into training before the end of the year.

I was fascinated by how strong you could become. I didn’t only want to look like some pumped up dude, but actually have the strength to pull a car or tear out a tree. So, I started to go to the gym, where I met a few guys that were into power lifting. A few days later I found myself trying it too and I was hooked and training towards competitions! I guess I’m an all-in person: if I get hooked I want to be the best I can get.