Meet the Colourist: Chris Martin, Mission Film & Design

Meet the Colourist: Chris Martin, Mission Film & Design

Brie Clayton June 25, 2024

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Chris has been a colourist for the last 20+ years, based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. He has balanced his commercial and music video work with his love for narrative and documentary projects. His credits include Fruitvale Station , and 7 Prisoners (2021).

Along the way, Chris has collaborated with filmmakers Ryan Coogler, Rachel Morrison, Chlo Zao, Alexandre Moratto and Francis Ford Coppola.

Since 2016, Chris has been part of the team at Mission Film and Design (MFD).

FilmLight: Tell us about your journey to becoming a successful colourist?

I was a History major in college when I took my first photography class. I was immediately hooked, going into the university dark room at night and not realising it was morning until I came out. Later, I wound up as a PA at a post facility thinking I wanted to be an editor. They had a telecine and colour grading system and I was drawn to how the craft combined the elements of the dark room with working from film, while being this bridge between production and post-production.

Pushing Dead, 2016

Can you tell us more about Mission Film and Design?

Mission Film and Design (MFD) is a boutique shop right along the water near the historic Ferry Building in San Francisco. Our focus is colour grading, so we collaborate with a wide range of creative entities who are looking for a grading partner. Being in a relatively small market, what I love most is that I get to work on so many different types of projects. I can go from working with agency creatives one day, to grading a Sundance bound film the next.

How long have you been grading on Baselight?

I have been on Baselight now for five years. It was easy to fall in love with all the grading tools. Everything is so well thought out and designed. Base Grade is a great example. It is the first primary grading tool I have used which allows for such natural control over the zone system. We were also drawn to FilmLight's colour science and colour management. As a boutique, we do not have the luxury of having a colour scientist on staff. FilmLight has filled that role for us.

We definitely had our eye on more complex workflows too, such as HDR and Dolby Vision, when we added Baselight. The first time I graded for Dolby Vision was for the Netflix film 7 Prisoners, directed by Alexandre Moratto. That project was a big first for us and working on Baselight provided both the creative and technical backbone I needed.

7 Prisoners, 2021

FilmLight: How has the role of a colourist changed over the years?

I think a colourist sees an image through the eyes of the tools they have at their disposal. So when we get a tool that elevates our ability to work with the image in a new and unique way, I feel like our craft is constantly evolving. Thinking about when I first used Baselight, all the textural tools were a brave new world for me. Now I really see an image beyond exposure, contrast, hue and saturation - I see the more nuanced elements that construct an image because I have the tools to do something about it.

Can you tell us more about your work on the independent film, Owl?

Owl is very much a labour of love' film with deep Bay Area roots. The director, Julian Pham and DoP, Andr s Gallegos worked on the film for five years, filming on and off through the pandemic. They were close to locking by the time I came on as colourist. I was really drawn to the strong visual composition of the film, which was shot on ARRI ALEXA and framed for 1.33. There are a lot of scenes where dialogue takes a back seat to composition and movement and I could see the grade was really going to play a strong role in shaping the film.

Owl, 2024

You started the film on Baselight 5.3?

We were still in Baselight 5.3 for the look development and first pass. We developed a look that did not so much mimic 16mm Kodachrome as it did honour the spirit of the stock. Working in ACES, we came up with a recipe that blended varying degrees of three of Baselight's Core Looks within the Look operator Vivid, Complement and Light. We came up with the right amount of weight, split tone and hue crosstalk in the blues and reds that we felt gave a modern twist to Kodachrome. After this, I worked with the flare operator in Base Grade. The right amount of lift was found that acted like a slight flashing of the film. This allowed me to work in the layers above and lean into lowering the overall exposure and finding the darker mood the film has while preserving a consistent quality to the shadows across the film that had a nice analogue roll to them.

I really like how Baselight allows me to customise a grading layer. Once we were happy with the developed look, I created a single consolidated layer that blended the Core Looks in the proper order and then added the Base Grade flare lift to the bottom of the layer's operators. I then just had one strip with the entire look development that I could grade through. I also made a category for it so we could easily fine tune the look as we went. We used the grain tool in Baselight to dial in the right amount of grain to evoke 16mm.

Owl, 2024

You then switched to Baselight 6.0. Which tools did you utilise and how did this move support the film?

As luck would have it, Baselight 6.0 was released about the same time we finished the first pass. I had a hunch that some of the new textural tools such as Bokeh and Flare would work great on this project.

In the film, Jean, the protagonist, has returned home to look after her ailing father. She is forced to confront both the skeletons in her past and the realisation of what she is about to sacrifice. There's a lot of non-verbal quiet moments in the film where Jean is in her own world lost in her thoughts. We found using the Bokeh tool with

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