Richard Lackey

I am obsessed with the art and science of emulating not only the color and grain, but as much of the “feeling” and “emotion” as possible of images captured on motion picture film using smartphone video as a source. This may sound like a strange mission, but as a post production professional, and colorist who understands the images I manipulate are simply data, I believe that any digital source meeting certain minimum technical requirements can be manipulated to meet almost any creative look desired with the right tools, approach and workflow.

Whether the camera source is photo-chemical, or electronic, that information is sampled, and becomes data, regardless of how the sampled values originated. From source to display, these values can be measured, matched and altered. Image noise, motion artifacts, and compression artifacts can be removed. Brand new pixels can be interpolated, inferred, and created using sophisticated ML algorithms trained on vast datasets.

Smartphone video, with its limited dynamic range, limited bit depth, and aggressive compression is a challenging source for experimentation and testing of these tools and methods.