Max Horton
"I was particularly good at physics at school and I went onto study at the University of London. I took great satisfaction at successfully completing my studies at that level, but a physics degree isn’t enormously useful. After I graduated, my father arrange for a couple of interviews with accountancy firms."
"I had my own car at the time, and what I enjoyed most was driving all over London. So when I saw a job at MPC as a courier/runner, I thought that could be fun. None of us knew what a post house was, so my parents just told their friends that I was involved in making films in Soho!"
"On my first day, I was told that there was already a Matthew who worked there as a runner. In fact, it was Matthew Holben, the CEO of Prime Focus and Double Negative. They couldn’t have two Matthews, so I was told to pick another name. Baffled to think of one, they called me ‘Mad Max’. To this day, I am still known as Max."
"The novelty of driving around as a runner soon wore off. However, I was in love with all of the equipment and the whole idea of being that one person driving a suite. I decided right there and then, that I wanted to be that person."
"My thought was to get a technical job at MPC and work my way up. How hard could that be? I had a degree in physics, so I thought it would be easy. When I finally got my chance for an interview with the technical director, he took one look at me and immediately said, ‘ next!’ Back then, it was very much an engineering job and he really wanted people who were ex-BBC. And, here I was thinking, I could just waltz in and they would immediately want me."
"So I was moved sideways into bookings and the library. I remember finding this to be quite hard at first, as I didn’t have any experience working with agency people. What I did get from this experience was learning how to deal with clients, some of whom were, very, very difficult to work with."
"After a short while, one of the telecine operators left MPC to set up his own suite and he was looking out for an assistant. So I joined Trillion Double Vision, which was essentially a one man band and me! Color grading began here for me, as soon I found myself getting into some rudimentary grading and color balancing."
"About this time, I started to experiment with making my own short films on VHS. I then bought a Braun 561 film camera and moved up to Super 8 filmmaking, which I could only do having access to a telecine and friends with an 8mm gate. I was able to experiment with different film stocks from which I started to properly understand the finer points of exposure and grain. There was a whole group of us in London’s post scene all doing the same thing, so it was great to be involved in a filmmaking community that was experimenting with different things."
"It’s incredible to think, we could actually shoot, scan and edit our home movies back then. Funny to think it would take another twenty years before everybody could do the same thing! Back then we were all encourage to play and learn how to use all of this very, very expensive equipment."
"My next job was at Virgin, transferring feature films across to VHS for the rentals shops. Unfortunately our source materials were all cinema prints, so they were incredibly dense and difficult to scan. With the early telecine having such a dim light source, you hardly got anything out of them."
"For the most part, I was pretty much left to my own devices, so I would scan them as I thought they should be. This involved scanning them perhaps ten times to get the best match. So I would see each scene over and over again. Watching these films all day long, you soon began to see how they put a creative edit together for a feature film - which turned out to be great training for later in life."
"I then received a call from Kevin Shaw at Cell Animation in North London. They had Bosch telecines and the very latest DaVinci, which was the first to have secondary grading controls. Having this level of control changed everything."
"Before long I found myself grading a huge number of pop videos for some of the most interesting directors around. Back then I would scan all of the 8mm and 16mm rushes before putting them out to Beta SP for the editor. Having to grade all of the rushes before the edit, meant that I had to guess how each scene would work together in terms of color. Whatever we did to the grade was what the editor had to live with in the end."
"I then worked for a number of facility companies before coming to Dean Street Post. This was a small company where we pretty much spent our time doing TVCs and some broadcast work. It was during my time at Dean Street Post that I was given my first children series: ‘Thomas The Tank Engine’. This was just such a beautiful and fun series to be a part of. It was all shot on 35mm with such high production values. I visited Shepparton Studios one day and was incredibly impressed by the sets with all of their little tunnels, stations and bridges."
"After a number of years at Dean Street Post, I was then invited back to MPC. Fortunately not as a runner! MPC had invested in Pogles and Rank color systems, and in 1998, they were one of the first commercials houses with the latest Phillips Datacine systems. It was a bit like being a kid in a candy shop, as I just loved all of the new technology and what you could do with it. So when MPC installed a pair of Quantel iQs, I was straight onto it."
"MPC had always been interested in high end film effects work and were trying out a new digital pipeline for VFX. Before then, we would have to take each VFX sequence out to negative, print it, and then view it in the cinema for approval. So every time, there was a change, we would go through this massive process."
"Once we had a fully D.I workflow in place, I suddenly found myself working on a multitude of very prestigious feature films. We had a fabulous team, each being a specialist in different parts of the workflow. It was the first time I had ever worked in a team like this before and it was very impressive. I still think they were probably one of the best D.I teams around."
"I was part of the ‘big’ move across from MPC to Technicolor’s new studios in Soho. When I came to Technicolor, I had to learn yet another system, as they were using Autodesk Lustre."
"Provided you are good at making color decisions I don’t think it matters about moving from one platform to another. I just loved learning all of these systems, because I find working digitally so liberating. These days I can be confident that what I am seeing, is exactly what everyone else will see in the D.I theatre. I can’t say, that about film. Most of the time, I just hoped that it would be close enough!"
"While I was at Technicolor, I worked on some of their very first 3D movies. The first one for me, was the ‘Gnomeo & Juliet’. 3D grading was so new then, there was no fixed way of doing things. You just had to work it out with the help of the stereographer. On this particular film, they had only been told 6 months before the edit, that a 3D version was now required. We were all bit anxious and to add to my anxiety, this was the first time I had graded on a Baselight."
"The first difference we noticed grading a stereo film was that the projection system only ran at a third of the brightness of 2D film. So you couldn’t make your whites look any whiter than a soft grey, before it clips. The poor designer was nearly in tears when first seeing this 3D version on the silver screen. In the end, we worked it all out and it wasn’t as difficult as we first expected. Since then I have worked on a lot of 3D kid’s movies such as ‘Pirates, the Band of Misfits’ and Hollywood block busters such as, ‘Gravity’."
"Having spent all of 2014 freelancing, I enjoyed the challenge of working in lots of grading enviroments. The biggest challenge was learning how to use all of these tools and keeping on top of all of the system updates. I guess my attraction to this industry in the first place, was my love of new technology and what you can ultimately do with it."
"It was through my freelance work on such projects as AC/DC and Elaine Page that I arrived at ONSIGHT and in early 2015 joined their team as senior colorist. ONSIGHT's a leading company in produuction services but more importantly for me high end post-production too. From colour grading to quality 3D, 4K and giant screen deliveries, it all means exciting new stuff to learn and more toys to play with! I am now so glad I didn’t become an accountant."