Tim Maffia
"One this particular trip, my father found they had a summer photography course. I had always been fascinated by photography, ever since I was given a bright colourful plastic camera by my grandparents. As a child, I would always be seen dragging this thing around taking b&w pictures all of the time."
"This happened during my school vacation in the summer quarter between 8th and 9th grades. I was always amused that I earned several full college credits before I started high school."
"To clarify my father was an auditor for the State of Washington auditing the state’s Community Colleges. We actually never accompanied him on his audits since they would last for months, though he was home on the weekends."
"In this particular case my father had befriended the photography instructor while auditing this school and learned of the summer course. Naturally, I accompanied him during the term of the course. It also helped that the school was in my mother’s hometown so I spent time with my grandmother who had, in fact, given me the box camera that started this off."
"So the idea of doing a photographic course, was perfect for me. While my father was on campus, I had free run of the college’s darkrooms. So long as we purchased the photographic paper, I was free to develop as many prints as I wanted. I just had a blast that summer, playing with all of their contrast filters and coming to grips with the skills needed to make really great black and white photo prints."
"Over the next year, my parents helped my build my own darkroom in our basement, so I keep doing the same thing. For some reason, when I graduated from high school, I didn’t pursue photography, instead chasing my other great passion of hiking in the mountains."
"In the end, I decided to study forestry at the Peninsula Community College on Washington States’ Olympic Peninsula. I was a student forestry ranger with a phobia for maths, so they put me in the engineering department in my first year! The purpose of this department was to build roads throughout Washington State’s huge forests."
"Half of my first term was spent out at Forks, which is the town they used for ‘Twilight’. What isn’t immediately apparent from the film, is this is absolutely one of the wettest places in the country. My job along, with a couple of other students, was to walk along this road, making detailed notes of every foot of it. Ditches, bends and rises; all of them had to be carefully measured and documented for the department."
"Again I need to clarify the timing here. The course work was done at PCC in Pt. Angeles from Oct. to June. Washington’s schools operated on a quarter term system during my college years. The job in Forks was a summer job working for the State of Wash.’s Dept. of Natural Resources between my freshman and sophomore years in college. The school helped land the jobs for several of us from the program. Despite a math phobia I landed the job because the interview happened just after an exam in my land surveying course and I was able to quickly remember a formula when asked. That impressed the engineer who was part of the interview team and he selected me to work for his group."
“I remember spending three weeks walking down the middle of this road heading off to nowhere. Every couple of feet, I would pound a stake into the ground, and walk off again into the pouring rain and mist. I swear, the guy who was in charge of us all, just sent us off measuring roads for his amusement, just to get us all out of the office.”
"While I was doing this seemingly senseless task, I kept reflecting on my first half of the term at college. When I first arrived at college, one of the tasks for my major, was to produce a multimedia slide show. As primitive as the equipment was looking back now, it seemed so sophisticated to me. I had to do a couple of projects that we put together using prerecorded sound tracks."
"I had no idea at the time, that this was really what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea that was, until I had spent a couple of weeks out on the forest back roads in the rain, pounding stakes into a dirt road! I figured correctly, that multimedia was always going to be a lot more fun than measuring roads, mainly because it was dry!"
"In my mind I had enjoyed my first year in the program but really enjoyed the slide show production more. The show was created during the spring quarter and delivered just a couple of days before I headed to Forks. Though that first task in Forks was miserable, I think I was still in my honeymoon phase. That slowly changed as the summer progressed. What clinched it was returning to school that fall and having to do timber cruising (taking a statistical forest inventory) with an instructor who delighted in choosing some of the most miserable forests to work in. We were crashing through some very dense undergrowth during a particularly wet and cold fall. It was truly awful and I realized, given what I had seen in Forks, that I wouldn’t find the work much better in the future. It then became clear I needed to follow my other love photography or perhaps given the slide show, filmmaking."
"After that term, I decided to finish off my year at Peninsula, taking general subjects. One of the great things about a community college like this one, as apposed to university, is the classes have at most, 25 students. The classes were very intimate and responsive to what you needed from them."
"The following year, I really needed another year of credits before I could transfer across to the University of Washington. So I decided to go to another community college, not far from where my parents were living in the city of Seattle. This time, I could pick the subjects that really interested me, so I took some of the TV production classes."
"The year I was there, they had a brilliant instructor, who I became friends with. Although he was working as a lecturer, he still had some great connections in the broadcast industry. He helped to get a few of us into internships over the summer with a variety of different broadcasters. That year, I worked at a public access facility, doing all sorts of things from running cameras during a live program to running cables. As part of that internship, I was also made responsible for producing a half hour program for broadcast."
"At the very same time, I was also working for my college instructor as a production assistant, for one of the larger networks he was freelancing for. This was incredible stuff to be doing at my age, given that only the year before I was marking ditches in the forests."
"The internship was part-time so I easily had the time to PA for the instructor. Also he produced the show, a special, for a local TV station. The station was a network affiliate and though the show aired state-wide it was not a network show."
“The people I worked with onset back then, I have worked with for many years since. It’s funny how I still run into all of those people after so many years have passed by. That I guess, gives you a sense of how close the broadcast community is here in Seattle.”
“My college instructor then became involved in a startup the next year, where I worked again, as an unpaid shooter and editor. It was one of those jobs that came with a promise of a full time job after graduation. Unfortunately for me, and them, their capital ran out just before I was to graduate!"
“A couple of months after this, my instructor rang me to say that he had another internship for me if I wanted it. This time, it was with one of the post houses here in Seattle. Although, I had already done a number of internships by this stage, he indicated that this one would go towards my graduating.”
“The company was Telemation, who had grown out of Bell & Howell’s broadcast division. It turned out to be one of the best things I could have done, to start my career. After only a month as an intern, they put me on as a freelancer working in the duplication department. A couple of months later, someone else moved on, so I was promoted to edit assistant and tape operator. Six months later, someone else moved on, and this time I was promoted to night colorist! And there it was, one of the fastest climbs up the rungs of a post house I could never have imagined for myself.”
“Telemation started as a video equipment manufacturer who then started a facility in suburban Chicago to demonstrate their products. They ended up selling the manufacturing to Bell & Howell while keeping and then expanding the facilities.”
“During all of this, Telemation was purchase by a Wall Street-type, who was planning to flip the company for some serious money. In the end, he sold the whole thing to the home cable TV network. They had an interesting way of getting into markets like Seattle.”
“When the network came into a new market, if the local broadcasters refused to pick up their transmission, they would simply buy one of the local TV stations in that market. Once they owned a local broadcasters, then the laws were that all of the other local broadcasters then had to carry their content as well. So my time at Telemation was during all of this incredibly rapid growth, until one day, it all came crashing apart.”
“Telemation was sold to the Home Shopping Network, a cable shopping channel. I don’t believe they had trouble getting on cable in Seattle specifically.”
“It would be the local cable operators in a given market who would refuse to carry the HSN channel not the broadcasters. In that case HSN would buy one of the local broadcasters, usually an independent station and switch the programming to their HSN channel. US law requires cable operators to carry programing of the local broadcasters so their shopping channel would get on the cable system despite the earlier refusal to carry it.”
“Since many of those stations had production and post facilities, I believe HSN purchased Telemation to serve as marketing group for offering production and post in a number of markets nationwide.”
“In the early days of Telemation, I worked on the FDL60 telecine, which was to later evolve into the Spirit. In order to use this thing, we also used a very early color corrector called ‘The Wiz’, which was the first product to come out of DaVinci.”
“The path of a night colorist was the perfect journey for me. I still had a love of black and white photography and processing at this time, so my knowledge of film and grain was really important as a colorist. I had never shot on film while I was working in production as it was mainly video. So my experiences from my photography, were very important in helping me to understand the role of film scanning.”
“Although I had always enjoyed being a shooter, I never really felt I had the precise skill and understanding to become a cinematographer. It just seemed to me, that I was far more interested in taking my results and enjoyed manipulating them more. I must admit that I am still partly a frustrated shooter, but the truth of it is, that I just love the control that comes from finishing beautiful images. I guess in the end, I found exactly what I was destined to do.”
“During my early years at Telemation, there were four colorists, so I spent a lot of my time working on dailies at night. One of the things that was so great about being a night colorist, is that I had time to experiment with things. In the end, the difference was going home at 1am or going home an hour later at 2am. It was one of those jobs, where it was up to you to find your own path forward.”
“Sorry, in my early years at Telemation there were only 2 colorists (Pinnacle had 2 colorists and I joined as a 3rd when they added a second suite. Eventually we added a 4th). The Senior Colorist on the day-shift and me at night. Later as I got busy enough and had built up enough clientele we added a third colorist on the graveyard shift primarily for dailies.”
"I remember the county library was between my home and work. So during the day, I would go by the library and reserve their 16mm film prints, that I would then use to scan and play with. They had all of these documentaries about dinosaurs and things, which just so happen to have bits of Disney’s Fantasia included in them.”
"I have always had a love affair with animation, but sadly could never draw with wit. So I would scan all of the Fantasia bits and then with one of the senior sound guys at work, created our own Fantasia for fun. Peter B. Lewis was the sound engineer, who has now gone on to do great things, like the soundscapes for the Nike town commercials. Peter created the soundscapes for the Nike Town stores (the physical stores) not the commercials.”
“After a number of years, I finally became the most senior colorist at Telemation - just as they closed their doors! Because the post house was owned by a shopping channel, they whole thing was heavily exposed to the retail sector. And it was about this time, just as I was getting to the top, that we went through a major recession.”
“Fortunately for me, this was all to coincide with the formation of one of Seattle’s biggest post houses called Pinnacle. The company was funded by people in Spokane who really knew how to invest in the right sort of facility. In its day, Pinnacle was a truly first class post production facility with the very best in equipment.”
“These guys had already made a name for themselves doing motion control work, and were now investing heavily in digital workflows in order to grow their business in Seattle. It was such a beautifully engineered place to work at as a colorist.”
“Where I had just come from, was one of those typical older places that had been cobbled together over the years, thanks to an ancient patch panel. When I came to Pinnacle, I was amazed by this thing called a router! Up until that moment, I had no idea that what I had really been working with was ‘bear skins and stone knives’!”
“When I came to Pinnacle, I started doing a healthy mix of commercials and corporate work, due mainly to us being attached to an effects house. We did a lot of the local retail groups and banks and some of the big national brands, like Powerade, when one of the local agencies landed a big account. For most of the nine years I worked there, I was the no.2 colonist so I had a lot of really great commercials to work on.”
“Actually the mix of work work at Pinnacle and Telemation was the same as it would be during my early few years at Modern Digital.”
“As we came in to the 90s, many of the local retail accounts and banks were eventually swollen up or bankrupted. As a consequence, the company moved more and more towards becoming a VFX house only. They really needed to upgrade the whole telecine infrastructure to HD, but instead sold off the whole division to Victory.”
“It’s probably more accurate to say that this occurred throughout the ’90’s but accelerated during the latter half of the decade.”
“My stay at Victory was to be short lived. By the time, we relocated and had setup the telecine, the dot.com bust hit everyone. Seattle was hit particularly hard by the downturn in the tech industry. In the end, I worked for them for just four months.”
“So by the beginning of 2001, I suddenly found myself out of work for the first time. Fortunately, the lead colorist at another post house in Seattle had just left, paving the way for me. Modern Digital were a very forward thinking company and fortunately had a clientele willing to pay for quality; which are all great things when you are a colorist.”
“When I started with them, they were doing pretty much the same kind of work as everyone else was doing. The difference was that they invested heavily in the first full HD workflow in Seattle, using the latest Sony telecine and a Lustre with a 2K scanning module; which is how we got into doing D.I.”
“After 9/11 all of the commercials and corporate work suddenly vanished, and so they took on more and more longford work to fill the gap. It was very challenging going from shortform to longform. Because the longform work was predominantly indies, I was having to turn a film around in under two days.”
“To clarify the timeline, we started HD with the Sony Vialta/daVinci 2K in the summer of ’01. As longform became a greater part of our work, about 3 years later we upgraded the Vialta to 2K scanning and built a DI theater with Autodesk’s Lustre.”
“Unlike commercials, I didn’t have the time to sit there with the still store and do wipes and things. I had to learn fast, to be more instinctive about how the various cuts feel together. Strangely enough, it was a little less nitpicking than it had been with commercials, because I went from doing 30secs in 6 hours to now doing 45mins now in 8hrs!”
“I should also say that although I did do a few features in 2 days most were given a week. That’s still very quick compared to a commercial. That meant correcting about 20 min. of material a day.”
“Also to clarify, I didn’t abandon the still store to speed things up. It’s still a vital tool but it’s also a bit of a holdover from telecine days when you had to roll through all of the footage to find a shot. Having a neg. cutter prepare cut-down rolls of film wasn’t done in this market so a still store was crude method of approximating how shots would work together. With DI’s and most workflows now you are working with the edited material so you can more easily feel how corrections are with each other. How a scene flows is very important and we can save the nitpicking for key moments.”
“After the recession of 2008, things had a ripple effect again across Seattle, with an immediate drop off in work. Modern Digital had stated life as a production company and as worked started to drop away, they started to pursue more production work once more. This shift, then led to most of the post team being let go.”
“After Modern Digital, I moved onto Alpha Cine, which was also owned by one of the founders of Pinnacle. They had purchased an Arri laser recorder early on and got into the business of doing film-outs on projects for digital cinema. At that time, there was still a pretty beefy requirement for film prints back then. So they made a very good business for themselves.”
“Alpha did a very good business doing film-outs on projects shot on digital video because festivals and distributers required film prints.”
“By the time I came along, they were looking to get across to the more creative side of the industry. They were looking for a deeper resume in terms of color grading, so they could push across from doing just film-outs. But just as I came in, the film festivals were moving more to DCPs instead of film-outs, and so Alpha Cine soon found they’d lost that hook for themselves.”
“They had been exceptionally good at pulling work from all over the country for film-outs, and so assumed they could do the same with color correction. Sadly, there just wasn’t enough in it to pursued someone from the east for example, to come all the way to Seattle to do their grading work as well. This was also compounded by the overall death of film at the time. And once you took away the film print, then you also took a way the big money maker for them too!”
“So a lot of things happened at precisely the wrong time for Alpha Cine. With all of that going on, I decided to try freelancing. Things had become so cost effective, that I didn’t need a trust fund nowadays, just to get my own color grading system.”
“Who would have thought, I could be doing this sort of work from home with a Resolve on an iMac! When Modern Digital put in the full DaVinci 2K system, I remember that just the de-focus board for that thing alone, cost $90,000. If you wanted additional power windows for the system, then that was a another $60,000! Today, you can get all of those bells and whistles for way under that, and with a control surface too. Without the control surface, well you can have all that, for just $1,000 bucks! I am still kind of amazed that I can run a 5K Red files on a iMac with Resolve.”
“I also have clients who have there own Resolve systems, who will call me in to work when they want a colorist. But for the most part, I am working from my apartment off my OLED monitor, or renting the local film school’s theatre for DIs. I tend to use the theatre for gauging the size of elements. It always helps me in getting a better feel for how things will look in a festival environment.”
“It’s not so much gauging the size as it is that size can affect your perception of a scene. A highly saturated scene that looks fine on a 25” screen can feel too overdone on a 10’ screen.”
“For the most part, I can do most of what needs to be done, all from home. When I need to, I just box up my iMac and monitor and take it to where the client wants me to be. It’s certainly a different world, from my days at Telemation and Pinnacle.”