About
Elliot M. Smith is a Colorist based in Los Angeles, California, and works with clients internationally. He came to Color Grading through Photography and Cinematography.
Elliot specializes in making good looking images gorgeous, improving problematic images, and enhancing production value.
Elliot works with Cinematographers and Directors to bring their vision to life, using color to enhance the emotional impact of stories.
Elliot The Colorist will make your project look cooler and more expensive.
BACKSTORY
Elliot has been a colorist exclusively since 2015. He began his journey well before that with artistic photography classes in the 2000’s, using a dark room to develop black-and-white film and color film, just prior to the digital transition transformed photography. He worked with professional photographers in wedding, fitness, and advertising, then began to do cinematography. Elliot moved to Hollywoood to pursue cinematography and directing, and spent time in camera houses and on sets before discovering his love for color.
Elliot's career path in color began at Technicolor/Laser Pacific. He had the opportunity to learn the mindset and skills of a professional Colorist by sitting in with very established Colorists, with decades of experience and who were working on studio features, and later with highly skilled and artistically talented commercial colorists at production companies.
Elliot has been contemplating images since he was about 11 when he opened the control panel on his parent’s faux-wood-paneled Zenith TV and messed up the picture. Naturally they were displeased, so he worked on figuring out what the brightness, contrast, and tint knobs even did, and eventually the TV was balanced out and looked better than it ever had before. This discovery was Elliot’s first exposure to the concept that images on TV have to be adjusted by someone somewhere, and he thought it sounded like a cool job.
In High School, Elliot pondered on the photography of editorials and advertising in magazines (Magazines were like a paper version of webpages). Then he'd skateboard to his job at the comic book store, where he would contemplate the art in comics. This interest in visual arts led him to develop opinions on what he liked, what he didn’t, and to pursue artistic photography, and then cinematography, which eventually led to color grading.
In college he studied directing, cinematography, writing, editing, and some VFX, and used Final Cut Pro’s three way color corrector on many projects.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
University of Texas at Austin Graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Radio-TV-Film
Member of multiple Honors Societies, worked in NYC with the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, and made the Dean’s List
Certified on DaVinci Resolve through Moviola in 2015
Certified on Apple Color through Moviola back in 2010
Links
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