Painting The Picture

Sam Chynoweth brings a mixture of animation and live action experience to VFX-heavy, Rajnikanth starrer, 2.0.

You are known for your unique expertise in colour grading, animation, and VFX. What brought you to these specialties, and how everything started for you?

Chynoweth: I’d had a strong interest in image manipulation throughout college and was pretty sure I was destined to be a compositor (or a shake jockey as my lecturer liked to call them). After a few false starts, including a stint as a trainee cheese maker, I entered post-production as a VFX review assistant at Animal Logic, in Sydney, Australia. I was pretty much a glorified VCR machine looping through shots all day (yelling ‘play it again Sam’ brought a chuckle to most supervisors). But it wasn’t too long before I realised that I had an amazing and unique opportunity to listen to some of the top visual effects supervisors and production designers, and to hear them breaking images down and discussing them in great detail.

We were running these sessions out of our grading theatre, leaving me seated behind this impressively illuminated colour panel. After a particularly long and arduous review session, two supervisors were stuck arguing over a shot of a burning moose. I quietly reached over and spun the gamma wheel - both of them turned around and exclaimed, “Yes, that!”

That really was the beginning for me as a DI operator. From there I was very fortunate to assist some amazing artists, who were always more than willing to answer my barrage of questions and help me learn the craft.

You’ve recently joined the team at Technicolor, in London. Why did you decide to join the company?