Meet colourist Daniel Stonehouse, co-founder and owner of Crayon, the Melbourne colour focused collective with a growing roster of colourists across Australia and New Zealand. In this issue, Daniel talks to Petria Wallace about Crayon’s growth into editorial facilitation for ambitious long form projects and his vision for supporting Editors to do their best possible work.
Q. Can you tell us a little about the founding and evolution of Crayon?
DS: Crayon originally emerged in 2011 from internationally regarded animation company XYZ Studios. Today, we’re an independent colour focused business, representing colourists from across our region. Crayon currently has two colourists at our home base in Melbourne (Sam McCarthy CSI and myself Daniel Stonehouse CSI), Kali Bateman CSI in Brisbane, and we’ve recently been joined by Max Ferguson-Hook in Auckland. We’re proud to be part of the international network of colourists through Colour Society International.
Historically we’ve been known for our short form work, though not just in commercials - we’re wildly enthusiastic about short films, and music videos. For me, music videos are still one of my favourite forms, and my first love, which drove my initial interest in filmmaking.
Q. What has triggered Crayon’s move into long form?
DS: Personally I’ve been lucky to work as a colourist on a number of interesting long form projects in the past few years. The recent David Bromley documentary, Bromley: Light after Dark, and The Defenders, an Amazon production. Kali Bateman CSI also has an enviable list of long form credits.
Recently, opportunities presented to us to host Editors for long form projects. We welcomed the esteemed Editors Dany Cooper ASE and Deborah Peart ASE for Amazon’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. The Director was Glendyn Ivin, who’s work (and photobook collection) I hugely respect, so it was great to have him around!
Q. How did Crayon morph from doing primarily short form work colour grading to hosting the Editors and Director of a premium streaming series?
DS: Lost Flowers landed in our lap in early 2022, I believe thanks to an introduction from Editor Maria Papoutis. Soundfirm were the post house for the project so our role was providing space, setting up suites to the Editors’ satisfaction, and a little bit of our gear and technology mixed in with Editors’ machines and provided equipment. Andrew “Chappers” Chaplin was the Assistant Editor, a great asset to the production and a great friend of Crayon to make. We had a good time together problem solving and setting up systems.
From Lost Flowers, we realised from the positive experience of the Editors, and especially Chappers, that hosting Editors might be something we were good at! We’re used to the particular demands of colourists (myself very much included) for the best technology and beautiful surroundings! And it turns out, Editors benefit just as much from a well thought through work environment.
When you treat Editors well, in beautiful rooms with quality equipment, where everything works, there’s a feeling that more is possible. All these niceties add up to make the hard work easier. You create a space where Editors can do their best possible work.
Q. Was the team working remotely or mostly at Crayon’s facilities?
DS: Most were based at Crayon full time, but there was offsite collaboration throughout. The project was at the end of the most intense period of Covid awareness and so due to an abundance of caution there were needs to quite quickly adapt to people having to isolate at home, due to illness of a family member for example, lest the whole team get taken down!
We were able to help with our best in class collaborative streaming hardware system, chosen and set up, again by picky colourists, who demand high quality and low latency. This meant edit sessions seamlessly beamed to lounge room TV’s, and even important screenings with many attendees being remote.
Q. Then you jumped to the level of facilitating an entire project. How did that come about?
DS: The next project that came to us was the upcoming Justin Kurzel feature film The Order. We’d learnt so much from working closely with Andrew “Chappers” Chaplin on Lost Flowers that when this was presented, we were confident in stepping up and saying “we can facilitate the whole editorial component of this project for you”.
We leveraged some cool tech on that job that had real quality of life benefits for everyone involved. Our streaming system meant Justin, who’s based in Tasmania, could work comfortably from his home base more than was expected.
The Editor on the film, Nick Fenton, has a home suite an hour away from Crayon. With the Assistant Editor Daniel Newfield based at Crayon for the entire project, we were able to set up equipment that allowed seamless collaboration and media sharing between Nick’s home suite, Nick’s Crayon suite, and Daniel Newfield’s suite. It was effectively like everyone was working in the same building at all times. No shuttling drives around, or manual file management. And Nick could work flexibly from wherever was appropriate on the day.
I think in our industry, no technical problems, no road blocks, a project that accommodates the rest of your life - that’s the dream. The creative problems are hard enough!
Now that we’ve worked out how to do this well, we’d love to keep on doing it! And despite colour and finishing being our core business, we’re also very comfortable not forcing that aspect on every job.
Sometimes I jokingly think of us as being the “post post house”. But I do contrast us and our open collaborative attitude with the more traditional way of doing things. A traditional post house model would, I imagine, say to any project, we want all of it, whereas we are quite open to being flexible and not interjecting ourselves into a role. For example, this Justin Kurzel project was graded by Tom Poole at Company 3, out of New York.
I think this attitude comes from our approach to other colourists. Our industry is small, specialised, and in recent years almost exclusively freelance. At Crayon we don’t think of other colourists as competitors. We’ve always welcomed other colourists into our space, and respected their existing trusted relationships with creatives. I think as a craftsperson it is important to collaborate with and learn from your peers, share knowledge freely, and work to make conditions better for everyone. It’s a much happier, healthy way to be.
Q. You’re a big fan of recognising the pivotal role of Assistant Editors. Tell us about that.
Assistant Editors are the glue that holds everything together. In many ways they share a way of thinking with colourists, with their ability to take action upstream to improve conditions or avoid problems down. At Crayon we treat them without hierarchy, putting them into the same calibre of space as the more senior Editors, with the same kind of equipment, and ability to host screenings etc. Not the broom closet with a random old iMac approach you sometimes hear about!
A happy, comfortable Assistant Editor will absolutely benefit every other role in post, even beyond the edit.
Q. Going big picture with this last question. With an increasing focus on looking after the physical and mental wellbeing of screen industry creatives, what are your thoughts about this in the post production world?
I think fundamentally, our roles are hard and can be stressful - fitting creativity into a framework of time, money, being in service of another creative’s vision! I think having that personal experience helps me a lot when trying to help build systems and structures to help other creatives do their work comfortably and efficiently.
I think a lot about, in an industry that is now mostly freelance, what has been lost? Thinking back to the era of big post houses, what should we let go of and what should we try to recapture and preserve? The two things I think that are invaluable that have started to fade are production support and institutional knowledge.
At Crayon, we currently have as many on the production team as we have colourists. We target 4-day work weeks. We’re constantly working hard on efficient workflows, tools, and automation to allow us all to focus on what we do best. More than half of the people working with Crayon have kids as well, including me, which is a powerful and undeniable reassessment of work life balance! But it can also function as a bit of a superpower, with less free time you find yourself getting the work done to a high standard but being really efficient.
Thanks for taking time out for this chat Daniel.
DS: My pleasure.