5 minutes with Colourist Pete Ritchie

Colourist Pete Ritchie is in constant demand for grading high-profile TV campaigns and corporate videos for premium brands including Amazon, Vodafone, Samsung, Toyota, SK-II, Heinz, 3 Mobile, and Facebook. He’s been doing so over a 30-year career which began in Melbourne, Australia, and has continued for the last two decades in Auckland, New Zealand, where he now lives. He explains how he maintains the great relationships he has with clients all over the U.S. and Asia working across time zones in about as a remote (and beautiful) a location as you can get.

‍A lot has probably changed since you began in the industry…

Yes, that’s right. I joined the industry straight from school aged 18 when transfers were being made from film to one-inch tape. Technology has changed the business and the art of what is possible dramatically. About 20 years ago, I was working for a facility in Sydney and got poached by a facility in Auckland — a city I have been living in ever since. I met my wife here and we've got a family, and everything just sort of fell together. 

About 10 years ago I made the decision to go freelance and set up my own little studio in Auckland with a partner who is a Flame artist. At the time, I probably had one of the first remote freelance kits in the country. I could just go and set up in a production company office and work there for the day if needed. The lighting was never ideal, but it was really good fun.

Then, Covid - when we had to work from home. After that there was no real reason to keep the studio going with the cost of overheads. It was a pretty easy decision to close it down and set up a permanent space at home. It’s a nice suite but it’s not really setup for large client reviews, and that's where finding a remote systems partner became really important. I desperately needed something and when a colleague of mine at Company 3 mentioned ClearView to me I thought I’d better have a look.

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Who do you work for mostly?

I have a great relationship with director Simon Clark who is based in Seattle, Washington, with his production company Hey Brutus. He's fantastic and we do a lot of work together. I have other regular clients in Tokyo, Singapore and Australia. The time zone works quite well for them in that they can brief me at the end of their day, and I can happily grade away during regular NZ hours and then present the project, for their morning / start of day. 

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What is your principal kit? 

The essential items that I have here at home are a Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Panel, a Sony PVM-X series calibrated OLED monitor, a Mac computer to power it all and the ClearView Flex.

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What has been your experience with ClearView?

‍Fantastic! It's enabled me to maintain the international relationships that I already had and to build new ones as well as enabling me to provide local approvals with clients sitting at their agency office in Auckland.

With the way budgets are now, people don't always have the money or time to sit in a suite with me for eight hours. It’s no longer an efficient way of working. Remote sessions suits everyone.

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Can you deep dive your workflow for us? 

It depends on the job but I love to get a brief up front along with any references for look. I come on at the tail end of the job that their team have been working on for six months so there's already been lots of conversations. I like them to share all their ideas; any sort of visual reference I can get from pitch documents or links to work they like is great. We’ll have a good chat up front, then they’ll  leave it with me to get a feel for the photography and explore looks.

Quite often if you've got a client next to you in a suite they'll be very direct in terms of where they'd like it to be, which is great and helpful but can also cut off some creative options. I prefer to take their opinions on board and then work through all the multiple directions we could take the grade. 

Personally, I enjoy the process more if I am allowed to have a play with the photography and get to understand the photography first. I’ll then present options to them. In my experience I can get seventy per cent of the way by doing this. That's where the Clearview session works really well.

We also use frame.io a fair bit but it’s a slower process because it doesn’t have live feedback. Clearview is fantastic because we can sit on a shot and talk about whether we could try it with a warmer look, say, or brighter, or tweak it any different way. We can see those changes right there rather than having to sign off and arrange another session. Clients really value that live interaction because they are just too busy to be sitting all day on reviews.

That’s not to say you won’t have multiple approval sessions. Sometimes you will go through that loop half a dozen times but the whole process is so much quicker, more creative and more fluid.
Clearview gives me that opportunity to go live back and forth with the client, which is what gets you to the final look that everyone's happy with. 

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