Today we’d like to introduce you to Keyhan Bayegan.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Keyhan. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Today I’m a Digital Colorist and a Visual Artist. As a child, I had a fascination for science, innovation and fantastical stories. SciFi films brought all those elements together and inspired me to make something in that direction.
I received my B.S. in Theoretical Physics from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. After my education, I decided to pursue my other passion for film and began editing for a production company in Tehran. Slowly I realized most of my interests lie in visual storytelling and became more involved in the image making aspect of motion pictures.
Where I’m from, people are mostly fascinated with stories rather than images and sensorial feelings that come from moving frames. Los Angeles is the capital for people and communities who are passionate about the visual aspects of filmmaking. So I packed my bags and came to the land of Cinematographers, Hollywood; and became the apprentice to the best of the best. I dedicated the next couple of years to the art of photography and moving pictures and worked on countless projects in various sizes to experiment all sorts of different ideas in visual storytelling.
Cinematographers have many degrees of freedom all the way from pre-production to post-production in order to craft and sculpt the ultimate vision of the piece. This includes lighting, utilizing set design, choosing the camera format, lenses, etc.
To me the most enigmatic part of image making came from Coloring in post-production. It’s the last piece of the puzzle bringing every frame together to give them a visual harmony for maximizing their impact. Colorists are hidden artists who can be as involved as much as they desire to be depending on the creative team that hires them so that every little part of image making chain can be controlled all the way to the final result. some filmmakers just like to think of colorists as technicians and people who fix problems but recently there has been a shift of expectation that puts colorists into more creative roles.
The more I served as a Cinematographer, the more respect I started to gain for colorists. I lit and framed everything perfectly on set with the mentality that it was the last step of the process but certain things are definitely out of control for filmmakers who depend on many other factors such as color of the sky or set pieces that can’t be touched. Traditionally filmmakers relied on the film emulsion and optical tricks to control the visual balance of untouchables but all of them came at an expense. Nowadays, we can also introduce digital enhancements to our toolbox although the possibilities that can be reached using computers is only as good as how deep inside the toolbox we dig. There are many unknown territories in digital coloring and color science that deserve extra attention due to being a new field and it has also been tied to constant hardware and software advancements.
All of this made me more in love with this part of the chain and I steadily came closer and closer to becoming a colorist until I decided to call myself one.
Since then I’ve colored shorts, features, music videos for various clients including Sony Entertainment, Netflix, Apple, Vogue and many other production companies and independent productions. Along the way, I was fortunate enough to collaborate with partners such as Codex Digital and Deluxe Creative who are pushing the frontiers in motion pictures.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Not always. Moving to Los Angeles without knowing anyone in the industry felt like starting from scratch. You have to put yourself out there and meet new people and artists. Creatives that share the same passion for visual storytelling as you do so that you might click with them in order to produce original work. It took hundreds of productions to find these people and still there are many more great collaborators to come.
LA is a diverse city and people from different cultures work with each other having vastly differing points of views yet with the least amount of friction possible. As a foreigner, I still had to learn the unifying underlying American culture. Certain actions that are signs of respect in eastern culture can be interpreted the opposite way in the States and vice versa. Learning the common language and tone to speak was tricky but extremely delightful. I respect the freedom of speech but at the same time I feel the responsibility to share the information in my head using the right words and sentences to minimize the room for misinterpretation. This can sometimes break the natural flow of my thought but I’m proud of the fact that respecting people is my first priority. I believe that proper teamwork and clear communication paves the way for better art rather than doing everything my way. I think this is even more true in the twenty first century when good work mostly comes from groups not individuals. Easier said than done but reaching a natural flow of creativity in a team of artists is very rewarding.
Please tell us about your current focus in Digital Coloring.
I’m mostly interested in image making and coming up with new pipelines to expand the canvas of filmmakers and other visual artists. These are all under the umbrella of digital coloring and color science for motion pictures but I also apply the same techniques in the field of design and photography.
Ultimately, I do all of this automation to have a more fruitful creative freedom and work more efficiently instead of using many smaller tools for every problem. As mentioned earlier most of my focus is coloring narrative and non narrative films from different genres but also I work with visual artists in fields that are outside of cinema.
I’ve been developing digital to film emulation algorithms and pipelines to accurately replicate the look of film format on digital captures. This is some sort of an ultimate colorist challenge for a lot of people but still people who pay enough attention can tell the difference. My goal is to make sure I introduce a more faithful reproduction of film look on digital images so that virtually all problems in creating new pallets and visual looks can be overcome using those tools. I’ve used some of my methods on still photos I take with my old flagship phone and it’s exhilarating to see that a lot of people can’t tell the difference at a glance. The hard part is to come up with a global adjustment and transformations that can turn pictures from a not so good cheap sensor to a more expensive film scans.
Doing all of these enables me to be agile when I collaborate with other artists who have particular visions for their art pieces and I can bring their imagination to life using a cost-effective and quick ways. I’m also glad that I can have dialogue with cinematographers using their thought process and vocabulary since I’ve been in their shoes for so long. This sort of mutual experience comes very handy in interpreting their needs and I’m glad that my clients think of me as a colleague who is going to complement their work rather than someone who is going to change the direction that they have been thinking, planning and shooting all along.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
The path that I chose for getting close to my final calling had so many turns that it’s hard for me to identify mistakes from right decisions haha. I believe that we can always improve but it’s important not to think about the past unless we did something objectively wrong. Decision making in Life is subjective and thinking about what went wrong can be pointless. I guess what I just said counts as a lesson from the past haha.
Contact Info:
- Website: KeyhanBayegan.Com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Keyhanbayegan/
Image Credit:
James Slaven; Emily Trimmer; Keegen O’Brien
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