Loic Zimmerman is a filmmaker and art director based in Los Angeles. His new film, ‘A Solitary Mann’, profiles the contemporary painter Jeremy Mann, in an impressionistic and absorbing portrait.
Loic Zimmermann – www.loiczimmermann.com
I’m very influenced by the cinema of the 70’s in general, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola, … but also contemporaries who embraced the digital beautifully, such as Michael Mann, Steven Soderbergh, Dennis Villeneuve, and the list goes on.
I tried Filmconvert and I immediately fell in love with it. Replicating manually what the plugin does in one click would be nuts and very hard to achieve (if even possible).
I pick the stock(s) depending on the project. I like to hustle my footages in post. For this particular film, I wanted a palette close to the one that Jeremy Mann is using in his paintings. I wanted the audience to dive into his world and a cinematic angle was more interesting for that than a third-party documentary approach.
My first projects were shot on a 5Dm2. I was using the cinelook color profile to get the best out of the (poor) codec of this cool camera. The Kodak 5207 Vis3 and the 5213 are usually my go-to. I also love the Fuji FJ 8543 VD, great skin tones.
I like to have images with very deep blacks and soft highlights so I usually tweak the levels for each shot. That’s something I do that on my photos as well. Occasionally I mess up with the white balance, it can get you into interesting places.
In Premiere Pro I apply my filters on an adjustment layer, that I drag over my edit and tweak until I reach a soft spot that becomes my base for the grading.
When I’m happy with my overall film look, I usually generate one or several LUTs to be able to work faster. It’s really a per-case scenario, sometimes the LUT is enough all the way to the end, sometimes I use FilmConvert as is.
On ‘A Solitary Mann’ I did a lot of After Effects selective masking and grading because it was shot live, without any rehearsal at all. It means that some shots needed a bit of love.
I’d simply apply the LUT (generated with FilmConvert in Premiere) onto my AFX comp to make sure my adjustments would work in conjunction with the grading on top. That LUT export option is really something I use a lot.
I like FilmConvert the way it is because it’s straightforward and simple to use. When you’re working on a film you have to go through so many steps and deal with so many variables that it’s good to know that you can fully rely on a tool.
