Color Timer

If you “force” the pieces of a puzzle together rather than “fit” them, what you get isn’t a clear picture; it’s a muddled mess. If that puzzle is the jigsaw kind, the only person who’s disappointed is probably you. When it’s something larger, however — like a movie — you’ve got an audience to answer to, which is why the position of “Color Timer” is so important.

As a Color Timer, you work in the film industry alongside a Director of Photography, making sure the on-screen color in movies is consistent from start to finish.

Although that sounds easy enough, the truth is: It’s no small task, as movies traditionally are made up of thousands of different snippets of film — the “pieces” in the puzzle — that are spliced together to create a single reel. Because film stock varies from roll to roll, each piece of film typically has its own tone, hue, density, and contrast, which means each scene looks slightly different from the next. Before films are finished, therefore, they’re sent to a film processing lab, where you use a machine called a color analyzer to balance each scene’s color and brightness so the movie looks like one continuous image, with each scene matching the next.

“Color Timer” is a term left over from the days of black-and-white cinema, when you had to actually time the exposure of prints to chemicals during the color-correcting process. These days, however, there’s no “timing” involved; just “color.” Basically, then, you’re the film industry equivalent of a Beautician, paid to “beautify” film with the right shades of cinematic make-up.