Now enrolling — Summer cohort of the Master's ProgramApply
Projects
Complete projects — feature footage, festival shorts, brand spots, music videos. Real LOG originals from real shoots. You watch a working colorist grade it, then you grade it yourself, then you get a written critique.
Why we built this
Every colorist on the planet learned the same way: by sitting in front of footage they didn't shoot, until the decisions started to feel obvious. Tutorials show you knobs. Theory shows you the science. Neither of them teaches you what a magic-hour scene wants when it's 11pm and you've been on it for six hours.
The reel-tip difference between a good colorist and a great one is roughly two thousand hours of bad first attempts.
Every project here is a real piece of work — a short film that actually played festivals, a commercial that actually shipped, a music video that actually got viewed. The footage stays yours. The grade stays yours. The credit on your reel is yours, because the work was.
The practice loop
The same loop every working colorist runs every week — compressed and aimed at the part of you that actually improves.
A 90-minute session recording. Every node, every decision, every moment of walking-back. Not a polished tutorial — the actual messy process, including the parts that didn't work.
~ 90 min · UncutOpen the same LOG originals in your own software. Build your own version of the look. Don't copy the reference — diverge from it, defend the choice. This is where the eye gets built.
~ 6-18 hrs · In your NLERender and submit. A working colorist returns a written critique within five business days — what's working, what isn't, and the one note that, if you act on it, changes the grade entirely.
~ 5 business days
An astronomer's last transmission from a station drifting beyond Neptune. Cold blues, magnetic ocean blacks, and a single warm practical that has to read as 'home' across forty minutes.
A Mexico City bus driver leads a double life as a cabaret performer. The grade has to hold two worlds in one film — dusty daylight and neon-soaked nights, routine and reinvention.
A race-spec BMW shot across studio B-roll and Los Angeles motorway runs. The grading challenge: match controlled studio light to blown-out LA skies, tame reflections on polished bodywork, and bring grit and tension to every cut.
Three retirees rob a small-town bingo hall and don't quite get away with it. Practicals, fluorescents, mismatched warmth — the grade has to make twelve sources sit together without flattening the comedy.
A Polish biopic following a priest who defied the establishment. Multiple scenes from a feature film shot by top cinematographers — the grade must serve period authenticity, dramatic weight, and the visual language of resistance.
What's included
60–120 minutes of Dado grading the project. Every decision explained, every walk-back shown.
Original camera files at full resolution. ARRIRAW, ProRes, R3D — whatever the project was shot on.
Dado's Resolve project with the reference grade. Compare your nodes to his side by side.
Submit your grade, get a written critique from a working colorist within five business days.
Every project you complete will give you extra practice in grading skills that will be useful when you start working with real clients. See what it does for your confidence.
