Low quality post production experience at CrispTV Ltd
In May/June 2019 I advertised on mandy.com for a colourist to work on a documentary I had finished editing
This production consists of about 350 clips. I was contacted by Crispin Holland proprietor of crrisptv.co.uk CrispTV Ltd who said he wanted to do the work and would charge £400 for it.
At a point in the summer of 2019 e mail communication with Mr Holland simply stopped and three weeks went by. I did e mail him again saying that I presumed that he wasn't interested.
Finally in January 2020 after another period of e mail silence after Xmas and into the New Year I got to deliver my data to him in person.
Mr Holland represented himself as a professional editor who had been a staffer at various editing facilities in London, with a work history of 20 years. I later discovered that he had two years' full-time experience at an actual facility.
A red flag on my departure was that he said 'I'm going to tart it up a little bit' when I thought we had been talking at length about a colour-correction job.
I should have stopped the work at that point. I had just given him £100 for good-faith because our technical negotiations had taken some time and I had talked about increasing his fee. I didn't tell him by how much, but was considering at least £1500-2000. The other red-flag was his comment that the production 'Wouldn't make any money' which I ignored.
About a week later he contacted me to say that the work was done. He sent me a bin of his work and I was able to view it immediately. I really could not believe the work he had done.
The production had a most peculiar green/yellow cast to it, the gain had been raised on nearly every shot including attempts to create light where there was no light thus completely blowing light sources such as already brightly lit windows. There was use of saturation instead of colour-correction, often creating a 'paint' effect and differing colour-correction use on almost consecutive shots of the same thing which created a continuity problem.
The production now looked like something that been perhaps shot on film stock that was very old and so misrepresented the colour in a strange and sickly way.
I saw Mr Holland in person and showed him a long list of faults I had seen on one viewing. He said that my monitoring was faulty and politely told me that I was being anal by saying I was too close to the project and was being fastidious.
He suggesting that dumping the project to a DVD would fix a lot of the problems. It did not and the production still looked awful. He also said at our second meeting that in order to get the production correctly graded, I would have to take it a facilities house and spend a great deal of money. He said 'They will grade it for you....but.' I had to wonder why Mr Holland was involved at all in this work.
From late January 2020 to late April 2020 I spent every spare moment and many long nights colour-correcting the production myself. It now looks acceptable and correct. I had to use this project to learn how to colour-correct video properly for the first time.
I noticed that Mr Holland had often added green to clips, to the point that there was actual dis-colouration and he had ignored a written printed instruction in the treatment I wrote not about raising the gain.
I decided that he knew nothing about basic ideas used in photography when it came to exposure. I identified some 114 clips that I would have to reject immediately.
In early May 2020 I received an e mail from Mr Holland asking about payment. I responded, giving the criticisms you see here. His response was to say that it was 'completely unaccaptable' and that he had worked on perhaps 100 or 200 hours of broadcast television and that I was the second person in 20 years to refuse to pay him. After that he disappeared.
My involvement with Mr Holland wasted a huge amount of my time. Mr Holland did not seem at all concerned about my time and convenience.
I think that he does have some technical background and some experience with video editing, but the level of his skill is very mediocre. He might well actually believe that he is a professional because he could well be a fantasist. He seems to be convinced of his abilities despite events with a real production demonstrating otherwise.