Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/309120
22 CINEMONTAGE / MAY-JUN 14 early days, recalls Passon, he worked on a Hazeltine motion picture analyzer. "You'd adjust color timing based on what you saw, and screen it with the cinematographer or director to get comments on how to correct it," he says. "It was a process that would take up to two months from a cut negative to a finished answer print." In the last decade, the scene-by- scene color correction now takes place in a digital intermediate (DI) suite. "We do the small corrections and make sure the film print matches the digital file," he says. "It's very sad. This has been my whole life and now film is going to be gone." Aaron Smith started his first job as a film lab worker 38 years ago, at Technicolor, where he trained as a developer. "At Technicolor, they had a very, very good training system," he recalls. "They trained you in white light to make sure you knew how to run the machine before they turned the lights off and threw you in the trenches." He learned that training others was part of the program when he found out one of the people teaching him had only been working there a few weeks. "I also ended up doing some training," he says. Later on, he worked at MGM, where he enjoyed a stint in the vault, "a big library full of film," searching for negatives. After leaving the industry for a while, he came back to lab work 21 years ago at Deluxe, where he started off again in developing but was soon trained for many different jobs. "I went into printing, then release printing, then front-end printing," he says. "Then I became a foreman at night and from there a customer service representative for four or five years." With five classifications, Smith continues to make the rounds of different jobs where needed. "Front End Shift Boss was my last title," he says. "Then I got called back to release printing." With film finally coming to an end, he remembers how Beverly Wood. Adam Clark at work at Deluxe Labs. " I know we film lab workers form a very small cog in a very large machine, but the recognition is really cool. I can't wait to go to the Goldwyn Theatre and see it." – Christie Meyer CineMontage_May-Jun_14-3a.indd 22 4/15/14 3:22 PM