What is a Finishing Artist?

At The Finish Line, we are all about delivering the best images possible and the key to doing this is our approach; having incredible Finishing Artists who take full ownership of picture from a finished conform right through to the final review. But what is a Finishing Artist? We couldn’t explain this more eloquently than Maggie did in her recent Post Perspective interview:

Everyone at The Finish Line is the last pillar of post production. We are responsible for completing the final product to the highest standards. Traditionally a colourist balances and colours images in line with how the client wants the audience to feel, even relighting and reshaping subjects using depth of field and other effects. An online editor fixes technical errors such as flash frames and dropouts, checks the conforms and frame rates, removes logos and creates titles, subtitles and credits.

A Finishing Artist is where these two roles meet, taking the creative skills of a senior colourist and adding in the highest level of technical capabilities to elevate the role beyond traditional expectations for either — from colour management and the creative grade through to compositing, captioning and Dolby Vision trim passes, all while understanding technical specifications and their ever-changing goalposts.

We can be a jack of all trades but need to be a master of them all, creating complex looks, painting out objects, creating simple VFX and doing last-minute edit changes.

Maggie Maciejczek-Potter

For us, this is the key component to ensure everything we deliver looks incredible. You can forget about the costs and wasted time round-tripping between multiple platforms and working around multiple schedules to finish your pictures. On top of that, the picture finishing time available can be tailored in such a way that adds maximum value to the budget.

On some projects, that might involve more time dealing with scaling, frame rate conversions, and other tricks to get your archive looking as good as possible. The next project might be all about the grade, stylising, and adding all the emotion you can by focusing on the texture and detail in the image.

We love images and are obsessed with making sure what we deliver is perfect in every way.

Read more from Maggie over on Post Perspective