Talking colour with Paul Harrison
Posted on Mar 27, 2026 by Admin
Paul Harrison, renowned colourist and founder of Residence Pictures, talks tech turning points and making a great grade
Words Nicola Foley \ Top image Cristina Ríos Bordón
After nearly 30 years in the game, Paul Harrison has gone from making tea at The Mill to becoming one of the world’s top colourists. Along the way, he’s picked up a cabinet full of awards and founded his own company, Residence Pictures.
It’s a career that’s unfolded alongside seismic changes in the world of post-production. From celluloid and telecine to digital capture, LOG images and colour-managed workflows, Harrison has had a front-row seat to some big shifts. In his view, the role of the colourist is only becoming more crucial.
“As we have moved into a more digital world, creating the look is very important. You often start off with something that looks quite flat and horrible.” In the past, by contrast, “when you shot on film and banged something out on the telecine – so long as it was shot well – it already looked pretty good.”
The learning curve has been steep, particularly in the early days of LOG workflows. “These images were entirely different to what we were used to. They looked terrible. If you look back at some of that early work, it was pretty ropey! It took a lot of fiddling about in Baselight to get there.”
Over time, new ways of working emerged, but then things changed again with the move towards scene-referred, colour-managed workflows, which have improved the starting image and become central to modern pipelines.
“A lot of our work now is for visual effects,” continues Harrison, “and it is about how the grade suite feeds into VFX and then comes back again. That whole round-tripping of shots – grade to VFX and back, or 3D and back – that’s been a key change. But the biggest thing is how we learned to manage data, and how that’s grown over the years. That’s what has really changed my everyday work.”
We might think of the colourist as a solitary figure, huddled over in a dark suite for weeks on end, but Harrison’s experience has been anything but. “I have spent a lot of time in commercial grading rooms,” he begins, “and you end up communicating constantly! You are talking to clients, directors and DOPs, and that changes the way the work happens.”
For that reason, he finds the best colourists tend to be people who are patient and get on well with others. “Put your ego in a box and listen to people – but don’t be afraid to articulate your own ideas on what you’d like to achieve visually,” he advises. “But also, don’t ram those ideas down anybody’s throats as people don’t tend to be receptive to that… and there are a few who are guilty of doing it,” he laughs.
He thinks the best grading work is almost invisible. “If, in the first five or ten minutes, I’m not aware of the grade – if it’s not encroaching on my enjoyment – then I just forget about it and watch,” he says. “But if I’m aware of it because it feels wrong for the show, too pushed or not good enough, that really annoys me.”
Overworked images, he admits, are a particular bugbear. He’ll happily abandon a programme if the look feels heavy-handed. “I turned something off last night because it just grated on me. I knew what they were trying to do with it – but it didn’t need to be that much.”
Looking ahead, Harrison expresses wariness about AI creeping into post (and filmmaking in general). But after decades as a colourist, “I still absolutely love it,” he grins. “It’s so exciting getting under the hood of a look. It’s a bit like a science project, thinking what do I need to create? Is it old autochrome? Or a film-style look? Whatever it is, you deep-dive into how it’s structured and layered to find your solution. I find it fascinating, I love to know how things work. That’s what excites me.”
This article appears in the February/March 2026 issue of Definition
