Indeed, I wasn’t supposed to become a colourist. After completing my Master’s Degree, I started working in Cairo on a one-year contract in Alcatel’s marketing department. At that time I was developing a strong interest in photography, without thinking that I would one day work in that field.

After a year I headed back to France, and a friend’s father proposed that I visit the colour grading suite at Eclair Studios where he used to work. I wasn’t even aware that such a job existed but I was immediately in love with the idea. There was an opportunity to be trained as a telecine assistant with the dailies team, so I decided to change course and start from scratch. I stayed a little less than a year at Eclair Studios, based in Epinay, and thereafter I joined Mikros.

After my training period at Eclair, it became obvious that I wanted to continue colour grading. I heard that Mikros was looking for a telecine assistant so I contacted them. Once at Mikros I quickly started to discover the world of commercials and music videos - but also a wonderful team. I was telecine assistant on commercials, working with our in-house senior colourists, but I also got to work with freelancers, which allowed me to observe different ways of grading.

Then I got the opportunity to grade dailies for feature films, very often early in the morning before assisting on a commercial later on. At the same time I was also scanning on our Spirit 2K, because DI was rapidly growing at Mikros and we did not have a dedicated scanner at that time. So there were a lot of hard working days but that enabled me to explore all the different aspects of colour grading.

A few years later, I took charge of the telecine suites operations, while continuing being a colourist. It is an amazing adventure that has so far lasted for over 13 years, and one which has given me the opportunity to work in Italy, Belgium and Switzerland.