Cinematographer Phil Holland sets the bar
July 6, 2021
9 min read
The HDR master reflects on a bleeding-edge VFX career and blowing minds.
Written by Laura Beth Beeston
Illustrations by Allan Matias
When he’s drawing, Phil Holland often flips the paper around to see its reverse. “It’s forcing your mind to look at it with a fresh eye,” the Director/Cinematographer and professional visual storyteller says. “It’s important to disrupt your natural line of vision.”
Holland is a pro at compelling the human eye to see something different, which prevents both viewers and visual artists from getting stuck or developing biases.
“That’s kind of the whole mindset,” he says. “You want to keep things fresh.”
He knows what he’s talking about. Holland’s epic IMDb and career arc are moving images to behold, with a deeply technical appreciation for his tools and new technology that comes through every shot.
And it’s probably even in his blood.
As a kid growing up in California, he says the entertainment industry was all around him.
“I used to be able to ride my bicycle and go sit down and watch people film an episode of Star Trek all day,” he explains on a Zoom call from Los Angeles. “It was a different time in the 80s and 90s before security was as tight. Most crews were happy to have kids sitting around, as long as you were not in the way.”
At 17-years-old, while “on a warpath to become a biological engineer,” Holland got “a really crazy opportunity to walk on set and help out with some gripping and gaffing,” which gave him a taste and deeper curiosity for the cinematic world.
At 19, he got his big break at Rhythm and Hues Studios, a visual effects (VFX) and animation company he was with from 1999 to 2010 as a Digital Imaging Specialist.
He was hired by the man who invented the 4K scanner.
Likening his early industry years to college, Holland literally grew up on the forefront of film technology alongside those who had invented it for films like Star Wars.
Becoming proficient in VFX, digital color correction, laser recording and film scanning, Holland also mastered high-dynamic range (HDR) when it was still really hard to do.
His journey from a teenage scan/record coordinator, to digital colorist, to digital imaging specialist took place in the same transformational clip as the tools themselves.
“Everything we kind of take for granted today was new,” Holland says of his training. “I was the first proper digital colorist there. I created the entire pipeline and tool set that we used. Before that, digital color was done at a command line with a notepad and a calculator and a program called rcomp where you plug in the values from another viewing program to read pixel values and compare a frame.”
He recalls that a big film back then would have between 180 to 300ish visual effect shots. Today, it’s not uncommon for films to have up to 2,000.
“The increase in workload was something that a command line and notepad wasn’t going to support,” he chuckles. “So coming up with that pipeline was really cool and a groundbreaking learning experience.”
Working on $100 million-or-more film projects in his twenties, he says, set a bar that was very high. Being quickly thrust into the industry forced him to catch up and exceed his peers' expectations. And the experience also allowed him to work shoulder-to-shoulder with those in the film labs, studios, and VFX houses.
As the industry became comfortable with and interested in digital color correction and grading in the early aughts, Holland was there, raising the bar, developing really bold color looks for films like X-Men, The Ring, and the sci-fi action flick The Chronicles of Riddick.
And since then, he hasn’t really stopped.
An experimental edge
Fast forward and “digital color correction and grading has been something that the entire industry relies on,” says Holland today. “Most post houses that do this work all came up in the last decade, which is crazy when you think about it.”
Comparing the progress and history in photography, cinema and television technology, Holland equates modern display technology — that is, “emissive technology,” LCD, OLED, Mini LED, or QLED has a similar appeal to the Cibachrome/Ilfochrome printing process which used a backlight to create a vibrant, bigger than life appeal.
“That’s probably one of my weirder thoughts,” he laughs, “but now we have the ability to have that vibrancy as well as that density of color right in our homes and in motion. It’s super exciting.”
With emissive theatrical displays, Holland adds, highly contrasting or bold material “shows its strengths because you get a really deep black, a really crisp white and everything in between. But much of the allure for me is the ability to display more color if desired.”
His expert eye for color, composition and technical execution comes from heavily testing and practicing his medium — or what he calls creative problem solving.
It’s about refinement and asking questions, he explains: “It’s looking at things and asking, well, how do we want to shoot this closeup? How do we frame it to make the best shot possible? How do we build things around it that make it more effective? What's the best way to help the audience feel this moment?
“It’s always a process of asking questions and answering them and applying some thought and theory to it.”
Typically three (or more) years ahead of mass technology adoption, Holland has shared his research and experiences in highly-technical YouTube and blog posts, cultivating a loyal followers who hang off his every trial, experiment and project.
“I love the bleeding edge because you get cut the most but you also learn the most in the process,” he says.
And his intense investigations into the latest cameras, lenses, lighting, and tech have led him to some really interesting places.
Testing, testing
One of Holland’s groundbreaking tests is “The Window Effect.”
Describing the moment when an audience loses their awareness of viewing a cinema screen, television, device or printed image, Holland explored the advantages of 2K, 4K and 8K resolutions, coming up with “really interesting mathematical theories” to blind test on his audiences in a theatre.
As he noted in his blog post at the time, this effect is related to the limits of human vision, viewing distances, resolution, color and dynamic range. And his hypothesis explored the relationship between motion pictures and still images.
“The big thing with my Window Effect theory is that [the] closer we can get to transparency between the content and the viewer, the more immersive viewing experience [they] will have.”
Providing all sorts of material like shaky cameras and static imagery, “the theory I discovered was about the actual screen technology itself,” Holland explains.
He concluded that certain lighting conditions, higher resolution, contrasting color — and even removing hanging objects on a wall near the screen itself — immerses audiences in the content more quickly.
Another experiment, conducted in collaboration with Nanosys, captured and manipulated Quantum Dots for an experimental short film called Quantum Flows, which showcased their vibrant color properties.
Specially engineering nanoparticles to suspend in an oxygen barrier for exposure, putting them in fluids and illuminating the scenes in motion with UV light made for a “super challenging shoot.”
But when he showed the final product to press in a pitch black room on an 80-inch television with a 2,000 nits grade, “it lit up the entire space and everyone was losing their minds. The color was just jumping out… they were like, ‘This is just so trippy.’ It was a really cool moment to witness people asking themselves, “What is going on right now?!’”
On one of his first television projects utilizing Quantum Dot technology, Holland says he actually had to explain to the client: “Like, we need to decide what the color green is to people…
“We can push it to a place that is really loud, almost surreal, like a blacklight velvet painting or something. But just because you have all that power, it’s a question of how to use it.”
The pace of progress
Giant, technological leaps in a short order is something that Holland says he has witnessed again and again throughout his career.
When he started, for instance, there were no HDR televisions or monitors while, today, a laptop and cell phone can do it.
Holland also watched as top VFX houses filtered down, commercial flows adopted feature mindsets and technology became even cheaper: “The storage alone, I mean, gosh, I can’t even describe the difference in cost on terabytes between now and then.”
State of the art technology during the first 10 to 12 years of his career “were all happening on the cinema side, in the film world,” he explains. “It still rings true today but the last decade in particular has seen a lot of new technology for display mediums. Five of the top five display manufacturers in the world are my clients.”
(And you’d likely recognize his expert aerial work for one of them: Holland has been a Director/Cinematographer with Apple TV since 2014, creating their ubiquitous, slow-moving screensavers that feature aerial shots of big cities and geographic places of interest).
“Now you have these displays that are so much better.”
He notes how the people who once looked at 4K as something that would never catch on would find it hard to buy a 1080P television today.
“You can buy a 4K TV for a few hundred dollars now [and] need a buddy to move it,” he says. “I have seen them in gas stations. It’s wild… But, you know, new technology is going to be expensive and then it’s going to come down in price. That’s just how it works. There was probably a time when a microwave oven was the price of a new car.”
With modern technology, he’s having conversations that remind him of the 2K versus 4K debate of days gone by. The question he asks now is: Do you want an 8K television in your home? 12K? 16K? What does that look like? And where does that content come from?
The future is bright
While being on the forefront has been interesting, Holland’s next ventures are only looking to be sharper and more colorful.
“My living room has been the introduction for many filmmakers to proper 8K viewing, [where] I can playback theatrical quality data,” he says. “I usually take pictures of people sitting on my couch when they first see their work because it’s a real eyeopener.”
The hard truth, he adds, is that today “digital is getting to where film has already gone,” further opening up the mass-media possibilities for display tech with higher bit depths and better cameras.
Moving forward, he predicts display tech will be seeking out more accurate color, more vibrant color and more contrast potential.
“And there have been all sorts of side technologies that the general consumer doesn’t even think about,” he says: anti-reflective technology, improved viewing angles, volumetric tech, higher-quality viewing experiences… “We will just continue to move towards that.”
But the allure of the 2D screen is not going anywhere, he adds: “It’s almost in our DNA now, whether you are hanging a painting on a wall or reading a magazine. It’s just intrinsically simple and easy for us to just get into it [as] a casual viewing experience.”
The future will be about balancing between new technology and things that are natural to us as human beings. And constant improvement.
“You know, as a cinematographer, you have a lot of creative decisions to make,” Holland says. “But what do you want the film to look like?
“At the end of the day, that is the last and only question.”