Wes Anderson’s films are famous for their symmetry of frame and quirky storytelling, but what makes them immediately recognisable are the colour palettes. Anderson’s most recent movie Asteroid City took the world by storm, which prompted a TikTok trend to replicate the aesthetic.
But this isn’t about Wes Anderson, this is about Polly Ho.
何天馨 Tian-Sin “Polly” Ho came to the UK from Taichung, Taiwan five years ago, to pursue a degree in Film, Television, and Digital Production at Royal Holloway University.
The twenty-three-year-old was a runner on set of the aforementioned hit film by Anderson, and has worked on other sets of recent box-office hits like Poor Things and The Zone of Interest during her time working at Halo post-production house in Soho.
“I came into this post-production house thinking I’m going to be an editor in the future, and I didn’t know that colour grading was one of the services in post-prod.”
After working for Halo House for a year and developing her creative and technical skills, Ho now aspires to be the person who makes the visions of film come to life in technicolour: A Colour Grader.
“When I saw the colourists doing some magical work on the footage, I thought, ‘that looks cool, I want to be a magician like them!’” she exclaimed.
Since then, Polly Ho seems to be dedicating every ounce of her being to her work. “Not only is she incredibly motivated by constantly improving her colour-grading abilities, she also puts in long hours to get the perfect grade. She works super hard, and her effort and drive are clear in the amazing work she produces,” says filmmaker Jack Heller, 22, who worked with Polly on 2 short films: BEEP, which is about a girl overhearing her long-distance boyfriend cheating on her via an accidental voicemail, as well as CASHIER NO.4, about the world’s worst possible shift.
Now considering Ho a good friend of his, he says he can’t wait to collaborate with her on many future projects. “What separates Polly from everyone else is her ambition and drive,” says Heller.
Growing up with TV, Polly’s favourite films were Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Alice in Wonderland, by Tim Burton, because “it made me think, you can literally do everything you want in a film. There's freedom in filmmaking,” she says.
“I like photography, but moving images are more interesting to me. Film production, it’s about passing people’s stories to the world. I want to make films that tell people’s stories.”
Ho’s latest project was in collaboration with filmmaker Matthéo Manticello on the Ukrainian feature documentary, Shining Brighter Than Flames, a 1h45m long film. The film focuses on the courage of civilians of all ages and professions fighting, not as soldiers, but in all the other forms.
“Polly really made a coherent and appealing experience out of a raw documentary,” said Manticello, 22.
About her experience, Ho said: “It was a challenge for me to bring in such a big project onto my amateur machine. I always love the vintage film camera aesthetics, so in this film I created that distinguished Fuji film look (soft overall contrast and the rich but nicely desaturated colour tones) to make it documental but aesthetic.”
While grading the film, she says some scenes really touched the bottom of her heart, circling her back to the initial thoughts that saw her stepping into filmmaking.
Manticello and Ho are in the planning stages of a concept for another feature film on the death of Netaji Bose in 1945 Japanese Taipei.
Photo of Manticello (middle) and Ho (left)
Opmerkingen