Cinelicious Expands in Joint Venture with Big Block, Welcomes Robert Curreri

Cinelicious announced it has opened a broadcast and DI theater housed at production and design studio Big Block in Santa Monica to serve Westside clients. Working in collaboration with Big Block’s world-class design and VFX team, the new venture will broaden Cinelicious’ reach in DI and short form telecine and provide a high-level color and finishing solution for both companies. As a key part of the expansion, Cinelicious has signed award-winning short form colorist Robert Curreri.

“Being based in Hollywood, many of our advertising friends have only ever admired us from across the 405,” Cinelicious principal Paul Korver said. “With this expansion, we bring our passion, talent and energy to the Westside to offer a fresh alternative for clients without the drive time. We are focused and committed to the art and craft of cinematography and image capture, while maintaining beautiful aesthetic and color calibration from film or digital capture on set through final color grading.”

“Installing the DI theater at Big Block is a unique opportunity for both companies,” Big Block managing director Kenny Solomon said. “For Cinelicious’ Westside clients it means freedom from the constraints of time and traffic. And having superb color grading capabilities in-house provides a completely holistic production environment for our clients.”

The new theater is specifically designed to achieve perfect rec709 colorspace for broadcast finishing, as well as P3 for digital cinema feature film deliverables.

“For a new experience in commercial finishing our color science team collaborated with Barco to optimize a new series 2 DLP projector to achieve a brightness and contrast ratio that is beyond what is typically seen in digital cinema, which allows us to emulate the blacks and colorspace of a broadcast display flawlessly; minus the shortcomings of plasma and LCD technology,” Korver explained. “We’ve coined this experience ‘Big TV’ and our commercial clients are loving it. In this emerging world of large, high-resolution home displays, it makes sense that commercial creatives want to interact more intimately with their images than they have been used to in a typical telecine suite with 24-40” mastering monitors. ‘Big TV’ is an exciting new approach that affords them that opportunity.”

The collaboration with Big Block also marks a reunion for Solomon and executive producer Leslie Sorrentino with Cinelicious operations producer Reggie Diaz and colorist Curreri; all of whom spent years together working at The Syndicate, which was founded by Solomon and Sorrentino. It was this longstanding relationship that inspired the expansion and collaboration, which provides newly-expanded services for both companies and their clientele.

Curreri is an award-winning colorist who has contributed his talent to color countless spots for such clients as Honda, Toyota, Ford, JC Penney, Reebok, Wachovia, Bud Light, Yahoo, Target and Volkswagen. He has been an independent talent since 2008 and was previously a colorist at Riot/CO3 and The Syndicate. On the music video front, his projects include Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, My Chemical Romance, The Killers, All American Rejects, and Queens of the Stone Age for directors Marc Webb, Nick Night, Marcos Siega, Ruben Fleischer, Brett Simon and many others. His feature projects include the Grammy Award-winning Tom Petty documentary Running Down a Dream directed by Peter Bogdonavich and the Sundance Winner for best U.S. documentary We Live in Public directed by Ondi Timoner.