Ntropic has added colorist Ayumi Ashley to its NY talent roster. She rounds out capabilities at a studio that can take on varied aspects of content creation.
Having been raised in several countries with multilingual parents—both classical musicians—Ashley was surrounded by arts and culture from a young age. While attending the Academy of Art in San Francisco, she forged the university’s first colorist track, putting changes in place which remain in the motion picture and TV department curriculum to this day.
Even before graduation, Ashley began to work as a high-demand independent artist. She eventually co-founded Mission Film and Design where she worked directly with Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Dropbox and Facebook—as well as with leading advertising agencies such as BBDO, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Y&R to service brands.
Following her career in San Francisco, Ashley’s creative spirit and desire to take on the East Coast market brought her to New York where she now heads Ntropic’s color division.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More