Why Excellence Matters: Elevating Your Film’s Vision to the Big Screen
I’ve spent my entire professional life in Hollywood. My father worked at Technicolor in the 1950s on legendary films like The Ten Commandments, and I started my own journey at just 15 years old as an intern for a neighbor’s post-production company. I’ve had a front-row seat to the industry’s evolution, and I founded my own digital intermediate post company right at the dawn of the digital revolution.
Over the last 20 years, as the Founder and CEO of ROUSH Media, I have helped push the creative and technological boundaries of DI post-production. I’ve learned from top creatives and worked with amazing engineers to pioneer more efficient, high-quality workflows. While I won’t name-drop here, my goal is to share the experience I’ve gained along the way about what it truly takes to make a project succeed.
The Pursuit of Excellence In this industry, everyone is always pursuing perfection. You never want to enter production or post-production with the mindset that your work is “good enough.” In fact, the opposite is usually true: you’re never really done, you just run out of time or money.
Excellence matters. When an audience spends $15 on a movie ticket, that price is exactly the same whether they are watching a small independent film or the largest studio blockbuster. Because of that, the excellence in the execution of your story must be on par with the studios. In the independent film world, this means ensuring your ambitions don’t exceed your budget. You can’t bite off more than you can chew, but you must deliver excellence in what you do. Our goal has always been to provide theatrical quality on an indie budget. It is really about value. With smart Systems & Efficiency you bring Higher Quality, lower cost and increased speed
The Final Polish: Protecting the Story Finishing your film well in post-production—with exceptional sound, seamless visual effects, and stunning color grading—is some of the best production value you can give a project. It polishes the film to look like the properly crafted studio features audiences demand today.
At ROUSH Media, we believe color is the soul of the image. When color grading and visual effects are handled together with the utmost care, they work synonymously to remove any visual distractions that might take away from the story. We’ve all had the experience of turning on a streaming service, and if the film doesn’t look or sound good within the first five minutes, we think to ourselves: If the filmmakers didn’t care, why should I care about this story? With planning, attention to detail and the team with the right experience make all the difference.
A Mission-Driven Partnership Hollywood is renowned for its high level of quality control. However, Hollywood is far less known for producing quality stories that impact culture, ring true to our faith and family values, and encourage, inspire, and challenge people. Those films are incredibly rare.
It has been my mission and calling to bring high-end excellence to these types of stories. We purposely operate as a boutique post partner, rather than a corporate-owned, bottom-line-focused facility. We want to come alongside filmmakers, act as the custodian of the DP and Director’s vision, and help execute that vision on the big screen so the film can make a genuine impact on our culture.
I have been blessed to successfully do this on many titles, utilizing our unique process, tools, talent and experience to create stunning results. I like to say “you can’t afford anything less than getting it right the first time”. Now, I’m looking for the next great project and the right team to partner with.
Keith Roush
