Tom Rovak

Tom Rovak has been a veteran of the motion picture industry for over 40 years. After an education at Columbia College majoring in Film and Video. In 1982 he began his career as an assistant film editor and as a production assistant working on commercial productions and feature films in and around Chicago. He soon was working regularly with several top editors in Chicago and began editing commercials, and movie trailers himself. Working at a company called Cinecenter in Chicago, he worked on many "A" feature films such as "Planes Trains and Automobiles", "Child's Play", "Midnight Run", "Color Of Money", "Betrayed", "The Untouchables", "Home Alone", "Home Alone II", "Adventures in Babysitting", "Backdraft", "Uncle Buck", "Curley Sue", "Ferris Buellers's Day Off", "Pretty in Pink", "The Breakfast Club", and many more. During the process he found how much he loved the color correction part and began exploring the colorist's world. In 1986 he chose to start over again as an assistant colorist at the famed Editel/Chicago. For the next 5 years he worked on the highest level national commercials, music videos, and shows in the country. Working his way from assistant colorist to colorist. During this time he was able to work weeks, sometimes months at a time at Editel/Los Angeles, Editel/San Francisco and Editel/New York. He found this education to be some of the greatest in his career and would apply all he learned accordingly. In 1991 he and his long time associate at Editel, Reid Brody, started The Filmworker's Club, with funding from Alan Kubicka (owner of Chicago Recording Company), in downtown Chicago. It began very modestly in a 400 square foot facility, but billing over $1.5MM the first year. At the time the Avid was taking over the film industry. Rovak and Brody decided to capitalize on that by doing video dailies for Avid that could be used to retrace the elements back to the original negative key code edge numbers, to give a clear correlation between video time code and film frames. The Filmworker's Club grew into a $6MM facility in 1995, billing over $30MM average per year. They built an empire with 3 film labs, additional locations in Dallas and Nashville, for owner Alan Kubicka. As a true technical leader of the motion picture industry Rovak was the first to use the DaVinci color corrector at Editel in 1986. At The Filmworker's Club he was the first to buy and use the DaVinci Renaissance, Davinci 888, and the first to buy and use the Spirit Datacine hi-res film scanner. The Spirit Datacine changed the motion picture industry and began the process for which the digital intermediate for features was created. In 1996 Rovak was approached by Mike Topel, owner of Swell Pictures, to head the Film Color Department at his newly built facility in the NBC Tower. Swell Pictures had been around a long time and had gotten a huge lift in all departments with this luxurious new facility. All doing quite well except the Film Color Department. Rovak came in, installed a new Spirit/DaVinci suite and took the department's annual billing from $650K to $2.2MM the first year. Annual billing rose $9MM to a yearly average of $22MM. At that same time he began working at some producing on commercials and features through Swell Pictures. In 2006, Mike Topel retired from the motion picture industry and sold off Swell Pictures. Rovak decided to dive deeper into the technology of film making and began working at DaVinci. At the time they were developing the now famous DaVinci Resolve software and work surface. Rovak was instrumental in it's development. From testing new innovations in color correction to training top colorists at top post houses across the US and in Europe. In his career as a colorist, Tom has worked with the world's top directors such as Ridley and Tony Scott, Bob Giraldi, Joe Pytka, Joe Sedelmaier, Peter Smile, Tony Kaye, Leslie Dektor, Peter Elliott, and so many more, directors of photography, producers, editors, advertising agencies, and movie studios. He was nominated 13 times for the ITS International Monitor Award (post productions equal to the Oscars) for best color correction, winning 8 first place awards. In 2012 Tom started Rovak Colorist Services to address areas of the motion picture post industry that other post people were not addressing. Mainly, getting experienced post help in an economical way, remotely. Accommodating new digital workflows and working creatively with today's post budgets. In late 2022 Tom started a new feature film company, Midnight Drive In Films,LLC with his partners Stephen Collins and Todd Hicks. He lives in Frankfort, IL with his wife Sandra, daughter Laura and his best friend, 80lb yellow Labrador Retriever, Barley. He is disciplined in the martial arts of Shaolin Fist Law, Shaolin Long Fist and Chen Tai Chi Chuan.