‘Leonor will never die’, graded with DaVinci Resolve (Blackmagic)

DaVinci Resolve was the solution used by the company Quantum Post to finalise the colour of Leonor will never die, winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance.

Leonor will never die, director Martika Ramírez Escobar’s feature debut, tells the story of Leonor, a retired elderly woman and former film director, who ends up in a coma when a television set falls on her head, a situation that forces her to become the heroine of her unfinished action film and opens the door to changing her life by radically modifying the film.

The film combines the aesthetics and concept of various film genres while paying homage to the particular style of 1980s Filipino films. In order to create and realise these visual effects, Escobar and Timmy Torres, responsible for colour grading, used DaVinci Resolve Studio: “Leonor Will Never Die is a film within a film within a film, so we had three different ‘worlds’ with three different looks. One part is naturalistic where we used minimal lighting and mostly single long takes. Timmy would call her style here the ‘no grading grading look’, which I easily understood as something subtle yet carefully balanced to look pleasing and close to real life,” Escobar herself explains.

Looking for the aesthetics of action films

One of the keys to Leonor will never die is its aim to pay tribute to the Filipino action films of the 1980s. According to Torres, this was one of the biggest challenges of the colour grading process: “We wanted a look that is a mixture of an action film and a world that is unique to Leonor’s memory. I used Resolve’s OpenFX to experiment with grain and sharpness. Having access to these tools during grading made the look creation so much easier. It made the scenes more vibrant than the actual world, adding texture to the images that helped us achieve that vision.”

There was a bar scene in the action world where we had to change the lighting of the environment from blue to red because the colored lighting resulted in too much of one color in certain shots. It was a fight scene so there were a lot of clips, the deadline was pretty tight and isolating the blues one by one would be too tedious. For this particular scene, DaVinci Resolve Studio’s hue vs hue feature was very efficient in achieving the specific shade the director wanted,” Torres concludes.