DaVinci Resolve Studio facilitated the finishing of the Spanish animated film 'Ozzy'

The Barcelona post-production company Moonlight Cinema turned to the Blackmagic solution for the digital intermediation and finishing of this recently released project, directed by Alberto Rodríguez.

Alberto Rodríguez, director of the television series Pocoyo and Oscar nominee for the short film The Incredible Story of My Great Mother Olive, has just released a new animation project. Ozzy, a Spanish production owned by Dreamcatchers, Atresmedia and Disney with a budget of around ten million euros, has brought the adventures of a group of pets to the big screen.

For digital intermediation and finishing, the film's producers turned to the services of the Barcelona post-production company Moonlight Cinema.

For this project, with Alejandro Matus and colorist Ignasi González at the helm, more than 40 different versions of the film were produced over two weeks, using the three grading rooms that Moonlight has to consider all aspects, from the dimensional relationship and the frame rate to the different languages. Throughout this project the DaVinci Resolve Studio solution from Blackmagic played a determining role.

Matus acknowledges that "this was the first time we accepted the challenge of making an animated film, so we had to deliver a high-quality final product. Resolve was a great help in all aspects of the project, particularly thanks to its new editing tools. We not only used it to shape and master the content, but it also allowed us to make changes to the edited material during grading without having to resort to another application."

The Moonlight Cinema team applied a conversion table to the 2K DPX files delivered by the Canadian company Tangent Animation in order to obtain the basic look of the film. “Many people think that in an animated film it is not necessary to adjust the color, but in fact the opposite is true,” says González. "Unlike feature films with real actors, in computer animation there are several people who create a totally new universe using different computer equipment. Making this content homogeneous and giving it greater depth through various effects is an overwhelming task," he adds.

Calibrations

In order to ensure uniformity between shots in a sequence, Matus and González decided to separate the key elements in each scene, through their respective alpha channels, through the use of masks. This gave them greater control to modify specific areas of the image, such as the characters' faces, during the final grading process. The next step was to give Ozzy a particular appearance.

Ignasi González emphasizes that "since this is a children's film, we wanted to keep the colors bright and convey a friendly feeling, even in the most tense or sad scenes. The good thing about working as a colorist on a project like this is that I had the opportunity to be more creative when grading the material. For example, in some night scenes, I was able to adjust the blue of the sky in a way that would not be possible in a real sky. The same thing happened with the sunsets."

"One of the best features of DaVinci Resolve for this project was the color management system. I was surprised by the program's ability to convert color spaces according to our needs. It was really fast and we had no problems. We also had to replace several shots during the grading process. However, Resolve allowed me to save an image with the desired appearance, which also included all the information related to tracking and keyframes. Without a doubt, this made this task much easier," he concludes.

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