'Gaey Wa'r', graded with Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve Studio

The DaVinci Resolve Studio system and the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel solution Blackmagic Design have been used to grade Gaey Wa'r, Chinese film that competed in the section A certain look of the Cannes Film Festival.

Gaey Wa'r, directed by Na Jiazuo, is set during the time of the rural exodus to the cities in early 2000s China. This feature film focuses on a group of young people who want to leave their town but cannot. At the same time, it explores the internal worlds by realistically showing their lives.

Junkun Sheng, responsible for grading the film, used DaVinci Resolve Studio for this project. Sheng has been working with the Blackmagic Design solution since 2015, using it for projects such as 12 Citizens, The Summer Is Gone, My War y August Never Ends. The creative decided to start using DaVinci Resolve for “its comprehensive color correction tools, its intuitive interface and the flexibility of its node-based workflow,” as he explains.

Challenges of Gaey Wa'r

The new film of Na Jiazuo was shot with a wide depth of field, which led to Sheng to create “a contained and unified aesthetic for daytime scenes” benefiting from “Resolve's masking tools.” It was not the only occasion for which he used masks: "There were many long takes in which the character moves through different scenes in different lighting conditions. In order to ensure that the protagonist's red shirt was always a color that was more pleasing to the viewer, regardless of the environment, I used many masks."

Sheng has worked with the latest version of DaVinci Resolve Studio, which has provided several advantages to their workflow: "The new HDR color grading tools allow luminance to be divided into much more precise zones, which is more useful. The new chromatic distortion effect can be used to control saturation and hue simultaneously, which increases processing efficiency." Even with everything, Sheng highlights a specific section: "The best update of Resolve is the color management, given that with so many brands of cameras that are used today and the diversity of color spaces, it is necessary to have simple and efficient color management. This new feature has helped us a lot to solve different problems."