‘Red Alert’ (Netflix), graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio

DaVinci Resolve Studio de Blackmagic Design has been the program chosen for color correction of Red alert, one of the latest productions of Netflix.

Red alert, an international crime adventure, follows FBI agent John Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) as he pursues art thief Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds). Hartley is forced to team up with Booth in order to capture “The Bishop,” an elusive art thief attempting to steal a priceless artifact known as Cleopatra's Eggs. The film, shot by Markus Förderer, ASC, proposes a trip through locations as diverse as Rome, Valencia or the jungles of Argentina.

The filming of the film occurred at a time when it was not possible to travel by plane, much less carry out a film production of these dimensions. As Förderer recalls: "We had to rethink how to shoot a film that travels around the world. Without the ability to go abroad, we ended up creating most of the sets in various huge spaces and in studios in Atlanta. These scenes were then edited with establishing shots, which were captured with a small crew in the locations in question."

Starting from this basis, the challenge was evident: combine the different elements that would make up this production. To face these challenges, the post-production phase had great weight. Förderer trusted the colorist Walter Volpatto (Company 3), with whom he worked from the pre-production stage: "Walter has a great talent for bringing consistency to those elements, as well as unifying visual effects shots and live action shots. This is a somewhat complex process and, in my experience, a fundamental step. No matter how good the effects shots are, there is always something that can be done in grading to make them look real. Then we simulate some characteristics of the lens, for example flare or contrast at the edges."

Creating the color of Red alert

During the pre-production phase, Sponsor and the director Rawson Marshall Thurber They established a color palette with red, gold and warm tones, in order to complement the places mentioned in the script. Volpatto defines the aesthetic of the film taking two scenes as a reference: "Much of the action takes place in the red room. The room itself and Gal Gadot's red dress had to be a very intense color. On the contrary, in the prison in Russia an opposite aesthetic was needed, since it is a cold place with a palette of tones that are not at all warm. So those are the two main colors that stand out throughout the film."

The first camera tests helped Volpatto y sponsors will create a single conversion table in DaVinci Resolve Studio, which allowed us to modify the different tones and, at the same time, represent the skin tones in a natural and subtle way: "We both like to prepare an aesthetic in advance in Resolve, so that Markus can work on the set as if he had custom film material, with the lighting that matches a single LUT, instead of dealing with multiple tables. He only has to focus on the light meter and the lighting itself, and he doesn't even use the monitor. "

"It's more like the dynamic that filmmakers use, where they are already aware in advance of what they want to achieve for a particular shot, so then they go in and know exactly what material they need to capture. For the final grading, we sit down, shape the scenes and polish the details. But the general attributes of the image are established in advance, so there is no reinvention of the wheel in the final stage of grading," Volpatto details.

Additional special effects

Despite the extensive planning to which Red alert, the recording style imposed by the pandemic brought challenges at all stages: “Some scenes were filmed outdoors, but when the pandemic hit, certain shots were captured in Atlanta, to which we added parts from other recordings,” Volpatto recalls. As a result, it was necessary include more visual effects than initially anticipated: “Sometimes they had to shoot without extras and then overlay them along with the background and effects.”

Although visual effects require many composition techniques, Volpatto had no problem merging elements, creating “perfect superpositions” of different types of shots. "There were some extraordinary images that still needed adjustments. A lot was accomplished in the visual effects stage, followed by chromatic corrections, although they used some tools to refine the aesthetic when different parts of the same scene had been shot months apart."

P3 and HDR in DaVinci Resolve

Thanks to DaVinci Resolve Studio, Volpatto had the possibility of creating a project in format P3 and, at the same time, quickly review the contents in HDR: "Transforming the color space in Resolve allowed me to analyze images in P3 and HDR with just a couple of clicks. So I could grade a scene, then immediately review in HDR and make the necessary crops."

Additionally, by using collaboration tools, Volpatto was able to work “quickly and efficiently”, even as he was still receiving shots for visual effects: "Editor Chris Doerr and I worked on the same project in Resolve, which meant he could very quickly mark up any shots we needed to replace, make those changes, and then deal with the small visual effects needed at the finishing stage. He was at a desktop with only access to the Rec. 709 version, while I could see the images instantly in my living room. By using the color space transformation function, I could immediately view the contents in Rec. 709, P3 and HDR without having to use a LUT or anything like that in the nodal structure. I just had to adjust the outputs in the color space transformation. It turned out to be very efficient.

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