Blackmagic at the heart of filming and post-production of ‘Single Mother by Choice’ (HBO Max)

Single Mother by Choice, an HBO Max film, was shot and finished with a selection of Blackmagic Design tools.

The film follows the real-life pregnancy of Eva, a Latina workaholic who is determined to have a baby on her own terms and faces more than she bargained for when she becomes pregnant in 2020. The film stars Selina Ringel and is directed by her husband, Dan Levy Dagerman.

From the beginning, Dagerman tried to shoot the project with a small crew using the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K: “I was really inspired by friends who had made amazing features with small crews shooting on weekends, and I thought we could lean into this model. My wife was working on another series, which was shot on the Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, and I was really impressed with the image.”

Dagerman squeezed every feature out of the cameras, but there is one in particular that he values: the ability to shoot in Blackmagic RAW format at 6K resolution, which gave him great flexibility at the start of and during the post-production process. “The Blackmagic RAW image quality was fantastic, and the 6K image allowed for leeway for scaling and reframing in post. When it came to color, it was so satisfying to see what could be done simply with a LUT and tweaking, and when we got into our final color sessions, I was amazed by how far we could push the image in Resolve,” explains Dagerman.

Post production with DaVinci Resolve Studio

Colourist Loren White came on board in post-production to colour grade the footage in DaVinci Resolve Studio. He was delighted with the material captured by Dagerman in Blackmagic RAW format, as it gave him more flexibility in terms of lighting: “Since a lot of the film was shot using available light in front of laptops or against white walls, we did what we could to add shape to the images. We used offsetting colors in the shadows and highlights, along with vignettes, gradients and some film grain. I feel like we were able to elevate the look above what we had naturally.”

The film, because of its unique characteristics and small crew, required extensive colour grading to bring visual consistency to the shots. The wide variety of tools available in DaVinci were instrumental in meeting this goal: “I have been using the color warper a lot since it was introduced. I like how I can quickly swing colors around to see what works. In the curves you can do the same, but you have to jump between various panels. With the warper, if I grab any tone, I can immediately affect all three values at once. It’s been a nice addition to the software.”

In perspective, Dagerman is “grateful” for the role Blackmagic Design tools played in Single Mother by Choice: “I am so pleased that we chose this camera because the journey of making the film blended the two worlds of ‘run and gun’ with more traditional narrative filmmaking. Being able to shoot such high quality in Blackmagic RAW, and knowing we had DaVinci Resolve to create the look, was extremely empowering as a filmmaker and important in these rapidly changing times where technology is democratizing the filmmaking process.”