The sadistic Santa Claus from 'Violent Night', graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio

David Husset (Company 3) has decided to grade with DaVinci Resolve Studio Violent Night, an action film directed by Tommy Wirkola and starring a dark version of Santa Claus.

Violent Night, produced by Guy Danella, David Leitch y Kelly McCormick of 87North, and distributed by Universal Pictures, shows how a team of elite mercenaries breaks into a family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone present hostage. Despite this, the hit team is not prepared for a surprise fighter: Santa Claus.

For this project, the director Tommy Wirkola and the director of photography Matthew Weston They coordinated with the colorist David Husset with the aim of defining from early phases what was he going to be like color treatment of the film: "Basically, during the color correction I tried to optimize the content that Tommy and Matthew had designed on the set. During the course of production, they had planned that the interiors of the ground floor would be warm and lively, while the exteriors, where several of the action scenes would take place, would be colder and somewhat disturbing. Some of the events also take place in a barn and an attic, so we made sure to assign cold colors to achieve a tense atmosphere. "

Once grading is completed, Hussey worked closely with Weston in one first rendering of the film, with a view to showing Wirkola a entire section to get his opinion: "Matthew had given me color references of some copies he particularly liked to guide us. Once Tommy saw the first presentation, we spent a week together polishing the aesthetic."

Remote work with DaVinci Resolve

Part of the work was done through virtual sessions, in which the settings applied by Hussey in DaVinci Resolve Studio of Blackmagic Design, in the study of Company 3 from Santa Monica, were available for simultaneous viewing by the production supervisor from Vancouver; Wirkola and Weston from Oslo, and Leitch y McCormick from Australia, where they were filming another movie.

In the sessions they required corrections which were quickly resolved thanks to the DaVinci Resolve versatility StudioHussey explains: "Being able to group images in DaVinci Resolve has made color correction much faster. Making a scene warmer or brightening the lights and being able to show it to the director in moments gives me great satisfaction. When tracking objects on screen, clients are still often surprised by the speed with which this is done."

Although his work procedure is usually characterized by simplicity, Hussey values ​​having more specialized tools for specific applications: “I used Open FX to touch up the grain in this film. Mathew wanted to give the film a little more texture, and the built-in grain turned out wonderfully. In addition, we did a lot of follow-up with Power Windows, and in this way we separate the warm tones of the skin from the reflection of the fire from the colder nuances that can be seen in outdoor shots. We also applied secondary color corrections to isolate and refine sections of the image, and we were very generous here, because who doesn't like to see bright blood splatters?”

A satisfactory result

Hussey was fascinated by the scenes from this action movie starring Santa Claus, although he admits that in Violent Night There's one that stands out above the rest: "If it's a Leitch/McCormick movie, you know you're going to find some captivating action scenes. One of my favorites is a fight between Santa Claus, the bad guys and a chipper. Matthew gave the scene an excellent tone using the brightness of the outdoor lights that reflected between the wooden slats of the barn. Our challenge was to maintain the feeling of the scene while also observing the events and balancing the lighting. so as to preserve the cohesion between the images. I was very satisfied with the results.”

“I've used DaVinci Resolve for most of my career, and it turned out to be the perfect platform to balance the lights using Power Windows and do the tracking I needed for all of these action scenes,” he adds. Hussey.

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