Kauai Made Films fully postproduces ‘Too Much Life’ with DaVinci

The Kauai Made Films-driven indie film Too Much Life underwent its entire post-production process with a single piece of software: Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve.

Too Much Life, a production of Elliot Lucas and Sawyer Woods for Kauai Made Films, showcases the work done by more than 250 students at The Kauai Film Academy in the pre-production and preliminary editing stages. The film tells the story of Harper Hudson (Katelyn Lopes), whose seemingly perfect life takes an unexpected turn when her closest friend runs for the school’s presidential election. As the most popular girl at Garden Island School, Harper is used to receiving constant admiration from other students, but she must learn that, in life, friendships are more important than success.

Over the course of the two-year shoot, the shooting and post production team worked with DaVinci Resolve Studio, as Lucas says, “The new features added every year to Resolve, Fusion, Fairlight, the plugins and tools changed the way we did post on this one film. Resolve doesn’t just make our workflow faster; it makes our work better.” The post team squeezed the tool to take advantage of its latest features, such as the sky replacement solution: “There’s a scene with Harper on a surfboard at night, and we shot the scene over two weeks, so the skies and weather were changing. All the tracking and trying to get the shots the same were proving difficult in another program until I thought to try out Resolve’s new (at the time) sky replacement tool. Immediately the speed and precision of the tracking was so much better. Something that we were originally going to let go, as it wasn’t worth the time to fix in the other program, ended up being something that we could not only do in Resolve but also that perfected the scene.”

Too Much Life also addressed audio processing through the Fairlight module, a tool that the Kauai Made Films team was able to use to address sound design, mixing, cleanup and EQ tools. Another key was taking advantage of DaVinci Resolve Studio’s automatic dialogue replacement capabilities, as Lucas says, “With ADR, we could change lines when the actors weren’t in the shot and use shots that we didn’t think we could originally. Having that flexibility to manipulate the story and constantly be evolving the edit was powerful and was supported by Resolve’s integrated toolset.”

“This film was truly transformed in post. Because Resolve integrates editing, color, VFX and audio, and all the tools are right there, it changed the way we posted the film for the better. Before, you would lock the edit and then move to color, having to jump to another program. But color, VFX and audio affected our edit. A shot we might have originally neglected because we didn’t have the time to jump between applications, instead we were able to save by quickly jumping into the color page or the Fusion page, making tweaks and turning it into something usable,” concludes Lucas, highlighting the versatility of the Blackmagic solution.