Kauai Made Films post-produces ‘Too Much Life’ in its entirety with DaVinci

The indie movie Too Much Life driven by Kauai Made Films undertook its entire post-production process with a single software: DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic.

Too Much Life, a production of Elliot Lucas y Sawyer Woods to Kauai Made Films, shows the work done by more than 250 students of the institution The Kauai Film Academy in the stages of pre-production and preliminary assembly. The film tells the story of Harper Hudson (Katelyn Lopes), whose seemingly perfect life takes an unexpected turn when her closest friend runs as a presidential candidate at school. 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.

During the course of the two years of filming, the filming and post-production team worked with DaVinci Resolve Studio, as Lucas explains: "The tools and plugins added each year to Resolve, Fusion and Fairlight changed our post-production system on this feature film. Resolve not only streamlines our workflow, but also improves it." The post-production team squeezed the tool to take advantage of its latest news, like the sky replacement tool: "There's a scene where Harper is seen on a surfboard at night, which was filmed over the course of two weeks, so there were changes in the sky and weather. Tracking the shots and trying to unify them proved to be difficult with other programs, but then I remembered that, at that time, they had just released a new sky replacement tool in Resolve. In an instant, the speed and accuracy of the tracking improved dramatically."

Too Much Life also addressed the audio treatment via module Fairlight, a tool with which the Kauai Made Films team was able to treat the sound design, mixing, cleaning and equalization tools. Another key was the use of the automatic dialogue replacement capabilities DaVinci Resolve Studio, as Lucas says: "The automatic dialogue replacement feature gave us the opportunity to change lines when actors appear off camera and preserve shots that we thought would not work. The flexibility to constantly manipulate the story and make editing adjustments using Resolve's tools was a huge help."

"We were able to transform this film during post-production. The fact that Resolve brings editing, grading, visual effects and audio functions into one program has improved the way we do post-production. Previously, editing had to be completed before grading, which required switching from one program to another. But color adjustments, visual effects and audio affected the edit, and we ended up missing shots due to lack of time when having to change programs. Now, in "On the other hand, we can save time by quickly switching from the Color module to the Fusion module and making adjustments so that we can use the shot," concludes Lucas, highlighting the versatility of the imaging solution. Blackmagic.