Directed by Han Yan, costarring Yi Yangqianxi and Liu Haocun, “A Little Red Flower,” the second installment of Han’s “Life Trilogy” and follow up to the 2015 comedy “Go Away Mr. Tumor!,” tells the touching story of two families battling cancer. After premiering on December 31, the film had grossed more than $123 million US dollars as of January 5 and is one of the world’s top grossing films.     

Before production, Hua Cheng, colorist and owner of Homeboy, started working with the director and DP to set the look of the film.     

“The story is set in the real world so the director wanted a natural look. Based on the DP’s creative work, we aimed for a filmic modern look by using a film emulation LUT and starting from there,” said Hua Cheng.     

After testing various Kodak 2383/2393 Print Film LUTs, Homeboy decided on a LUT and then adjusted it to recover the colors that should have been there. After that, the custom LUT was put into use for production including on set monitoring.     

Though still in its beta testing phase, Resolve 17’s new features played their roles in the making of “A Little Red Flower.”     

“The new Magic Mask feature of Resolve 17 empowered by its neural engine helped us create selections for persons or a specified part in an efficient way. In the past, it required VFX artists to spend time making roto mattes, which means extra manpower, time and costs. Now Magic Mast eliminated them all for us,” said Hua.     

He continued: “The new .drb and .drt formats in Resolve 17 designed to export and import individual bins and timelines were ideal to keep the data management orderly and accurate. It’s also worth noting that Resolve 17’s ability to support render caching in collaborative workflow ensured the grades the colorist made could be updated for every team member instantly using a render server, lowering the hardware requirements for workstations.”     

“The collaborative workflow introduced since Resolve 12.5 is reliable and useful. we adopted the PostgreSQL collaborative workflow, which allowed the colorist, assistant colorist, data management and conforming personnel to do their work simultaneously, avoiding waste of time. When the colorist was grading, the conforming department was able to add or remove shots at the same time and the colorist assistant could made specific adjustments to some of the shots as per the colorist’s instructions,” he said.     

Hua also pointed out that the DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel was key to keeping his grading work efficient and precise. The DeckLink SDI 4K card that provided him with 12 bit 4:4:4 quality image for monitoring made him very confident in every decision he made when manipulating the colors.     

Press Photography  

Product photos of DaVinci Resolve Studio, DaVinci Advanced Panel and DeckLink SDI 4K as well as all other Blackmagic Design products, are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/images.     

About Blackmagic Design  

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmyâ„¢ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.