Blackmagic Design today announced that the Korean mystery film “Madonna,” which premiered as one of the official selections in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes Film Festival, was graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio by Eligio Kim at Seoul based KT&G Sangsangmadang.

Written and directed by Shin Su-won, “Madonna” follows Moon Hye-rim (Seo Young-hee), an assistant nurse at a hospital, who is offered a deal by hospital supervisor Kim Sang-woo (Kim Young-min) to find the family of a brain dead girl nicknamed “Madonna” (Kwon So-hyun) and persuade them to donate the girl’s heart to Sang-woo’s paralyzed father. Moon, however, uncovers Madonna’s extremely painful past as her investigation intensifies.

The story unfolds mostly in a hospital ward, which director Shin wanted to appear filled with an atmosphere of death. Eligio Kim created the “death” look with a low key style in DaVinci Resolve, but the director thought the faces of the characters in the resulting images were not bright enough.

“When I was making the low key style, the faces went darker than in the original footage and it became difficult to see the facial expressions. That was the biggest challenge as brightening faces would bring about intensive tracking work,” said Kim. “Fortunately, DaVinci Resolve’s tracking feature saved me a lot of time by automatically tracking the faces in most of the shots with accuracy.”

“Madonna” was shot on a low budget, and the cinematographer chose a contrasty gamma curve designed for a quick turnaround time with shooting. “This also made the initial editing easier but the simplicity came at the expense of flexibility in color grading,” said Eligio Kim. “For more room for creativity in the final color grade, we decided to replace that contrasty curve with a flat log curve and apply a LUT provided by DaVinci Resolve to the footage.”

He continued, “Changing gamma for the footage can be time consuming if you don’t take the proper measures, as it might not only affect Gamma space itself but also other metadata, which would result in more color correction work for each shot.”

“Knowing DaVinci Resolve could work with a wide range of different formats, including the file that stores the metadata for the footage, we changed the Gamma Space option by simply selecting the log curve while leaving any other metadata intact. Easy and simple,” he concluded.

“Madonna” premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival and received a rave response in the Un Certain Regard section.

Press Photography

Product photos of DaVinci Resolve are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/press/images.

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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 Emmy™ 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.