“The Eight Hundred” is a Chinese war drama film directed by and cowritten by Guan Hu, and starring popular actors including Huang Zhizhong, Jiang Wu, Zhang Yi, Wang Qianyuan and Du Chun. Premiered on August 21st, 2020, the film has grossed $434 million worldwide, making it one of the highest grossing films in Chinese film history.    

The film is about the defense of Sihang Warehouse in 1937 Shanghai led by Lieutenant Colonel Xie Jinyuan of the 524th Regiment of the underequipped 88th Division of the National Revolutionary Army. He leads less than 500 officers and soldiers to defend the Sihang Warehouse against the Imperial Japanese army on a heroic suicidal last stand for four days and nights, during the Battle of Shanghai and the Second Sino Japanese War.    

Besides “The Eight Hundred,” Zhang Gen has also provided color grading services for many other popular Chinese films, including “Legend of the Demon Cat,” “Detective Chinatown 3,” “Hidden Man,” “The Bravest” and “My People, My Homeland.” For “The Eight Hundred,” they were asked to create a look that was inspired by Picasso’s Blue Period and was different from any other war film ever before.    

Their work on “The Eight Hundred” was not only about post production. Instead, they started working as early as test shooting began.    

Zhang Gen said: “This project started in June 2016. Before the production officially began, the director and crew did a test shoot and ended up with a two minute short film. We worked with DP Cao Yu and produced three different graded versions using Resolve to give major creative members an idea of what look the director was aiming for.”    

“After the test shoot, the film crew decided to try the IMAX camera instead for the project. The DP tested the camera and lenses thoroughly and we created another three LUTs with Resolve accordingly,” he continued.    

“Speaking of IMAX, the huge amount of footage was a challenge. For ‘The Eight Hundred’ particularly, we upgraded our host computer and storage subsystem to meet the hardware requirements. Also, we used Resolve on Linux, because it gave us much more processing power and reliability. The DP also made adjustments to the previously created LUTs in Resolve on set according to lighting conditions and then passed the project file along with media files to me, so I could keep track of the changes as the production went on.”    

It took several years to complete the whole production and post production of the project, and Zhang Gen used a number of different versions of DaVinci Resolve Studio, going from v14 to v16. “From 14 to 16, a lot of new features were added, and the node UI and management were also upgraded, making it easier for me to organize and manage the nodes. I like the ability to display different versions in full screen mode. The OpenFX plugin interface allows us to custom our own plugins.”    

“Grading a feature film like ‘The Eight Hundred’ was not something that could be done by only one colorist. Behind myself was everyone of my team consisting of 13 members, who took care of from production, assistance work, data management and workflow management,” he said.    

“We needed to deal with a variety of work from creating LUTs for production to color grading in post production, often on different operating systems, and we needed to make sure the project file from our team was compatible for other teams. DaVinci Resolve is very affordable, which allowed for extensive installations on Mac, Windows and Linux computers and its collaboration workflow even allowed many of us to work on a same project simultaneously, dramatically improving our efficiency!” concluded Zhang Gen.    

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Product photos of the DaVinci Resolve Studio, DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel, as well as all other Blackmagic Design products, are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/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 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.