SANTA MONICA — Company 3, here, recently used DaVinci Resolve with Resolve Control Surface for color grading the 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D versions of Underworld: Awakening. The film is the latest in the popular vampire series and was directed by Mårlind and Stein and shot by Scott Kevan.
Senior colorist Siggy Ferstl at Company 3 worked with the filmmakers to help bring a refreshed look to the latest installment. While the series is known for its overall cold, steely-blue feel, Awakening is somewhat different.
"The creative team was intent on building a bold new look for the franchise, especially since this is the first 3D installment," says Ferstl. "Of course, being part of the Underworld series, a lot of the story takes place in darkness with characters who are often dressed in very dark costumes. We used color a lot to help the viewer differentiate between people, vampires and Lycans, often during intense, fast-paced action scenes."
Ferstl says Kevan’s original material, "had very rich, deep blacks. The wealth of information in the shadows gave me a tremendous amount to work with during color grading. It was great to have so much to work with in the darker areas of the frame and to have such control in Resolve to finesse things.”
This is especially important for a stereoscopic film, he adds. "Today's 3D projection technology can't display whites as brightly as we're used to in 2D, so if we want to see a lot of contrast on the screen, it has to come from the darker areas."
Ferstl made extensive use of Resolve's parallel node function to help fine tune the film's look. "If you give the scene an overall cold, blue look, of course you lose a lot of your warmer tones," he notes. "The richness of red, say in blood, will be lost. But by using parallel nodes, I can very efficiently give a scene that colder feel in one node and then bring back certain information from an earlier node. This way, the shot can have a kind of blue feel overall but the blood can still retain that powerful red color it had before I added the blue wash."
Resolve's stereoscopic 3D hardware capabilities also played a role in the grading process. "Any movie shot in 3D can have some alignment issues between the left and right eyes that impair the 3D illusion," Ferstl explains. "In the past, these would have to be fixed at a visual effects facility. But I was able to use the Resolve's auto alignment function for virtually every shot that needed adjustment. It worked very well and added a great deal of efficiency to the DI process."