Fremont, CA – February 19, 2021 – Blackmagic Design today announced that Senior Colorist Maria Carretero of creative studio Nice Shoes remotely graded the award-winning feature film “Waikiki” using DaVinci Resolve Studio, along with noteworthy projects such as the music video “Lost Horse” and Sundance 2021 film “All Light, Everywhere.” Nice Shoes has relied on DaVinci Resolve Studio as part of its remote workflows throughout 2020 across its New York, Toronto, Boston, Chicago and Minneapolis locations.
“Waikiki,” a dramatic feature film from Hawaiian filmmaker and Sundance Institute Native Lab fellow Christopher Kahunahana, gives an unflinching glimpse into the gritty realities of life in paradise. During post-production Carretero was based in New York with Digital Intermediate (DI) Producer Katie Hinsen in Los Angeles and Kahunahana in Hawaii. The team collaborated over a secure, color-accurate video link developed by Nice Shoes. Originally created for advertising clients, Nice Shoes’ technique was refined to meet the unique demands of the pandemic and expanded for its film and episodic projects.
As Hinsen noted, “Usually we’d have only a handful of clients per month using remote workflows, but now it’s almost all. We also used to have most of these sessions facility to facility, but we scaled up to have both the artist and the client at their homes, both using secure color accurate viewing links to their monitors to view the output of DaVinci Resolve Studio.”
She continued, “Quite a few of our projects, from last year and continuing into 2021, use DaVinci Resolve Studio’s collaboration features, which have been very complimentary to our remote workflows. It really helps us make the best use of our resources, since our assistants and online editors can access any project on any machine at any time. Before going remote, an assistant would go into the colorist’s room and drop a shot into the sequence. Now, they can go into the timeline no matter where they are physically in the world. It has allowed us to make better use of our teams in different locations and time zones, which has been crucial for projects like ‘Waikiki.’”
Another recent remote project that Carretero was tasked with was Asaf Avidan’s “Lost Horse” music video. Not only was the project shot and posted remotely during quarantine with Director Adi Halfin based in Berlin, but as Carretero noted, Halfin has very specific tastes when it comes to her looks. “She is always looking for something very delicate, so it’s a lot of work putting together the saturation levels and recovering information into the shadows to get the feeling that you can breathe the air that the image has into the scenes,” she said.
“DaVinci Resolve Studio has been a great asset to Maria and the rest of our colorists. The color management and collaborative toolsets have been instrumental as we’ve adjusted and refined our workflows while collaborating with filmmakers all over the world,” concluded Hinsen. “While everyone has understood the reality of the past year, remote DI is not something most feature clients were used to, and DaVinci Resolve Studio absolutely aided us in making believers out of our clients.”
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 Emmy™ award-winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues groundbreaking 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.
