The sadistic Santa Claus of ‘Violent Night’, graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio

David Husset (Company 3) has decided to colour grade with DaVinci Resolve Studio Violent Night, an action film directed by Tommy Wirkola and starring a dark version of Santa Claus.

Violent Night, produced by 87North’s Guy Danella, David Leitch and Kelly McCormick, and distributed by Universal Pictures, sees a team of elite mercenaries break into a family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone present hostage. Despite this, the team of hired killers is unprepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus.

For this project, director Tommy Wirkola and cinematographer Matthew Weston coordinated with colourist David Husset in order to define early on how the colour treatment of the film would be: “I basically tried to enhance via the grade what Tommy and Matthew had designed on set. They had made a plan during the production to make the downstairs interiors warm and rich while keeping the exteriors, where many of the action scenes take place, cooler with some edge. There’s also a barn and an attic where action occurs, and we made sure that area was a very moody and cool color temperature.”

Once the colour grading was complete, Hussey worked closely with Weston on an initial rendering of the film, with a view to showing Wirkola a whole section to get his opinion: “Matthew had given me colored references from the dailies he was particularly happy with in order to give me an idea of where we should take it. After Tommy watched the initial pass, we spent a week together polishing the look.”

Working remotely with DaVinci Resolve

Some of the work was done through virtual sessions, where Hussey’s adjustments in Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio bei Company 3’s Santa Monica studio were available for simultaneous viewing by the production supervisor from Vancouver, Wirkola and Weston from Oslo, and Leitch and McCormick from Australia, where they were shooting another film.

As the sessions progressed, corrections were required that were quickly resolved thanks to the versatility of DaVinci Resolve Studio, explains Hussey: “Grouping in DaVinci Resolve has made creative color grading so much faster. To be able to warm up or brighten a whole scene and show it to the director in seconds is so satisfying. When I’m tracking objects on the screen, clients are often still blown away by how quickly that can be done.”

Although his workflow is often characterised by simplicity, Hussey appreciates having more specialised tools for specific applications: “I used Open FX for its grain package on this film. Matthew wanted to give the film a little more texture, and the grain we added looked great. Also, we did a lot of window tracking, separating the warm fire lit skin tones from the cooler exterior backgrounds. And we used secondary color correction, to isolate and refine portions of the frame, an enormous amount because who doesn’t like a rich red blood splatter!?”

A satisfying result

Hussey was fascinated by the scenes in this Santa Claus action film, but admits that one scene in Violent Night stands out above the rest: “If it’s a Leitch/McCormick produced film, you know it’s going to have some exciting action scenes, and so one of my favorites is a fight scene with Santa, the bad guys and a woodchipper. Matthew gave the scene a lot of mood using bright exterior highlights coming through wood slats of a barn. Our challenge was to keep the mood but see the action and balance all the highlights to make it all feel cohesive. I’m very pleased with the results.”

“I’ve used DaVinci Resolve most of my career, and it was the perfect system for the windowed highlight balancing and tracking that I needed for all of these action scenes,” adds Hussey.