Alien: Romulus’ space terror amplifies its visual impact with DaVinci Resolve Studio

Colourist Mitch Paulson decided to use Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio software to work on the colour for ‘Alien: Romulus’, the latest instalment in Ridley Scott’s saga, this time directed by Fede Alvarez (‘Don’t Breathe’, ‘Infernal Possession’).

In Alien: Romulus, a group of special young conquerors come face to face with the ‘creepiest life form in the universe’ in the depths of an abandoned space station. Directed by Alvarez, Galo Olivares (Gretel and Hansen, Roma) was responsible for the cinematography, while Mitch Paulson, then at Company 3 and now part of Picture Shop, handled the colour grading.

Paulson had already worked with both Alvarez and Olivares separately on different films and was excited to collaborate with both talents on Alien: Romulus. The initial conversations helped define the visual style of the project, which sought to recreate the early films in the saga: “Fede wanted to take stills from our movie, put them up on a wall with stills of ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens,’ and have them all blend together. We looked at a lot of stills from both films to reference colors. We also had a custom grain created to help match the look even closer.”

Paulson works with a simple system from the start of the colour grading process and avoids over-complicating the nodal structure: “I typically start with doing offset grading to get a general balance on the shot. I’ll do some curves to help get the contrast to where I want it, and then I’ll get into windows and keying as needed.” For the film, Paulson not only focused on colour, but added a number of smaller visual effects in colour grading, enhancing the shots with DaVinci Resolve Studio tools: “There were a lot of small visual effects things throughout that we dealt with in color. One of the biggest scenes was when the main character, Rain, goes to the lower part of the ship at the end of the movie. I used the flicker effect to create lighting changes as she walks around looking for the Offspring.”

For Paulson, the best thing about colour grading a film like Alien: Romulus is knowing that her work has the ability to affect the mood of the film as much as other elements of the filming process. A good example of this is his favourite scene, in which Tyler, Rain’s ex-boyfriend, and his sister, Kay, encounter a Xenomorph that has not yet hatched: “Galo wanted to keep it dark and scary but at the same time still be able to see the important elements. We shaped the environment with windows and balanced all the lights that were moving in the tunnel. Then, when the Xenomorph attacks Tyler, we worked on helping the VFX look even bloodier.”