‘Gaey Wa’r’, graded with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio

Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio and DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel were used to color grade Gaey Wa’r, a Chinese film that competed in the Un certain regard section of the Cannes Film Festival.

Gaey Wa’r, directed by Na Jiazuo, is set in the era of the rural exodus to the cities in early 2000s China. This feature film focuses on a group of young people who want to leave their village but are unable to do so. At the same time, it explores the inner worlds by realistically depicting their lives.

Junkun Sheng, who is responsible for the film’s color grading, used DaVinci Resolve Studio for this project. Sheng has been working with the Blackmagic Design solution since 2015, using it for projects such as 12 Citizens, The Summer Is Gone, My War and August Never Ends. The creative decided to start using DaVinci Resolve because of “powerful comprehensive color grading tools, intuitive UI and flexible node based workflow”, as he explains.

Gaey Wa’r‘s challenges

Na Jiazuo’s new film was shot with a wide depth of field, which led Sheng to create “a unified retrained look for the daylight scenes” by taking advantage of Resolve’s “masking tools.” This was not the only occasion for which he employed masks: “There were many long takes where the character goes through different scenes with various lighting. To make sure the red shirt on the protagonist always has the color that is the most pleasant to us, no matter what environment he is in, I used keyframing tools a lot.”

Sheng has been working with the latest version of DaVinci Resolve Studio, which has brought several advantages to his workflow “The new HDR grading tools can divide luminance into much finer zones, very useful for HDR grading. The new Color Warper can be used to simultaneously control saturation and hue, increasing the efficiency.” Still, Sheng highlights one area in particular: “The best update goes to Resolve’s color management, because with so many brands of cameras being used nowadays and the deliverables with diversified color spaces being required, a simple efficient scientific color management is necessary. The new color management has really helped us solve a lot of problems.”