The third season of ‘Brassic’ (Sky) was graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio

The Блэкмэджик Дизайн DaVinci Resolve Studio software was used by postproduction company Core Post to color grade the third season of Brassic (Небо).

Core Post’s Matt Brown tackled several challenges on this project. The first was to maintain the aesthetics of the series while accommodating the visual changes added by the new season. To achieve this, Core Post had to find a balance that worked well, which was found in the addition of some warmth in the quiet shots that took place indoors, and blue tones in hostile and cold environments.

Thus, filters were introduced to preserve warmth in skin tones, while blues were added in color grading, something that was previously taken care of in post-production. As Brown explains, “The filters worked out well, producing realistic color in the skin tone but not too detrimental at the top end. The tones were also protected when it came to adjusting colors in the grade.”

DaVinci Resolve Studio was also used for the fiction’s visual effects using the Fusion module. In total, the third season of Brassic, produced by Calamity Films, has more than 400 visual effects. The fiction was shot in 4K anamorphic format to deliver the material in 2.35.1, while 16:9 versions were created with masks for Sky in HDR UHD definition, as well as a 16:9 SDR version for worldwide distribution from ITV International.

Ongoing collaboration

Core Post did a first version of the color grading in 4K HDR alongside Digital Imaging FX, who were responsible for the visual effects. Brown and Tanvir Hanif, visual effects supervisor, discussed how to resolve each hiccup in the process and then discussed the implementation of those decisions. “For example, I used a power window to grade a sky which blew out the moon in the HDR grade, but VFX easily keyed in a fix,” explains Brown. Since Core Post and Digital Imaging FX work out of Salford’s Media City, there was an opportunity to collaborate virtually from the DaVinci Resolve timelines and physically in order to finalize the material for Brassic.

The collaboration between the two companies has proved successful. In fact, Hanif himself is delighted to be repeating the experience for Brassic Season 4: “We’re now heading into work on the fourth season of Brassic, and the workflow has gone from strength to strength. A lot of that success can be attributed to DaVinci Resolve and our ability to work together in one solution.”