Blackmagic Design has cause for celebration today after the Bafta-winning film Another Round picked up an Oscar for Best International Film at the 93rd Academy Awards. Colourist Emil Eriksson of Zentropa Post in Copenhagen, Denmark, used Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve Studio to grade the film with DP Sturla Brandth Grøvlen and director Thomas Vinterberg.
Blackmagic has released an interview with the main protagonists behind the grade: Grøvlen, and Eriksson.
“The Dogme style of not too much lighting and a lot of freedom to change things around made the film perhaps not the easiest to grade in terms of continuity,” said Grøvlen. “I also went into the grade intending to reinvent the look, perhaps a little too much.
“We went too far on our first pass in terms of boosting the colour a lot. There was a little too much green and cyan. Thomas wanted it to look honest, truthful and intimate, which is the path we found.”
Grøvlen’s handheld camera style on Another Round relied on vintage Canon K35 lenses to help counter the digital cinematography. Eriksson then used DaVinci Resolve’s Stabilizer tool to correct any extreme shot movement while also blending movement back when something felt too static.
“Some shots were too static and felt out of context with the rest of the scene. These were primarily wide shots that Sturla had filmed on a tripod. To address that, we’d then reintroduce some shake,” Eriksson explained.
“I would go into a clip that we liked, track that movement and then place it on to the static shot. It’s not a camera shake plug-in, as that would feel wrong. Instead, I take a tracker window, invert the tracking data and paste it on in the Stabilizer.
“There was a little inconsistency with the skin tones which I remedied using the logarithmic tools, which I love, where I could keep the exposure in the faces. Sturla shot the film with a beautiful contrast quality and it allowed me to use the contrast boost controls and the contrast pop plug-in, which with you can change the contrast in the blacks for instance and also match the contrast you have elsewhere.”
